Tonight’s Gun Nuts Radio show the topic of controlling your breathing while shooting came up. At length.
The general consensus is that you should shoot while holding your breath during the exhale period. No disagreement there.
What I’d like to talk about is the physiological reason that it works best to hold your breath on the exhale, rather than the inhale.
The human brain has no ability to detect the level of dissolved oxygen in your blood. None. Zero. What it can do is detect the level of carbonic acid in your blood, which is what carbon dioxide dissolves into when in the blood stream. In short, your body cannot detect the “good” air — only the “bad” air. Obviously this works very well during regular life, and even when exercising. If it didn’t we’d die.
Where it breaks down, in practical terms, is something like pistol shooting. Your muscles aren’t in danger of running low on oxygen while holding a pistol on target, but your CO2 levels are rising while you sit there not breathing, and the brain starts to pitch a fit. A very mild fit, but enough to throw off your shot. The whole body starts a mild panic when the brain sends out the “BREATHE! DAMNIT!!” signal that only gets worse over time. Exhaling before the shot removes waste CO2 from your system. This gives your brain a little bit of peace and lets the body do it’s own thing for a while.
If the stability issue was directly related to the concentration of oxygen in the blood stream then we’d see folks saying that one should hold breath after the inhale, not after the exhale, but we don’t, and the above explains exactly why.
It isn’t about getting, or keeping, oxygen in the system — it’s about not letting too much carbon dioxide stay in the system.
Dang, man! That makes sense. As the Atomic Nerds say, “Science; we’ll fuck you up!”
maybe you should try shooting without the giant black dick in your mouth