Is breathing through a respirator/gas mask hard?

Hello, and in this video I want to look at one of the weird things I hear about gas masks a lot, I guess from people who've never worn a gas mask or a respirator, and that's it's really difficult to breathe with a respirator on. You need a massive amount of lung force apparently to be able to breathe with a respirator on. Now, yes, it is true that if you're a young child you might not be able to breathe properly with a respirator, especially babies. That's why baby respirators traditionally had pumps and now actually use an oxygen supply or something like that, or an air-powered pump, rather than actually having a baby breathe through it. But even children can breathe through gas masks, that's why you can see pictures from World War II of lots of children wearing masks. The Soviets made a big load of children's masks as well, so there's no real truth to it that it's impossible for people to breathe with gas masks on, especially if they're not trained to breathe through it. However, if you were doing physical activity then obviously I think you're going to notice it is slightly harder to breathe with a respirator on more. Now, I've found some masks are better than others, especially things like with M17 type masks, the cheek filter masks, and with the GSR. I've noticed because each filter is not as good as a 40mm filter on each side, the airflow is a bit weird through those masks. Now, another thing that will affect it is if your mask starts to clog up, especially the particle filter, if there's lots of dust and things in the air, then yes it will get harder and harder to breathe because the filter's clogging up. Better it clogs up than the stuff gets into you. So, there are those factors, but in general, even if it's a small two-sided mask or one 40mm filter, it's generally quite easy to breathe. Now, the only times I've found it's not is if you have a really giant canister filter running through a hose, and the reason for that is obviously sometimes there's a bit of resistance with a bag where the hole in the bottom of the bag isn't quite big enough for the filter, so that's one point of, you know, restricting the airflow. Then you've got a very big filter, so that restricts the airflow even more, because obviously the more stuff inside the filter, the more energy I guess it requires to pull the air through that filter. Then you've got to pull it up the entire length of the hose and into the mask, so then you sometimes get a bit of resistance, but nothing too massive. The only time that's been sort of horribly massive is when I've had to do it with, or I've put that particulate layer in to stop asbestos coming out of the old Soviet filters to test them. So anyway, let me put this on and I'll just demonstrate to you I can breathe normally with it on. Now some people are tempted to mouth-breathe with a mask on, it doesn't really matter as long as you're breathing properly. The only issue is if you're mouth-breathing, you can't smell anything if the filter starts to fail, where obviously if you're breathing through your nose and it's a gas that has an odour, you might realise in time to swap the filter or something like that. So anyway, let me put this mask on. So there we go, I'm breathing through my nose and I'm having absolutely no problem breathing. And this isn't even a brand new filter either, I've used this filter for quite a lot of things. Anyway, let's make the video a bit more interesting. What I'll do is I'll get a weight, I'll lift that for a bit and I'll see if it becomes much harder for me to breathe. Right, I have a 12kg kettlebell here as you can probably see. Not the heaviest thing in the world, so let's see if I can lift this a few times without knocking the camera over and we'll see how much my breathing increases and if I then start to struggle to breathe, because apparently you do. Right, okay. So, am I struggling to breathe holding this weight? No I'm certainly not, it's still quite easy. Obviously when you are doing physical exercise, you will need to breathe more. That's why athletes train so they are actually able to breathe less I guess, or use less lung capacity and actually keep their heart rate down while doing exercise. But the truth is that you don't actually really struggle with breathing when you have a respirator on. Now, is there any truth to this? Yes there is and I'll go into what that is now. So, I think the truth of this comes from when armies often get soldiers to exercise in full NBC gear or CBRN gear and their respirators. So they might be doing like a short distance run or a longer distance or march. They're in all their NBC gear and all their equipment, so they're in very heavy gear. They're getting very hot obviously because the NBC suits don't let you drain the fluids out very easily, so your heat's getting trapped in your NBC suit. Obviously when that's going on, you are going to get very hot and then that's probably why people report finding breathing difficult. Not because of the exercise they're doing, but because of all the heat building up from the exercise they're doing if that makes sense. I've not worded that very well, but I'm sure you get my point. The main issue I think is for where people think this comes from is if you have to start doing military exercises while wearing your respirator and all your kit, then it becomes much more difficult and that's not generally completely down to breathing, that is mostly down to exhaustion from the physical exercise. Obviously it is more difficult with a mask on. I know there are some kinds of activities where people train using masks to actually make it slightly harder to breathe and for a few other reasons. In general, I don't think you have much issue with breathing with a mask on. Now, I might be a bit biased because whenever I'm at the hospital, they tend to get about 99% lung capacity off of me, which is apparently a really good number. Now, that's the weird thing because I used to have asthma quite badly and I still have asthma now, but it's very inconvenient when it turns up, but that's it. It's not really a serious risk to me anymore. I don't know if it's something to do with that, but because I've overcome lots of lung problems when I was younger, I don't know if that just means now that I'm quite capable of breathing through a respirator without even thinking about it. Whereas some people might find it a lot more difficult if they've never done any sort of lung exercises or anything like that, so that might be the case. I don't know. But yeah, in terms of actually breathing through a mask, I've never had a problem. And as I said, if your particle filter starts clogging, then yes, you will have breathing problems, but on an actual new mask and a mask in good condition, that is never a problem. As long as the filter's in good condition, there should be no problem with airflow going through it. Now I found with the GSR, if you only have one of the filters on, so you've only got one bit of airflow, the bayonet filter thing really restricts airflow, so a GSR of one filter is really hard to breathe in, I'll give you that. But for the most part, I've never noticed it with masks being a difficulty. So there you go. Is it hard to breathe with a gas mask on? Evidently not.