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A Look Inside the Lungs

From the outside, lungs are pink and a bit squishy, like a sponge. But the inside contains the real lowdown on the lungs! At the bottom of the trachea (say:tray-kee-uh), or windpipe, there are two large tubes. These tubes are called the main stem bronchi(say: brong-kye), and one heads left into the left lung, while the other heads right into the right lung.

Each main stem bronchus (say: brong-kuss) — the name for just one of the bronchi — then branches off into tubes, or bronchi, that get smaller and even smaller still, like branches on a big tree. The tiniest tubes are called bronchioles (say: brong-kee-oles), and there are about 30,000 of them in each lung. Each bronchiole is about the same thickness as a hair.

At the end of each bronchiole is a special area that leads into clumps of teeny tiny air sacs called alveoli (say: al-vee-oh-lie). There are about 600 million alveoli in your lungs and if you stretched them out, they would cover an entire tennis court. Now that's a load of alveoli! Each alveolus (say: al-vee-oh-luss) — what we call just one of the alveoli — has a mesh-like covering of very small blood vessels called capillaries (say: cap-ill-er-ees). These capillaries are so tiny that the cells in your blood need to line up single file just to march through them.

All About Inhaling

When you're walking your dog, cleaning your room, or spiking a volleyball, you probably don't think about inhaling (breathing in) — you've got other things on your mind! But every time you inhale air, dozens of body parts work together to help get that air in there without you ever thinking about it.

As you breathe in, your diaphragm contracts and flattens out. This allows it to move down, so your lungs have more room to grow larger as they fill up with air. "Move over, diaphragm, I'm filling up!" is what your lungs would say. And the diaphragm isn't the only part that gives your lungs the room they need. Your rib muscles also lift the ribs up and outward to give the lungs more space.

At the same time, you inhale air through your mouth and nose, and the air heads down your trachea, or windpipe. On the way down the windpipe, tiny hairs called cilia (say: sill-ee-uh) move gently to keep mucus and dirt out of the lungs. The air then goes through the series of branches in your lungs, through the bronchi and the bronchioles.

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