How lung capacity increases when doing consistent cardio and what happens anatomically?
In: 486
I’m not an expert but since you don’t have any answers I can give you my understanding. I think it’s more that your body becomes more efficient at using oxygen rather than filling your lungs with a larger volume of air. If you do a lot of aerobic exercise, your muscles become more efficient at using the same amount of oxygen to do more work, you might have a higher red blood cell count to move oxygen through your body quicker, and the lungs might get better at extracting the oxygen from the air you do breathe in
I’ll do my best to try and explain but I’m not really an expert here so bear with me:
When we engage in consistent cardio exercises, such as running, swimming, or cycling, our lung capacity increases due to various anatomical and physiological adaptations.
During cardio exercises, our body requires more oxygen to meet the increased energy demands. To accommodate this, our breathing rate and depth increase, leading to deeper and more forceful inhalations and exhalations. This allows a larger volume of air to enter and exit the lungs.
Anatomically, the lungs contain millions of tiny air sacs called alveoli. These alveoli are surrounded by tiny blood vessels called capillaries. When we inhale, oxygen from the air enters the alveoli and diffuses into the capillaries, while carbon dioxide, a waste product, moves from the capillaries into the alveoli to be exhaled. The efficiency of this gas exchange process improves with regular cardio exercise.
Consistent cardio exercise stimulates adaptations in the respiratory system. The diaphragm, which is the primary muscle responsible for breathing, becomes stronger and more efficient. Other respiratory muscles also strengthen, allowing for greater lung expansion and increased air intake.
Additionally, the alveoli and the surrounding capillaries undergo structural changes. The alveoli become more elastic and better able to expand and contract, allowing for improved air exchange. The number of capillaries surrounding the alveoli may increase, enhancing the oxygen supply to the blood and facilitating efficient removal of carbon dioxide.
Regular cardio exercise also improves the efficiency of the cardiovascular system, which works in coordination with the respiratory system. The heart becomes stronger and pumps blood more efficiently, delivering oxygen-rich blood to the muscles and organs. This, in turn, supports enhanced oxygen uptake by the lungs
.
Okay, let’s think about this like a balloon. When you first get a balloon, it’s small and doesn’t hold much air, right? But, the more you blow it up, the bigger it gets and the more air it can hold.
Our lungs work a bit like that too. When we do cardio exercises consistently – like running, cycling, or swimming – our lungs have to work harder, similar to how we have to blow more air into a balloon to make it bigger.
Our body responds by improving our breathing muscles and increasing the amount of air our lungs can hold. Just like how a balloon can hold more air the more you blow it up.
Additionally, our body also becomes better at using oxygen efficiently. So, not only can we breathe in more air, but our body also gets better at using that air to power our muscles. This makes us better at the exercise and less tired when we’re running, swimming, or doing other kinds of cardio.
Anatomically, your diaphragm (the major muscle responsible for breathing) and other muscles involved in breathing become stronger, which allows for deeper, more efficient breaths. Your body also improves its ability to get oxygen to your muscles by creating more capillaries, which are tiny blood vessels where oxygen is transferred from your blood to your muscles.
So, think of it as your lungs and your body becoming better, stronger balloon blowers, getting the most out of every breath you take!
Probably wrong here. Increased/consistent physical activity increases the concentration of mitochondria in the muscles. Mitochondria power the cells. So they become more efficient using the oxygen you’re providing.
consistently engaging in cardio exercises, makes your lung capacity tend to increase as an adaptation to the increased demand for oxygen. Anatomically, several changes occur within your respiratory system to accommodate this need for more oxygen during aerobic activities.
Initially, your breathing rate increases to bring more air into your lungs. Over time, your respiratory muscles especially diaphragmatic breathing, become stronger and you become more efficient at air movement in and out of your lungs. Oxygen delivery to your bloodstream increases and removal of carbon dioxide likewise becomes more efficient, which gets produced during exercise. This by the way is why it’s important to train to “nose breathe”. On inhaling through your nose, you are creating a low pressure by the slight restriction. This in turn allows you to scrub more Carbon Dioxide, which is harder to release than Oxygen is to uptake. So while the restriction of nose breathing might reduce your Oxygen efficiency very slightly, it increases your ability to get rid of Carbon Dioxide to a much greater extent. counterintuitive I know, I would have arguments with my coach over this in my early years, until he proved it with a blood lactate test once the tech came along. it was (in me) a 15% difference, which is massive.
Anyway, slowly over time, your lungs undergo subtle changes at the alveolar level; those tiny air sacs where the gas exchange between your lungs and bloodstream takes place. With consistent cardio, the number of capillaries surrounding the alveoli increases, supporting greater oxygen exchange due to a larger surface area for diffusion. Improving lung capacity the ability to take in and utilize oxygen more effectively.
As mentioned before, your diaphragm, which is the primary muscle involved in respiration, becomes stronger through ongoing cardio exercises, helping to increase lung capacity by creating a larger space within the thoracic cavity for the lungs to expand. This enhancement, along with the strengthening of your intercostal muscles that assist in the breathing process, contributes to your overall increased lung capacity. High-performance athletes can sometimes achieve double the expiratory volume and reach oxygen efficiencies of 70+ on Vo2Max tests (a measure of oxygen transfer efficiency) of the average person (20-40 Vo2Max). Cross-country skiers for reasons I don’t even understand seem to be able to hit astounding levels, 80+ Vo2Max.
Through training aerobic exercise, (especially zone 2,3) increases cardiovascular performance, which, creates efficient oxygen delivery to your muscles and other tissues. This interconnected relationship between the respiratory and cardiovascular systems ensures that your body can more effectively meet the metabolic demands of exercise, allowing for better endurance and overall health. Also improper or too fast of a ramp-up from a detrained state can lead to some conditions where the heart’s ability to move blood can develop faster than the lungs can handle the blood flow, leading to high pulmonary pressure and edema. This can lead to fatal conditions such as SIPE (swimming-induced pulmonary edema) seen in some triathletes and competitive open-water swimmers. The combination of underdeveloped lung blood capacity coupled with the slightest pressure on the neck from a wetsuit, can mess with the vagus nerve and send pulmonary blood pressure skyrocketing as the heart ramps up to a steady aerobic state. I’ve seen it twice in my athletic career, and it’s not a good scene.
There is a difference between actual lung volume and active lung volume. You never actually get all the air out of your lungs when you breathe out, but you can train to breathe in and out more total volume, meaning you have more “usable” capacity. There are also other effects, look at the other (very extensive) comments
[removed]
The first step i haven’t seen anyone mention yet is that in normal life we don’t need to use our entire lung capacity. So, being the lazy creatures we are, a lot of our lung capacity ends up functionally unused.
When you start exercising and needing that lung capacity, your lungs need a bit of time get used to use again, but when they do that’s your first big bump in improvement.
Bar that, lungs are only ever the bottleneck in specific cases, for the vast majority of people your heart is the bottleneck.
Lung function isnt my prime specialism but I think I can answer it: so your “lung capacity” can be broken down into sections. It’s important to know that capacity isn’t actually that important, it’s how well they function.
So, I *think* you get the impression your capacity increases because people who exercise the muscles for the lungs – diaphragm, intercostal muscles etc. Have more control. In reality, we cant empty our lungs completely. If you were to take a full breath in and breath out as far as you can, that’s known as your “vital capacity (VC).
Beyond the VC, there is a small amount of air that must remain in the lungs. If it didn’t, the lungs would become a vacuum and collapse, like sucking all the air out of a plastic bag. This is your residual capacity.
Swimmers, wind instrument players etc appear to have higher capacity on simple lung function tests like spiros because their muscles are able to push more air out. If we were to test the actual lung volumes themselves, we’d find they’re probably not much bigger than normal.
In fact, having an overly high total lung capacity (TLC) can be a sign of lung disease, known as hyperinflation.
I hope this has helped (and is accurate!) I did lung function tests for a living, but it was never my specialty so my understanding is limited.
My understanding is that at the very ends of your lungs are microscopic train stations where fresh oxygen gets into your blood and CO2 gets off. Cardio is like the maintenance team that keeps the train station running efficiently. Through exercise, this concentrated flushing of the system keeps it clean, shiny, working as intended. Without the flushing of the system gunk builds up and the train station stops working at its optimum.
Latest Answers