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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A similar analogy is to movement of our bodies. We can crawl, roll, wiggle, walk, run, jump, sprint whoever we want to move somewhere else. However we walk because it takes the least amount of energy to do. We call have different speeds for that walking but it’s roughly the same among different people.
The same thing is true with breathing. The lung has a certain amount of compliance, or ease of expansion. Also the small the lungs become, the more force it takes to open up because you are fighting the hydrostatic forces of water within the lung. The bigger they get, now there is recoil affect from the lungs that pulls them back in. Basically there is a sweet spot there that allows us to breath without fighting as much recoil and hydrostatic pressures. That zone allows us to breath without increased amount of work and we call this zone of breathing the resting tidal volume. That extra breath above normal breathing is call the inspiration reserve capacity. The amount we can breath out from baseline is the expiratory reserve capacity. And the total amount of all three together is called the forced vital capacity. However we don’t need to use the forced vital capacity for most people because we have more lung tissue than we need (for most people) and makes it so we don’t need that extra air to come in to make up for it. Basically it uses lots of energy to use all of that lung like that and is why people that have bad lung disease tend to become so skinny (burning too much energy to breath).
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