How To Get Better At Freediving

Freediving is immensely enjoyable but at its core, it is an intensely taxing physical sport. This is why there are relatively few freediving hobbyists in the world. It takes a certain kind of person to get out into the water every day and freedive. However, even if you struggle with freediving currently, that doesn’t mean you can’t improve your skills with training. In this article, we analyze what is physically required to successfully freedive and what you can do to improve upon your freediving skills.

What Is Required To Successfully Freedive

Holding your breath – The first component of freediving is the ability to hold your breath. Freediving means that you are diving beneath the wither with no assisted breathing apparatus such as an oxygen tank. This means that you have to rely solely on the oxygen held within your own lungs to make the dive.

Furthermore, it’s important to remember that a dive is a two-way journey. Whatever distance you travel down into the water, you will have to repeat that same swim back to the surface. This is precisely why you have to be aware of your maximum held breath duration so you can have a sense of when exactly you need to start swimming back to the surface. The last thing you want to do is overexert yourself with you dive and end up too deep to make it back to the surface.

Endurance – At its core, freediving is a workout. When diving downward, you will find that your body doesn’t cut through water the way it does as you freestyle swim across the surface. The water offers great resistance when it surrounds your entire body. This is why your ability to exert your muscles continuously for long periods of time is essential to freediving. If you are incapable of fighting against the water to dive deeper, you are not going to be able to truly enjoy the essence of freediving.

What To Eat Before Freediving To Improve Your Performance

This is a question that doesn’t get asked a lot but it is something that you need to consider. Freediving is an intense workout and it can leave a diver utterly exhausted. This is why it is important to be properly nourished and hydrated before you embark on a dive.

Before you freedive, you should eat a good, light source of carbohydrates for energy. One such food is sweet potatoes. These have a variety of vitamins and carbohydrates and they won’t sit heavy on your stomach. Additionally, you will want to consume some electrolytes so that you are properly hydrated before you dive. Try sprinkling some pink Himalayan sea salt on your sweet potatoes or take a low-sugar electrolyte supplement mixed with water. All of this should be done at least an hour before your dive in order to allow your body time to digest it before the dive.

How To Get Better At Freediving

Now that we have identified the key components of freediving, we can analyze how to improve upon these to get better at freediving as a whole.

Breathing Exercises – These are by far one of the most important things you can do to improve your freediving. These exercises come in a variety of techniques but they all basically center on the idea of controlled, often meditative breathing in fixated patterns. The exercises involve varying degrees of timed inhales and exhales, patterns of inhales and exhales, and interval periods of held breaths and completely emptied lungs. You can search the web for a variety of breathing exercises. When performed consistently, a person can actually develop and improve upon their ability to hold their breath, which will be essential to staying under water in a dive for long periods of time.

Ice Baths – When you freedive, you have to be prepared for sudden changes in water temperature. When you are underwater, you will often notice changes in water temperature as you travel from place to place. This is because heat collects in pockets within the water so at one minute you may be swimming through a toasty warm pocket of water when suddenly you feel a rush of cold surround your body. If you are not prepared for this, the sudden drop in temperature can cause a state of shock, which can lead to panic, and, subsequently, a rush to reach the surface for air. This is where the ice baths come in.

Ice baths are a great way to prepare for freediving because they teach you to deal with the sudden shock of cold water. The ice baths themselves are believed by athletes to have recuperative properties when taken after high-intensity training. However, we are more interested in the mental training that they provide. More than anything, this is a form of mental training which can save your life if you a many meters below the surface and you encounter a sharp drop in water temperature. You will be much more prepared if for this if your body and mind are already familiar with the shock of freezing temperatures.

All you have to do is fill a tub up with cold water. Then, dump a few large bags of ice into the water and wait a few minutes for the temperature of the water to lower. Once you’re ready, submerge your body into the ice water all the way up to your neck if possible. The feeling will be intense. Your initial reaction will be to immediately get out of the tub. Try to stay submerged for up to five minutes if possible. This might take some practice. However, if you can train your body and your mind to endure the cold, you will be better prepared for your freediving adventure.

Resistance/Weight Training – As we stated previously, freediving is an intensely physical activity. The better physical condition you are in, the more success you will have with freediving. That is why we recommend resistance training to improve your muscular power and endurance.

When freediving, your entire body becomes incorporated into your swimming. That is why it is important to incorporate some multi-joint exercises into your training regiment. These include squats, deadlifts in particular. Then performing these exercises, virtually your entire body becomes involved with moving the weight. As a result, you will see a full body development when you perform these consistently.

High-Intensity Interval Training – This sort of training involves short bursts of intense exercise followed by low-intensity recovery periods. The high-intensity aspect of these workouts actually mimics the type of physical exertion that freediving will require of the body. Additionally, studies have shown that HIIT helps with the muscles’ consumption of oxygen. This means that you will be able to better perform your freedives because your body will be much more efficient with oxygen uptake (1).

Long Distance Endurance Swimming – Any athlete will tell you that be the best way to train for a sport is to practice that sport. All of the strategies that we have outlined up until know will improve your body’s ability to perform, but none of that matters if you cannot swim. Ultimately, that is what freediving is at its core: swimming. Try to find a gym or a place that has a long pool with lanes roped off. Practice swimming long distances to build up your muscles that you will use to execute your dives. You will also see in improvement in your cardiovascular output which is essential on long freedives.

Controlled Practice Dives – Sometimes the best way to get proficient at something is to simply do it as often as possible. However, the problem with freediving is that it is unpredictable in what you might encounter while you are doing it. You could lose your breath underwater or you could suddenly become fatigued. That is where practice dives come in.

You can improve upon your capacity to hold your breath while diving deep by practicing your dives in a controlled environment. Before you begin swimming out to a coral reef to embark on your first freedive, practice diving to the bottom of a deep pool. See how long you can cruise around the bottom of the pool before having to come up for air. This is a good way for you to gauge your abilities and time yourself on how long you can hold your breath and swim. This is important information when freediving in the open water.

Once you have practices in a swimming pool, you can graduate up to the open water. However, before you go freediving off the edge of a boat in the middle of the ocean, get more practice in shallow, beachside waters. This will give you an idea of how to handle currents and temperature changes while freediving. You can progressively increase your dive depths as you become more skilled with your dives.

The main idea of preparing for your first freedive is proper training and complete knowledge of what you are capable of. The worst feeling in the world while freediving is the thought that you are too tired to make it back to your boat or the feeling that you are not going to be able to hold your breath long enough to make it back to the surface. However, with proper training, you will have a successful diving experience.