Health Tooty Fruity

When you exercise, your breathing gets deeper and faster. If you push yourself to the limit, you’ll be panting and gasping for air. As you get into shape, you’ll be able to do much more exercise with less respiratory effort—you’ll “get your wind.” Surprisingly, though, your lungs don’t deserve any of the credit. In fact, the lung is one of the few human organs that does not improve with exercise training. The reason: your lungs have such a large excess capacity that they do not have to improve to meet the demands of exercise. In fact, you could get along perfectly well with just one lung, even getting enough oxygen to permit vigorous exercise.

Intense exercise produces breathlessness because tissues aren’t getting enough oxygen and they are producing excessive amounts of carbon dioxide and acid. Regular exercise improves your wind without changing your lungs because it boosts your heart’s ability to pump oxygen-rich blood and it enhances your muscles’ ability to extract and use that oxygen.