Why is it that we don’t often breath to our full capacity, we take shallow breathes and rarely take full breath

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Why is it that we don’t often breath to our full capacity, we take shallow breathes and rarely take full breath

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Anonymous 0 Comments

A similar reason to why you walk some places and aren’t in a full out sprint everywhere, it’s just easier

Anonymous 0 Comments

You don’t need full lung capacity during the day to day, the extra expansion is for intensive movement. Otherwise you’d be breathing rapid fire trying to get your O2 up while exerting yourself.

Anonymous 0 Comments

When your body is at rest, respiration doesn’t need to be working at 100%. The few times you take full breaths (yawns) is because you feel drowsy because of lack of oxygen

Anonymous 0 Comments

Under normal circumstances, we don’t *need* to take a full breath on every inhalation; our body gets enough oxygen to maintain organ and cell function through normal respiration.

Taking a deep breath (or a series of shorter breaths) *is* helpful if you expect to exert yourself in some way, though, because you’ll want that extra oxygen in your bloodstream to offset the expenditure of O^(2) from increased muscle use and respiratory requirements.

Anonymous 0 Comments

same as why cars can drive 120 kms but normally do 60 km. it’s better to design with higher capacity to reduce strain for everyday use than to always be hitting the limit.

Anonymous 0 Comments

We actually do take large breaths every 5 minutes or so. When they used to have old breathing apparatus many people died, when they introduced a large breath every x minutes the death rate reduced.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There’s evolutionary advantage to having excess lung capacity relative to normal needs. Most of the time we don’t need it, but it significantly improves your chances of staying in the gene pool if you have it when it’s needed.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You know the process of breathing and how its a very repetitive process that we do nonstop every day?

Well here’s the thing: if we repeatedly expand the lung over and over to the max capacity nonstop it will cause damage, and unlike muscle that is designed to be damaged and repaired within days, lung damage are slower to repair.

And here’s the thing: on average we consume 5% of the air we breathe in because inspiration and expiration happen at a fixed rate. Increasing total air in the lung will not have a significant increase in efficiency, but will result in higher energy expended.

There’s just no beneficial reason to actually take full breathe when not doing anything..

Anonymous 0 Comments

OP:

Your full lung size is designed to work and sustain you during intense exercise.

You only need a bit of it in normal life.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There’s a big point being missed: what does breathing do?

Sure, you are able to introduce oxygen to your blood, but that also means removing CO2 as the increased levels from your body working like to mix evenly with the open air if they can.

If you force yourself to breathe more than you need to, that CO2 responsible for adding acidity to your blood will leave and you will increase blood ph. While acidity is bad in terms of damaging cells (think battery acid on the extreme) high ph will cause the same outcome of cell death like bleach (again, another extreme).

When you exercise, it isn’t an issue to breathe more because the acidity buildup from co2 increases to balance the exhalation losses.

CO2 is also responsible for the dilation and constriction of blood vessels in different places of the body to encourage bloodflow where it is most beneficial. Ex: muscles when excersizing and stomach when digesting food

TL:DR sure you need oxygen for energy, but the carbon dioxide you keep in your blood by not breathing too much is important for preventing cell damage and encouraging certain functions