Where does the air go?

We might hear  this on the yoga mat before ," take a deep breath in ...and out...let the air go into your belly via nose and chest..." But...where does the air really go? Does air go into our stomach and intestines, so that we are able to make the movement of our belly?

I was always waiting for someone to ask me this question, finally someone days ago did it via SMS. 

Bellow is how our lung looks like, the white sticks are our front rips and they connect to the back ones to form the main room of our chest with clavicles and diaphragm, the flat white part in the bottom of this photo. As  the picture shows, the black parts sit right in the "room" is our lung and it hugs our heart in the center, just a bit to the left side.

(Picture is from the book ,Mensch Kröper Krankheit, by Renate Huch )

 After knowing where is what, it becomes  easier to find out what happens when we inhale and exhale. So, when the air comes in, our lung gets bigger, could go up to twice bigger than the normal size. To make sure there is enough space for lung to grow, our clavicles move up toward the chin, at the same time rips move to both side and diaphragm moves down to our abdominal. It all happens together and everything go back to where it starts when we exhale. 

So actually when yoga teacher says"bring the air to your  belly." or " use your  belly to breath." doesnt mean there is any secret path between our lung and stomach that the amount of air lung can't contain would be past over to stomach.instead of that, what our yoga teacher means is to bring consciousness  to our abdominal, so the body will passively force the diaphragm move down a bit more, so the lung gets more space to grow and to contains more air at the same time. Same concept if we hear teachers say " bring the air to you back in between the rips." that means to move rips more to the sides to make more room for lung and to remind the lung there is still a bit space to usein between  the back rips. The moving belly and back we observe while take deep breath in and out are just the physical appearance of our structural change instead of certain organs in the belly or back receive air.

That is why we want to use yoga asana and certain praayama techniques to train our back/chest muscle and our core muscle.If those are not flexible enough to support the movement happens on diaphragm and rips, then even if we force, there wouldn't be much room for lung to grow. 

Why do I keep saying " making the lung to grow?" Because when lung grows, the alveolus grows. Alveolus is where the microvasculars receive O2 and release CO2.  Therefore the less alveolus could grow, the less O2 it could pass to our body and less CO2 it could take away from our body which means our heart has to work harder to get the O2 /CO2 balance in our blood or we might feel tired or even sick easily. And the faster we breath, the less calm we are and most of the time emotional would take over and the physical system will out of control.

Anyhow, this post is just about sharing with everyone where does air go, so next time we know what it really means of " use your belly to breath." 

Actually instead of the air goes to belly, I found it is closer to the fact that it is the energy from my otter world enters my dantien and support my energy body for daily activities:)