When you go out for a job or a sprint, extra blood is pumped to your muscles, providing you with the vital ingredient to make energy - oxygen. Deep, regular breaths replenish your muscles with oxygen and set your pace.
Aerobic jog
When exercising at a moderate pace, your body is relying on the oxygen you breathe and energy stores in your muscles. Oxygen burns glucose, a sugar that is stored in your body, for energy. Muscle cells use energy to contract and ultimately move your body. This process is aerobic respiration, and is the most stable form of exercise. Aerobic exercises include jogging, cycling, swimming, rowing, dancing and more.Steady rise
Your breathing rate will rise with your pace.
Steady breaths
Rhythmic breathing allows a steady flow of oxygen to keep lactic acid at bay.
Slowing down
Breathing rate soon returns to normal after a jog.
Jogging
A slower pace allows you to exercise for longer periods of time. Your body can make energy much more efficiently from its glucose stores.
Anaerobic sprint
During strenuous exercise, your body demands energy more quickly than you can provide oxygen to make it. However, muscles can continue to break down glucose without oxygen in a process known as anaerobic respiration. It is great for short bursts of energy, but it generates excessive lactic acid in your muscles and is unsustainable. Now, oxygen is needed, not to help burn glucose, but to convert the build up of lactic acid into glucose - for future energy. This is known as paying the oxygen debt and leaves you out of breath for some time after an intense sprint.
Ready
You prepare to take deeper breaths.
All systems go
Lactic acid builds up quickly in the muscles. Oxygen intake lags behind.
Breaking point
You may become dizzy and feel the "burn". Lactic acid will eventually reach a level where your muscles simply cannot contract. The breaths you take are as deep as possible to maximise the amount of oxygen you absorb.
Replenishing breaths
Immediately afterwards you continue to use your lungs' vital capacity and you are taking your deepest breaths.
Oxygen debt
Minutes after, deep breaths continue. This is necessary because oxygen is still needed to neutralize the build up of lactic acid.
Reaching your limit
A build up of lactic acid in your body is the reason why you get tired during exercise. Lactic acid interferes with muscle contraction, which results in physical exhaustion. Oxygen is needed to get rid of lactic acid, which is why you breathe heavily after exercise. This build up of lactic acid happens during both aerobic and anaerobic exercise, but it occurs quicker in the latter. Brain cells can only burn glucose for fuel and as exercising muscles deplete the body's available glucose supplies, mental fatigue also sets in.
Hydration!
Drinking water during exercise helps regulate body temperature through sweating and flushes away lactic acid. Water in blood plasma is sweated out, so your blood thickens and your heart works harder to pump blood around the body. This is called cardiac drift, and it's one reason why you can't respire and jog forever.
Comments
Post a Comment