Does exercise induce hyper-ventilation or hyper-respiration? And what does it matter to those of us who exercise at the intensity necessary to stay in top physical condition?
Until a few years back hyper-ventilation was standard terminology for the normal compensatory mechanism that accelerates breathing during exercise when ventilation spontaneously gets deeper and faster. Then whoever influences medical usage got lazy. They needed a word to describe what happens at another point during exercise which had more clinical significance: the point when muscle fatigue, overheating, and build up of metabolites exceeds compensation. Of course it’s important to distinguish this moment because if the increasing demands of metabolism can’t be compensated, stroke volume reaches a plateau and often decreases resulting in a fall in blood pressure. Dehydration occurs. Cutaneous vasoconstriction also decreases rate of heat loss and high temperatures result in acute acidosis. “Most people think hyperventilation refers to emotional stress only,” they must have thought, “no one will notice if we start using it to denote the point when the compensatory mechanisms fail instead of the point at which they kick in during exercise.”
Normally ventilatory compensation is caused by rising hydrogen and decreasing carbonic acid in the blood. Although CO2 and CO3 concentrations levels are considered relatively stable during steady state exercise, you still end up with an oxygen debt that must be compensated for before the deficit can be balanced by converting lactate into glucose and blood pH re-established at 7.4.
The problem is when blood pH drops during exercise and H+ concentrations are high, potassium moves from cells into the extracellular fluid depressing polarity and slowing electrical response in organs, glands and deep tissues. Add high temperatures and increasingly slower excretion of excess H+ by the kidneys as generalized metabolic acidosis ensues, and ventilatory rate dependent on cardiac output for stimulation of the carotid bodies eventually slows down along with decreasing stroke volume and stroke volume and falling blood pressure. When the compensatory mechanisms fail and heart rate slows, the huffing and puffing necessary to rectify acidosis is shut off. So hyper+ventilation really isn’t the best word here at all, is it?
In the meantime another another word was needed to describe the normal acceleration of breathing at the RCP during exercise. The Greek root of hyper-pnoea or hyper-pnea refers to pulmonary respiration or breathing, so that seemed to suffice. However a couple of things were overlooked. What wasn’t taken into consideration is that respiration is not the same as ventilation, but whoever was responsible for the switch in terminology didn’t think it was important enough to differentiate between the two since their interests had been served.
Steady state exercise would need to increase not decrease respiratory efficiency in order to use hyper-pnea, meaningfully wouldn’t it? But since it always triggers hyper-ventilation when metabolism becomes anaerobic during exercise, this brings us to the third element regarding usage that’s virtually overlooked. The fact that it’s actually possible to engineer true hyper-plea, true hyper-respiration during exercise by oxygenating all the tissues of the body equally even as heart rate peaks. However it takes a specifically designed sequence of exercises with a breathing movement pattern that can maintain resting state homeostatic balance, a slightly alkaline pH, at all degrees of performance intensity and duration. As long as the relative anion/cation ratio remains the same the total number of ions can go up or down as metabolism speeds up during exercise and homeostatic acid-base pH is still maintained, aerobically.
Body’Fit pHx™ compensates for oxygen deprivation in deep organs by opening up circulation in deep vessels, so blood volume can’t be shunted over to the muscles like it usually is, thereby maintaining the anion/ cation balance required for acid base equilibrium. In other words no huffing and puffing of heavier breathing is ever triggered at any intensity. This is true hyper-pnea, because the breathing design sustains 100% aerobic cardio, automatic compensatory hyper-ventilation is completely unnecessary. Body’Fit design works with physiological mechanisms to define the gold standard that makes sense of both hyper-ventilation and hyper-respiration.
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