Effects of Voluntary Changes in Minute Ventilation on Microvascular Skin Blood Flow

Performing yoga exercises in addition to basic training helps athletes to improve their results. At the same time, yoga exercises, including Hatha yoga, which involves controlling one’s breathing, are integrated into the training process. This work is devoted to study the influence of breathing exercises, with the decrease and increase in the minute volume of breathing with corresponding changes in gas exchange, on peripheral blood flow, spirometry, and gas analysis in anatomically different areas: the skin of the forehead, fingers and toes.

Volunteers performed full breathing exercises, which led to the decrease and increase in the minute volume of breathing with corresponding changes in gas exchange. Blood microcirculation was recorded using laser Doppler flowmetry (LDM) analyzers in the skin of the forehead, fingers and toes. Additionally, spirometry and gas analysis were used.

It was found that 5-min practices of full breathing among experienced volunteers led to similar changes in microcirculation parameters, namely, an increase in the skin blood perfusion in all areas, as well as an increase in nutritive blood flow only in the extremities (fingers and toes). Reducing the minute volume of breathing leads to an increase in amplitudes of endothelial and neurogenic oscillations during the recovery period, but increasing the minute volume of breathing leads to an increase in amplitudes of neurogenic oscillations during that same period.

The study of the blood microcirculation behavior during breathing exercises and its correlation is useful both for obtaining fundamental knowledge of oxygen delivery to biological tissues in various breathing modes and for evaluating the efficacy of breathing exercises in sports training and rehabilitation. Changes in lung ventilation and the corresponding shifts in gas exchange affect the active mechanisms of blood microcirculation regulation. This stimulation occurs through endothelial mechanisms during reduced minute volume of breathing with hypoxia and hypercapnia, as well as neurogenic mechanisms both in increased and decreased lung ventilation.