What Happens to Breathing Rates During Jumping Jacks?

There are four major types of physical activity: aerobic, muscle-strengthening, bone-strengthening and stretching. Although aerobic exercises, such as jogging and jumping jacks, may also strengthen your muscles and bones, the primary focus of aerobic activity is to train your heart to use energy more efficiently. The effect that aerobic activity has on your breathing rate and your body in general depends primarily on the intensity and duration of the exercise.

Aerobic Exercise

• Swimming, running and jumping jacks are all examples of aerobic exercise. When you perform an aerobic exercise, your muscles use oxygen to complete the task you're doing. Your body's increased need for oxygen makes your breathing rate increase so you take more oxygen into your body. Your heart rate also increases, so your heart pumps more blood throughout your body; the blood is responsible for delivering the oxygen to your muscles.

Intensity

• The intensity of an exercise is how much you make your muscles work. Gradual increases in the intensity of an exercise can train your body to comfortably handle more intense exercise over time. For example, if you start by doing 40 jumping jacks per minute but the repetitions become easy, you could try doing 50 jumping jacks per minute to make the exercise more intense for you. In time, your body will adjust, and you'll be able to do 50 jumping jacks per minute easily. The more intensity you add to an aerobic exercise, the more your breathing and heart rate increases.

Duration

• Duration is the length of time you can perform an exercise without a stopping. Duration has an inverse relationship with intensity; the harder you exercise, the shorter you can sustain that exercise. Like intensity, you can train your body to be able to sustain an exercise longer by making gradual increases in the duration of an exercise. According to Pennsylvania State University Strength and Fitness, aerobic exercises should last 12 minutes at minimum, not counting warm-up or cool down time; however, the longer you can sustain an exercise, the better.

Jumping Jacks and Breathing Rate

• Regular aerobic exercise trains your body to be able to tolerate more intense exercise, for longer durations; as your body adjusts to doing a certain number of jumping jacks in a given time frame, your breathing rate won't increase as much when you do them, and you won't see the same benefits of doing jumping jacks that you did before. As your body adjusts, you need to increase the intensity of the exercise. In the case of jumping jacks, you can try doing more jumping jacks without increasing the duration of exercise to sustain the benefit of doing them.