How To Hold Your Breath Longer For Freediving
Holding your breath while freediving is a skill that can be developed over time. This article explains how you can become better at holding your breath.
One of the key components of freediving is the breath hold. The longer you are able to hold your breath, the longer you can say down on a dive and enjoy your aquatic surroundings. In this article, we will discuss some things you need to understand regarding what goes into a long breath hold. We will also give you some techniques for improving the duration of time that you can sustain a held breath.
What Are The Key Components Of A Breath Hold
CO2 buildup- this is what gives us the urge to breathe. When you take in oxygen into your body, it converts the oxygen into carbon dioxide as a byproduct of the metabolic process. A buildup of this CO2 is what causes the natural urge for you to breath again.
Hypoxia – low levels of oxygen in the body. When your body is depleted of oxygen, it can negatively impact the performance of the body.
In a short period of time, sometimes in a matter of days or even weeks, you can train your body to deal with more and more mounts of CO2 and gain a high tolerance to carbon dioxide. However, for the most part, it usually takes weeks to months or even years to improve and increase you’re your hypoxic threshold. This means that although you might be able to sit in a chair and hold your breath for a long time, your still might not be able to exert your body for longer periods of time due to the low oxygen levels within your body.
Mammalian Dive Reflex – this is the response that occurs within mammals (ie humans) when submerged in water. Basically, it means that our bodies will naturally optimize respiration when we are underwater by distributing oxygen stores to the heart and brain, which allows mammals to stay submerged for long periods of time.
What This All Means For A Freediver
What freedivers need to realize is that all of these things are trainable which means that your freedives will become increasingly long and more immersive. You will be able to mentally process your surroundings and enjoy your experience more because your body and your brain will be more accustomed to the dives and the lack of oxygen.
How To Hold Your Breath Longer For Freediving – Techniques
Breath-hold Training Tables – These are a training regiment of breath holds where your practice manipulating the duration of time for your held breath OR your manipulate the duration of your recovery. All the while, however, your total time per “set” remains the same. For example, a CO2 table is where you have the same breath hold time but a decreasing recovery period (the period of time between each breath hold). The opposite is true for an 02 table which is where you have the same time period of recovery but you have an increasing time period for your breath hold.
Static Breath Holds – These are a series of consecutive breath holds in which you must start a new breath hold every set period of time. For example, let’s say you want to do four-minute intervals. This means that you hold your breath as long as you can. Let’s say its only a minute. Once you exhale at the end of a minute, you now have 3 remaining minutes to recover (total 4 minutes). If you hold your breath for 3 minutes and then exhale, you now have 1 remaining minute to recover (total 4 minutes). You perform a series of 8 of these intervals to train your body to deal with the stress of increased carbon dioxide and decreased oxygen.
A breath-hold table is essentially a sequence of breath holds in which over the period of the breath holds we are increasing the amount of CO2 in the body or depleting the 02 levels in the body or both. We are forcing our body to adapt to these stresses.
Deep Breathing Oxygenation Of The Body – there are schools of practice that show that a person can temporarily increase the duration of a breath-hold by performing extended series of deep breaths before finally taking one deep breath to be held. For example, you can perform 20 to 30 deep breaths (usually in a controlled, count-to-five inhale and exhale pattern) increase the amount of oxygen being delivered to the body. The idea is that you can increase the amount of time you can hold your breath because the body has been previously supplemented with a more-than-usual oxygen dose. Additionally, if you practice deep-breathing techniques daily and for consistent weeks and moths, some people have displayed an increased ability to hold their breath on command.
Weighted Pool Dives – Even if you improve upon your capacity to hold your breath, there are still the environmental challenges that come with freediving. Pressure changes and variances in water temperature can have an effect on the body. Simply holding your breath in your living room isn’t going to be enough to actually apply your breath-holding capacity to your freediving. You will need to expose yourself to underwater environments.
This is where practice dives in a deep pool can be beneficial. By using some form of weight, you can practice submerging yourself in the deep in of a pool while holding your breath for varying amounts of time. This will allow you to experience the sensation of a deep-water breath-hold without the unpredictable dangers that come with open water freedives. Furthermore, you can practice your dives in conjunction with heightened CO2 levels in your body by limiting your recovery time when you come up for air.
Controlled Breathing While Sprinting – as we mention in various articles on this site, freediving is an extremely physical activity. It isn’t enough to just hold your breath. You have to be able to do it while exerting energy in the form of swimming. You can simulate this exertion by controlling your breathing while sprinting.
When you run, your body experiences a build-up of CO2 in the body. This is why people begin panting while running. You can train your body to better handle this buildup by actually doing breath holds while running. Simply arrange short intervals of light jogging and hard sprinting and practice holding your breath during the sprint. This will get you used to the absence of readily available oxygen while exerting yourself which is exactly what you will experience while freediving.
IMPORTANT: Whenever you are experimenting with increased levels of carbon dioxide in the body and overall hypoxia, you run a real RISK OF LOSS OF CONSCIOUSNESS. Be careful to test your limits gradually and be sure that a lifeguard or a spotter is around if you are practicing in a pool. The purpose of training is to improve our performance when freediving in the open water. The last thing you want to do is cut short your freediving days (and your life) before you even get to the open water.