Hi Santiago,

I'm not entirely sure of your question. Distance runners do typically have lower muscle mass, but I don't follow the "bigger muscle mass than some other disciplines".  Nevertheless, I want to try and help with this content area.

I can't say I know this answer directly, but I did *quickly* review an article by Salvadori 2008 on obesity and ventilation. The article used incremental exercise reporting lower VE (vs controls) during all stages until the end exercise and peak.  When VE was normalized to fat free mass, VE was higher at all time points but only reaching significance above 100 watts. Albeit not resting, it may provide you a place to start. There are many older articles on obesity and ventilation- most I've been exposed to are exercise related, or diaphragm activation in nature.  Asmussen (1946) does address muscle mass and ventilation, but I doubt it's what you're looking for.

My quick suggestion, be careful when reading if you're looking into distance runners.  For example, if your population (distance runners) has "high BMI", the authors are probably referring to BMI compared to other runners, but that will still be a low BMI compared to other individuals, where most of this literature is housed (in my experience).  I would look into the respiratory steal phenomenon and the work of breathing, if I were you (Craig Harm's work in the late 90's).  I'm sure you would be able to track down reference you could use from there.  

This may sound like an odd and tangential suggestion from the question you have, but it will help with the physiology.  Larger bodies typically involve moving more mass, altered breathing patterns thus increasing the work of breathing.   Higher work of breathing has been associated with a 'competition of blood flow' where the peripheral muscles lose blood flow (no clearly defined mechanism).  Your question about resting values is particularly interesting and terribly difficult to parse out.  I would suggest looking into some of the literature on respiratory timing.  The manuscripts may have the data you are looking for despite the title or the authors' specific question.

I wish I could be of more help and hopefully someone is aware of a pocket of literature that I have yet to explore.

Feel free to message me if you would like.

Gino

Hi Santiago,

      I don't have an answer but have an idea where some understanding may lie. I give a lecture on Mon in equine sports medicine and for this have looked at mammalian allometries, that is, the study of how characteristics vary with size.  Across mammals, muscle mass is inversely correlated with basal respiratory rate and directly proportional to tidal volume, vital capacity and lung mass.  To understand how an athlete is different compared to others for a specific parameter we look at the linear correlation (double log) across mammals, and see where the athlete falls, above or below the line. There is a surprising wealth of info that has been gathered on this subject that can be quickly found by Google. For example, a race horse has 20% more lung volume than predicted by the allometry. Good luck, Peter

https://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/Breathing.html