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Why is it dangerous to hyperventilate before swimming under water?
Wiki User
∙ 13y ago
I've never heard of hyperventilation being dangerous after swimming, but it is dangerous before swimming.
You know when you hold your breath and you feel a strong urge to breathe? This is called the pressure to breathe and it happens before you are actually in danger of running out of oxygen. Your body monitors the level of carbon dioxide (not the level of oxygen) in your blood to decide when to breathe - when it builds up, you feel the pressure to breathe.
By hyperventilating, you can clear more carbon dioxide out of your blood than you do with normal breathing. This mean that you can stay underwater for longer without feeling the pressure to breathe. The dangerous part is that you can run low on oxygen before your carbon dioxide levels get high enough to trigger the pressure to breathe - so you could be swimming along, feeling fine, and suddenly you don't have enough oxygen.
A lot of kids died this way doing diving contests in quarry swimming holes - if you don't have time to get to the surface when your body belatedly realizes that you need to breathe, you can drown.
Wiki User
∙ 13y ago
Wiki User
∙ 10y agoAccording to folk wisdom, hyperventilating will increase the oxygen saturation of the blood, allowing for a longer supply of oxygen to the body. In fact, the blood should always be fully saturated when breathing normally in a standard atmosphere.
What hyperventilating does do is cause expulsion of excess carbonic acid from the blood, raising the pH of the blood. This in turn suppresses the urge to breathe. So while hyperventilating does not give you one more second of usable oxygen, it does make you more comfortable with not breathing. In extreme cases, it can make you so relaxed, that you black out from lack of oxygen without realizing it. If you're underwater at the time, this is bad.
Free-divers and competitive apneists are trained to recognize the signs of low blood oxygen (dizziness, loss of peripheral vision, etc).
Wiki User
∙ 13y agoBecause when you take many small breaths before holding your breath, your body can't expell excess amounts of CO2 which can build up and increase the risk of oxygen deprivation under water
Wiki User
∙ 11y agoyou pass out
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