How knows this product? How has try it? Santa gave me his gift and I would like to know if it worked for you! I will tell you in a couple of weeks if it works for me…
The US Army has done extensive testing of resisted breathing, it is germane to the subject of fighting a war wearing a respirator, and found no increase in performance in unresisted activities after training with a respirator on.
Wearing something that makes it hard for you to breathe has been shown to make you better at doing things while you wear the device, but not oince you take it off.
this is a new one on me. i lost the better part of my right lung about 20 years ago.
i’ve always worked on the understanding that improving lung capacity and capability was more a technique of several types of breathing modes, and focusing on using the muscle(s) which expand and contract the lungs. not sure if this device qualifies for that. i’m interested in what benefits you find after a month of two of regular use.
According to my pulmonologists, you can NOT expand lung volume. What you have is what you’ve got.
You can only become more effecient.
Wish it were true. Lost part of my left lung in 2002.
-Jot
so not even developing muscles in and around the ribs such as the obliques and intercostal muscles won’t help you expand your rib cage a bit to help the lung capacity?
The problem with this device and anything along that line is that even if you could expand your lung capacity, it would not matter. You lung capacity does not limit your aerobic ability. The limitations occur elsewhere in the cardiovascular system with your lungs being able to take up more oxygen than your body can actually use. Likewise, it can get rid of carbon dioxide faster than the body can transport it to the lungs.
I have seen one study suggesting that training these muscles might help delay muscle fatigue and also conserve energy, however I find it hard to believe that this has any real implications for performance (even if it were true).
Like most of these types of products, it is difficult to prove or disprove the theory behind it. I am sure someone has used it and felt that they improved dramatically. When there is no hard evidence, then you have to look at it and ask “Based on what we know about the human body, would this work?” In this case, my opinion is no, but I am always open to being proved wrong.
This brings me to the next logical question. What factors determine or contribute to VO2 max? Some people are very hight and then are aerobic while many of us would be anaerobic trying to run or bike at their pace…
“The problem with this device and anything along that line is that even if you could expand your lung capacity, it would not matter.”
Despite the name and the marketing of these types of products, the idea is to improve respiratory muscle endurance not “lung capacity”.
http://www.spiro-tiger.com/html/images/decreased.pdf
Haim
You lung capacity does not limit your aerobic ability. The limitations occur elsewhere in the cardiovascular system with your lungs being able to take up more oxygen than your body can actually use.
I can tell you without a doubt that lung capacity matters. I will grant you it is only anectdotal evidence, but
you’re going to have a hard time doing a controlled study to determine aerobic ability on people who have
had parts of lungs removed and those that just think they have (ie, blind studies not possible). I had ~12%
of my left lung removed, a portion of which was non-functioning tissue, in 2002. It was extremely apparent
when I got back into shape that I had different operating ceilings.
Your ability to turn over oxygen is less. It means you go anerobic faster, and your max pace staying aerobic is less.
Also, less flotation for swimming. 
-Jot
edit: formatting was horrible.
What is up with all you guys losing parts of your lungs?
What is up with all you guys losing parts of your lungs?
Seemed like a good idea at the time? 
Undiagnosed congenital lung defect. Happens rarely, normally caught in childhood. Mine was
caught in my 30’s. It did explain to me why I was always between packs in sports. I was
fast enough to keep up with the front pack until I was just too tired, but never with the slow
pack. Less lung tissue and a cardiac shunt explain a lot.
Here is the summary from just before and after the surgery.
I feel 100% confident is saying that no medical professional recommends a thoracotomy for
entertainment.
-Jot
Post:
so not even developing muscles in and around the ribs such as the obliques and intercostal muscles won’t help you expand your rib cage a bit to help the lung capacity?
No, not much anyway
involved in respiration you have two systems at work. the lungs, a pneumatic pump in a confined cylinder (rib cage) and the abdomin a hydrolic pump. they are separated by the diaphram, a dome shaped muscle that is attached to the ribs, spine and sternum.
the hydrolic system is a closed system, the pneumatic is open at one end.
the lungs have no ability to ‘pull in air’ by themselves. basicly they are stuck to the ribs and diaphram with some sticky stuff and when the diaphram lowers (it’s a dome shaped muscle so contracting pulls it down, lowering the dome) the lungs expand and suck in air. think of pulling the plunger on a syringe to suck in fluid.
the rib cage is almost completely rigid. the diaphram attaches high enough on the ribs (i think it’s the 6th or there abouts) that the ribs above the diaphram are rigid, they attach to the sternum by a small segment of cartilage. unlike the lower ribs where severl attach to a segment of cartilage that goes up to the sternum (a little bit of flexability) and the last 2 float free (a lot of flexability). the ribs meet with the spine in the back. so, there is very little expansion of the rib cage in the area of the lungs.
so, there is only one meaningful way to expand the lungs. move the diaphram. this involves the hydrolic pump, the abdomen. as i understand fluid dynamics (i understand very little) you can not compress a liquid. so, you can not compress the abdomin. you can change the shape though. that is you can stick ‘out the belly’ or ‘distend the abdomen’ what ever you want to call it. you must change the shape of the abdomen to allow the diaphram to contract (lower) to enlarge the lungs. then you must contract the abdomen and relax the muscle that is the diaphram to raise the diaphram and expel air.
what does this mean.
if you want to increase lung capacity you must develop the abdomen and diaphram. by develop i mean both the ability to contract and the ability to expand.
the contraction of the diphram while relaxing the abdomen (allowing it to bulge) and then the contraction of the abdomen and relaxing of the diaphram to expel air.
i’m sure most people have heard of these belly breathing practices and yoga practices emphisize them. of key importance to trithletes also is learning to do this while holding the body stable on the bike and when running. (probably one of the many benefits of steep angle and on the areo bars is that it’s easier to relax the torso muscles as compared to a ‘road’ postiton where more torso muscles are used to stabilize the upper body.)
so, once you’ve explored the expansion of the lungs you may need to consider it’s importance and of course the ‘diminishing returns’ of training it.
is the amount of oxygen you take in a limiting factor? will expanding the lungs to greater volume increase the oxygen uptake?
do the abdominal muscles tire during endurance activity enough to affect performance? do you specificly develop them or will they develop as needed as a result of training?
Post:
so not even developing muscles in and around the ribs such as the obliques and intercostal muscles won’t help you expand your rib cage a bit to help the lung capacity?
No, not much anyway
involved in respiration you have two systems at work. the lungs, a pneumatic pump in a confined cylinder (rib cage) and the abdomin a hydrolic pump. they are separated by the diaphram, a dome shaped muscle that is attached to the ribs, spine and sternum.
the hydrolic system is a closed system, the pneumatic is open at one end.
the lungs have no ability to ‘pull in air’ by themselves. basicly they are stuck to the ribs and diaphram with some sticky stuff and when the diaphram lowers (it’s a dome shaped muscle so contracting pulls it down, lowering the dome) the lungs expand and suck in air. think of pulling the plunger on a syringe to suck in fluid.
the rib cage is almost completely rigid. the diaphram attaches high enough on the ribs (i think it’s the 6th or there abouts) that the ribs above the diaphram are rigid, they attach to the sternum by a small segment of cartilage. unlike the lower ribs where severl attach to a segment of cartilage that goes up to the sternum (a little bit of flexability) and the last 2 float free (a lot of flexability). the ribs meet with the spine in the back. so, there is very little expansion of the rib cage in the area of the lungs.
so, there is only one meaningful way to expand the lungs. move the diaphram. this involves the hydrolic pump, the abdomen. as i understand fluid dynamics (i understand very little) you can not compress a liquid. so, you can not compress the abdomin. you can change the shape though. that is you can stick ‘out the belly’ or ‘distend the abdomen’ what ever you want to call it. you must change the shape of the abdomen to allow the diaphram to contract (lower) to enlarge the lungs. then you must contract the abdomen and relax the muscle that is the diaphram to raise the diaphram and expel air.
what does this mean.
if you want to increase lung capacity you must develop the abdomen and diaphram. by develop i mean both the ability to contract and the ability to expand.
the contraction of the diphram while relaxing the abdomen (allowing it to bulge) and then the contraction of the abdomen and relaxing of the diaphram to expel air.
i’m sure most people have heard of these belly breathing practices and yoga practices emphisize them. of key importance to trithletes also is learning to do this while holding the body stable on the bike and when running. (probably one of the many benefits of steep angle and on the areo bars is that it’s easier to relax the torso muscles as compared to a ‘road’ postiton where more torso muscles are used to stabilize the upper body.)
so, once you’ve explored the expansion of the lungs you may need to consider it’s importance and of course the ‘diminishing returns’ of training it.
is the amount of oxygen you take in a limiting factor? will expanding the lungs to greater volume increase the oxygen uptake?
do the abdominal muscles tire during endurance activity enough to affect performance? do you specificly develop them or will they develop as needed as a result of training?
The real limiter to “lung capacity” is the development of turbulent flow in the upper airway at high flow rates. Once turbulent flow develops it is essentially impossible to further increase airflow regardless of how much improves his/her muscles.
interesting, can you post some links/writings on this. i’m not familiar with it as a limiter in healthy people.
thanks
interesting, can you post some links/writings on this. i’m not familiar with it as a limiter in healthy people.
thanks
It is the limiter in everyone. Look to the medical literature, especially the anesthesiology literature (that is what I trained as) regarding ventilatory dynamics. When one is trying to ventilate a patient to reduce CO2 one can only get so high in minute volume, even when using very high driving pressures. This is mostly a concern in critical care medicine where airways become obstructed with edema or other reasons, especially in children who have small airways. This “problem” can be dealt with in several specialized ways from changing the reynolds number of the inspired air (substituting helium for nitrogen) or changing the ventilatory pattern to extremely high frequency low volume “respirations” which allows gas exchange to occur via enhanced diffusion along the upper airways vs the normal bulk gas transport. Anyhow, did a little google search for you.
Here is a link to an article that discusses how “lung capacity” contributes essentially zero to the healthy athletes performance.
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/309/6947/113
Here is a link that mentions the differences between laminar and turbulant flow in airways.
http://oac.med.jhmi.edu/res_phys/Encyclopedia/AirFlow/AirFlow.HTML
Your first link is this:
So I read the article, and it seems to say that lung volume is not an issue for
most people.
The opening sentence though is:
Assuming lung function to be normal, there is said to be no pulmonary limitation to aerobic performance.
Given that (which I don’t get to do) it is more about respiration rates than lung volume.
Which is what everyone was saying i believe. In other words, “increasing lung volume” is:
- Impossible
- Not important for the normal athelete
So, a device claiming to do this (ie the OP’s question) is snake oil.
-Jot
edit: fix quoting instead of html
Not to highjack this thread but there was a book published a long while ago titled: Breath Play; now there is even a web site (www.breathplay.com) for ways to improve performance by breathing differently. Do you feel that there is any legitimacy to these methods?
So I read the article, and it seems to say that lung volume is not an issue for
most people.
The opening sentence though is:
Assuming lung function to be normal, there is said to be no pulmonary limitation to aerobic performance.
Given that (which I don’t get to do) it is more about respiration rates than lung volume.
Which is what everyone was saying i believe. In other words, “increasing lung volume” is:
- Impossible
- Not important for the normal athelete
So, a device claiming to do this (ie the OP’s question) is snake oil.
-Jot
edit: fix quoting instead of html
Anyhow, we are pretty much born with our maximum amount of alveoli (there may be some further early development but it doesn’t come about because of athletic training). Some improvement in maximum minute volume occurs as we grow and our upper airways enlarge but once we reach adulthood this improvement ceases and this improvement is unrelated to training, as far as I know. So, after an early maturation period I believe the data shows our ventilatory capacity only decreases with time and nothing can be done to reverse the trend.
If breathing against resistance provided a benefit then it seems the best athletes in the world would all be asthmatics (asymptomatic during competition, of course). They are not even though many top athletes do suffer from mild asthma few of them, I suspect, encourage asthmatic attacks during training to enhance their breathing capacity. So, in the absence of scientific proof that such a device is beneficial (in which case we would need to revise a lot of our thinking regarding ventilatory mechanics) I would say such a device is snake oil.
Not to highjack this thread but there was a book published a long while ago titled: Breath Play; now there is even a web site (www.breathplay.com) for ways to improve performance by breathing differently. Do you feel that there is any legitimacy to these methods?
Don’t know although maximal ventilatory capacity does depend some on breathing technique if one can prevent or delay the onset of turbulent flow by changing technique. This is more a problem breathing out (where the airways are compressed, so smaller) than breathing in.