Dr. Andy Galpin

The way you reduce CO2 concentrations in your blood is to exhale.

And so this would cause you to increase your respiratory rate and to start either mildly or excessively hyperventilating.

And this is why as you exercise, your respiratory rate, again, the amount of breaths you're taking goes up.

It is in part to increase and bring in oxygen, of course.

But when we're doing it anaerobically, we're not using oxygen anyways.

So the real reason we're breathing so hard and we're panting and

and all that stuff as we're getting harder and harder of our exercise is because we're trying to dump and get rid of all that CO2 buildup.

Remember,

excess CO2 is altering pH.

This is making us more acidic.

This becomes an extreme problem.

So another way to think about this is when you inhale, that's actually a sympathetic driver.

And so your heart rate increases during inhalation.

When you exhale, it is parasympathetic and it drops.

So effectively what's happening is your body is sort of saying, oh, you're inhaling.

We're assuming then you're bringing in oxygen.

Let's get prepared to deliver this oxygen throughout the system.

When you're exhaling, it's the opposite.

I don't want to be in a situation where I'm hyperventilating.

I don't need to be breathing too much because if, again, that CO2 gets too low, instead of being acidic, we are now in respiratory alkalosis.