Clean Air and What Else Contributes to Lung Health?

Healthy Lungs part 2

As a young corrective and adaptive physical education student I was taught that exercise strengthened the lungs.  Is this a fact, or does exercise do other things that impact the lungs instead of strengthening the lungs, or maybe it is both?  Let us explore the possibilities.

When I do a search with Google Scholar so that I get actual research articles and skip the advertisements I find a study to see of exercise improves the lung function of children with asthma in which the researchers find that there is no conclusive evidence that exercise improves lung function in children with asthma. Does physical activity strengthen lungs and protect against asthma in childhood? A systematic review – Cassim – 2019 – Pediatric Allergy and Immunology – Wiley Online Library

Another article studied children with cystic fibrosis and found that exercise did improve the lung function of these children according to the title of the article, but upon examination of the research methods we find that what was being measured was exercise capacity and lung function.  If we look at their chart presentation, we find that the number that showed statistically significant improvement was exercise capacity while lung function had slight improvement to no improvement. Exercise improves lung function and habitual activity in children with cystic fibrosis – ScienceDirect

I did not do extensive research, because what I found pretty much validated my idea that we cannot improve lung function with exercise.  When I say that I did not do extensive research, I do not mean to suggest that these are the only 2 articles that I researched.  They did represent pretty much all the literature that I searched.

What exercise does is to improve the use of oxygen by the muscles which then in turn helps a person do more with the limited lung function that we do have.

This does not mean that we might not expect anything to come along which does improve lung function because studies are in the hopper which do indicate that a method by which they lungs are able to repair themselves with a little help from our friends is not far off.  Until then keep those arms and pumpin and those legs a jumpin to improve our exercise capacity.  Increasing exercise capacity will help us not to feel so short of breath and give us more energy to go about our daily lives.