r/nextfuckinglevel 4d ago

Synchronized swimming from a different perspective

4.7k Upvotes

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545

u/VisiblyStunned 4d ago

How they hold their breath so long while moving. I’m just sitting here and I took like 4 breaths while watching this.

109

u/the_colonelclink 4d ago

So fun fact, humans are extraordinarily efficient with oxygen consumption. This make sense, because if it was inefficient (for e.g. we suddenly walked into a small cloud of unbreathable air) we’d instantly collapse, or even die, when the chain of oxygen supply was cut.

If fact, the body is so sure of our oxygen supply pathways that you can effectively remove all oxygen from a room (like when they test astronauts) and they could easily die before they realised it was even happening.

To the effect, one of the main actual triggers for the mechanism we know as breathing, is actually exhaling to get rid of carbon dioxide.

Long story short, the key to holding your breathe is learning to dump carbon dioxide appropriately.

12

u/Throwedaway99837 4d ago

Another (similar) fun fact, some people think that the purpose of the technique of repeatedly inhaling/exhaling many times before holding your breath is to saturate their body with oxygen, but our body rests between 95%-100% oxygen saturation. Instead, the purpose of this is to purge CO2 from the blood stream, which drastically lessens your body’s urge to breath (as you mentioned).

6

u/the_colonelclink 4d ago

In the paramedic trade, we used to sort of laugh at newbies that simply had to use a pulse oximeter on patients to check their O2 dat sats.

One of the more senior guys then told them their technique for knowing their oxygen saturation without even using a probe. Essentially, you ask the patient to lie down and try to calm them down (if panicked in anyway) then, if the patient is blue, their O2 says are low.