hi i'm paula moore the chiropractor from posturevideos.com today we're going to
be looking at your vital lung capacity in order to measure this you're going to
need a taylor's measuring tape or a piece of string will do now vital lung
capacity simply means the ability of our lungs to expand when we breathe and the
more they expand the more ability they have to draw in more oxygen Dr. Rene
Cailliet the leading world expert in physical medicine and rehabilitation
tells us that our ability to expand the lungs in other words the vital lung
capacity reduces by a shocking 30% with slumped poor posture now this is crucial
because we need oxygen for two purposes in the body
number one oxygen converts our food into energy without it we can't move we're
lethargic our digestion sluggish and our organs don't work very well
number two oxygen helps to restore old haggard aged tissue so if you want to
age well you need vital lung capacity that's expansive so let me show how you
test it okay so grab ahold of your measuring tape or a piece of string if
you're using a string you're going to simply need to mark on the string the
before and after and then hold it up next to a regular ruler okay now mine
comes in both centimeters and inches can you see that I'm going to use the
centimeter side as they're smaller than inches and I figure you get a
more accurate result what you need to do is come right underneath the
breastbone in here the part where the ribs come under and meet the sternum in
here so you want to go around with your measuring tape keep it flat it's going
to go across your shoulder blades and it's going to come right in
and you're going to pinch it tightly on an exhaled breath so you're going to breathe
in breathe out all the way when the airs all the way out you simply squeeze and
take a look and there for me is 72 centimeters so that's my exhaled breath
from here to here now what I'm going to do is take a few practice breaths and
then on my biggest expansion I'm going to measure the centimeters of that and
I'm going to subtract the two and see how many centimeters i get so let's
do that again wrap the measuring tape back to 72
centimeters now hold that loose take a few deep breaths just to warm up your
lungs a little bit so I tend to favor going through the nose and out through
the mouth and now let's measure great big breath ready
squeeze again and now I've come to 80 centimetres so I've gone from 72
centimeters to 80 centimeters and that's an increase of 8 centimeters Dr. Rene
Cailiet tells us normal or very good lung capacity really we should be aiming for
between an 8 to 10 percent rise so from 72 centimeters a 10 percent rise would
be another 7 centimeters which would be 79cm I had 80 centimeters so my vital lung
capacity is very good and that's what you should be aiming for as well it's
alright if you're finding you're under that this is something that can be
improved upon that's why posture is crucial