Ask Us Anything: How Much Exercise Do We Get From Talking?
Jason SchneiderSpeaking involves dozens of muscles, and it can be a bit tiring. For a study published in 1998, speech-language pathologist Bridget Russell, of the State University of New York at Fredonia, asked participants to read aloud using either a quiet, normal, or loud voice while she measured their breathing rates, oxygen consumption, and energy expenditure. Russell found that continuous, normal speech is no more exhausting than sitting in silence, but quiet and loud talk both interfere with normal respiration. Most affected were men who read out loud at high volume; they took in 20 percent more oxygen.That’s on par with measurements in other species. Franz Goller, a physiologist at the University of Utah, has studied the energetic costs of singing in birds. He guessed it would be tiring: A canary erupts in 30-second bursts of song, replete with complicated trills that require rapid “mini breathing,”...