why can’t we just breath faster when we run so we’re not out of breath, and when we do breath faster we pass out
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Even though your rate of breathing increases by a lot when you’re exhausted, you’re not really adding more oxygen to the blood. Your flow of blood is still the limiting factor, but your body tries to overcompensate by breathing faster, even if it doesn’t help.
This is why, if you get in great cardiovascular shape, you can do the same amount of work even if you’re not breathing as heavily. The blood can pick up and transport the oxygen in your lungs faster, even if you’re not moving more air through your lungs in total. The oxygen content of air when you breathe in is about 20%, and the oxygen content of the air you exhale is about 15%, so 75% of the oxygen in the air is unused.
Obviously there is a crossover point here where if your cardio gets amazing enough, you might have to start breathing faster to maximize your oxygen uptake, but in most people, the heart and blood limits you before your lungs.
If you breathe faster, each breath has less time in the lungs for oxygen to diffuse into the blood and CO2 to diffuse out. You are not going to get much extra effect. Vigorous exercise going into oxygen deficit leads to other chemistry taking over to generate energy and lactic acid building up in the tissues.
When you breathe extremely fast you lose CO2 which causes your blood to be too alkaline (it’s normal pH range is 7.35-7.45). Your blood needs to have certain criteria met in order to make the gas exchange between O2 and CO2 happen smoothly. When its not met it is harder for the exhange to occur and therefore your brain doesn’t get what it needs and shuts you off.
There’s a way to train to breathe more efficiently. It’s not just about breathing faster. Just like anything it takes training and doing it right to be successful.
Your lungs are a particular size. Your capillaries in your lungs are at some density. Your heart can only beat so fast.
If you had bigger lungs, stronger heart, and more blood vessels, then you probably could exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide faster.
Also, the trachea and large airways are basic pipes and don’t transfer gas really at all. If you breathe super fast the air just goes back and forth in the pipes, without expelling old air or taking in new.
I’m going to buck the trend.
Breathing faster does help, that’s why pretty much every human breathes fatter when exercising. If you do a sprint just breathing normally, you would be even more out of breath, than if you were normally breathing heavily when you sprint.
Most people do not pass out from breathing fast. But breathing fast helps your body get rid of co2 which causes your blood vessels to constrict hence in some people can reduce the blood flow to their brain enough to pass out.
You don’t breathe faster, you breather better in order to run.
You are getting out of breath because you don’t actually know how you should be breathing. I recommend learning to keep a balanced rhythm to your breathing whenever doing physical effort that requires stamina over pure intensity, sharp breaths are not good unless you are going for explosive bursts of power like in a combat sport, and even then you still need to keep a base rhythm.
Practice this first, when walking, inhale for three steps, rest for 1, and then inhale for the next four steps. Practice this eight step cycle, adapt it to whatever speed you are walking or even jogging. Do not try this exact one for sprinting though, as steps get too fast this would get too sharp, you need to cap the speed at some point, and remove the resting step for more intense efforts.
Breathing may or may not be the bottleneck, if it is, then breathing faster *will* help.
We can actually measure how effective our lungs are, with a unit called *VO2 max* which basically says how much oxygen we can use in a given time period.
But breathing is one thing, it *gives* us oxygen, but we also have to *use* the oxygen (convert it to energy). Depending on who you are, how old you are, how (un)fit you are and lots of other factors, your bottleneck might either be getting the oxygen, or using the oxygen.
Exertion doesn’t use just oxygen.
Your muscles and organs are not directly connected to your lungs, blod needs to carry nutrients and oxygen.
There are multiple steps between the air and your muscles, each system is either governed by physics and can’t be improved or could be improved but since they all connected and other systems pull them back and not improved in the end.
The peak physical condition is when you regulalry exert yourself, your heart is healthy and is accustomed to frequent exertion. (cardio) Your blood is healthy has enough blood cells that can transfer oxygen and nutrients. your lung is healthy and most of the inner surface is still healthy
Then you have the most amount of stamina, but that is also finite and cannot be extended after a point, without disturbing the delicate balance of the systems.
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