Air consumption tips?

[beanojones]

Beano, I respectfully have to correct you. The size of the lungs has NOTHING at all to do with gas consumption. The size of the trachea and major bronchi (volume contained within them) will, but those differences are really quite small.

I dive with one buddy who is almost two and a half times my weight, and significantly taller than I am, whose gas consumption is the same as mine. I dive with another tall, slender cave diving buddy who makes ME turn dives. The ultimate gas consumption you end up with has something to do with size, yes, because more muscle mass means higher basal metabolic rate, and therefore more CO2 production. But efficiency, fitness, and breathing discipline have a lot more to do with it than lung size.

I was using the term 'lung size' as a replacement for tidal volume or more correctly whatever the spirometer measures when the chamber drivers are setting flow rates for inside tender's masks, on air environment chambers which use high o2 masks. Since tenders are all calmly sitting there, (and thus, mostly, fitness is out, except when they take O2 hits), and yet the flow rate can be triple for one tender over another, the drivers tend to use the term big lungs as a catchall for why some people peg the spirometer, and others barely move the needle. You know the terms better than me.

I just know the practical facts of gas supply to tenders and patients meant we were all measured, and the range was much wider than the range of breaths per minute between sedentary and active people, or the breaths per minute of a calm diver to an agitated diver.

Japanese people tend to move significantly less air in a single respiration, as both tenders and as patients. And as divers, to the same ridiculous degree. My common example is for a (nervous, not necessarily fit) Japanese OW student taking over a minute to breathe out the pressure from the hoses after the valve is closed in the air depletion exercise. Americans get a couple of breaths at most, even when they are relaxed fit and concentrating on breathing slowly.

Japanese blood Hawaii raised people used more than Japanese raised in Japan, generally in pretty much the proportion of their body mass. (The Ama pearl divers of course are excepted. They have enormous lung capacity, apparently, though they never ended up in the chamber in Hawaii, so that's all hearsay.)

Since the high O2 from the mask is dangerous in the air of the chamber, getting flow rates right was important, so they measured lots of peoples lung capacity and found pretty wide range in the amount of air moved in a normal breath cycle. Since that is a baseline around which other factors rotate, and it roughly (though not completely) runs with body size...For what it is worth, it actually seems to have a lot more to do with what the person's body size was at the end of puberty more than the present body size. In other words getting fat does not increase the spirometer readings. Where the person was raised (high altitude) does seem to have a lot to do with it, too.

[nimoh]

I have been considering yoga for a while to help with breathing. Maybe now it's time to look further into it, but I'll start a new thread