Why are we told to inhale through the nose and exhale
from the mouth?
What difference does it really make???
My normal breathing pattern is in through the Nose out through the Nose. Since this is on automatic, why wouldnt it be the best way?
Who is telling you to breath like this? What is their vested interest in this breathing pattern?
I don’t know who or why someone has advised you to breathe this way, but if you breathe through your nose, it will heat up the air more, and probably capture more dust and stuff in the mucus lining your nasal cavity. I doubt this has any major health implications in any but the most extreme scenarios.
Typically, practictioners of the martial arts are told to breathe this way during kata and other exercises. To be honest, I’m not sure why, never asked and didn’t find it that helpful. I can only speculate that breathing through your nose forces your breathing to be slow enough that you get to use more of the oxygen than if you had taken a quick gulp of air though the mouth. Breathing out your mouth is definitely useful when executing techniques that require power though, so I can understand that part. The exhalation should be timed with the moment of impact.
I believe yoga and other meditation practitioners suggest you breathe this way also but I don’t really see the benefit there.
wevets is right it heats up the air more than through your nose which makes it easier for the lungs to use and distribute throughout the body. and ur nose hairs capture a lot of the dust. i was told this by my science teacher who was also a track coach. it probably doesn’t matter if u breath like this for just normal breathing but it prolly makes a difference if your in a sport that involves running or a sport where you need a lot of air.
It also prevents you from accidentally blowing your nose all over the heavy bag.
[sub]I wish I could say that this knowledge was not gained through experience[/sub]
Ancient chinese secrets be damned, this is the real reason! Thanks KTK, for setting me straight. Sheesh, I’ve never had to clean coke out of a keyboard before.
Maybe you should breathe out through your nose…
[Chuck Palahniuk mode]
“Metahumor” isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.
[/Chuck Palahniuk mode]
Get used to it. From what I’ve seen, this is a common occurrence around here.
Oh, and if you’re jogging, breathing in/out through your nose means you’ll lose less water through breathing, so you won’t get dehydrated as quickly.
I apologize for the lack of cites, but I’ve always heard that in-through-the-nose, out-through-the-mouth, increases your oxygen absorption. This relaxed breathing pattern is the most efficient means of oxygenating your blood. Any other pattern - nose-nose, mouth-mouth, either creates excess pressure in the lungs or increases tension on the alveoli, reducing efficiency, or results in the stimulaiton of muccous production. I would suspect that unless you’re an athlete or musician, you won’t notice a significant difference.
Anecdotal stuff: Advanced wind instrument players learn circular breathing techniques that allow the musician to breathe and play tones simultaneously. Obviously, the only way to do this is nose-mouth.
All warm-blooded animals, ourselves included, have small bones in our nasal cavities called turbinate bones. These serve to minimize water and heat loss in high-metabolism creatures like ourselves. They work by drawing air in through the nose and over the thin many-layered bones, where they pick up moisture and heat before going into the lungs. When we breath out through our noses, the warm humid air flows out over them where some of the water vapor (and consequencialy heat) condenses there rather than being lost to the outside air. Next breath starts it all over again. This nose-breathing seems to be for the majority of our time when we’re not really working hard and breathing heavy, for which we use our mouths for greater capacity.
These nasal structures have led some researchers to conclude that dinosaurs were cold-blooded by their absence of turbinate bones. Read about it here http://www.orst.edu/Dept/ncs/newsarch/1996/96August/coldnose.htm
What, you mean as opposed to losing moisture and heat to the outside air by passing over your moist tongue, palate, and esophagus? Ridiculous.
Apparently, the concept of increased surface area of many thin bone plates as opposed to a single strip of skin on the tounge and the palate eludes you Chas.E. Secondly, one should actually read the link posted which includes a brief description of turbinate bones whose existance and function in warm-blooded animals have been known and documented for a LONG time (they allow you to conserve moisture, not loose it). Lastly, the air you breath goes through the trachea, not the esophagus, and it ALL goes through there whether it comes through the nose OR the mouth. Me thinks it’s obvious that someone ought to pick up a biology textbook and learn some anatomy; me also recomends doing a bit of research before challenging a post to avoid embarrasing one’s self.
I said it passes OVER the esophagus, and that is accurate. I did not say it passes THROUGH the esophagus.
I really don’t care to read an irrelevant dissertation on the structures of the dinosaur sinus. My otolaryngologist says that there is no functional difference between breathing through the nose as opposed to the mouth, and that’s good enough for me.
A quick google search gave scores of pages by otolaryngologists about sinus problems and turbinate bone surgury, so they apparently are there for a reason and there can be quit a difference in breathing through the mouth vs the nose, especially when there are problems with these structures or harsh air conditions. If such highly modified bone structures served no functional purpose, it puzzles me as to why they’d evolved in the first place, (especially coincidently in all warm-blooded animals for whom heat and moisture retention are important), why they remain today, and why leading paleontologists can make potentially ground-breaking discoveries about the physiology of extinct animals based on their presence or absence. For anyone who IS interested in learning more about factors affecting breathing, just type in “turbinate” and “otolaryngology” or “evolution”, etc…to get more information about how some breathing mechanisms work.
You’re supposed to breathe in through your mouth and out through your nose. How else is your Fremen stillsuit supposed to capture the water?
Also, if you breathe with your mouth open all the time, you look dumb.
-Rue.
…or you need a Melange fix real bad. 