Note this is oxygen assisted - the diver breathed pure oxygen and (from the article) can increase available oxygen from 450mL to 3L in doing so.
Still impressive nonetheless and I didn't know that this trick is sometimes used in Hollywood to extend underwater filming time. Avatar 2 comes to mind when I was impressed to find out Sigourney Weaver trained to hold her breath for 6 and half minutes in her 70s!
Coming back to the article, I'm disappointed that the details were sparse - how do they check whether the contestant is conscious? How does the contestant know what his limits are before passing out?
This is nuts. I remember reading that Hollywood gave up on underwater filming after near death accidents on sets of The Abyss and especially Waterworld making such productions too risky and expensive so they resorted to VFX faking long underwater scenes after that. Obliviously Cameron didn't get the memo.
James Cameron, maker of The Abyss, probably got the memo. But the memo read “You’re going to need to make much more successful movies before they let you do that again.”
- A coach / safety will give a signal to the athlete, e.g. pinching of the arm and the athlete will react to it by e.g. lifting a finger.
- Training. You get to know your body and limits very well when training freediving for a longer time. That does not mean that you always avoid blackouts, particularly in competitions they happen but that's what safeties are for. In the end, a free diving competition is one of the safest places to explore your limits.
In a documentary about freediving they explained that during competitions there are strict rules and steps for the diver to follow after they emerge from the water surface. Only when followed the dive is considered ok.
For sure - what I find interesting is that passing out is a disqualification (I assume) so there is a fine line between achieving your utmost limit and being disqualified. Which is like most sports but my understanding is that it is quite easy to accidentally slip under so the guy must have incredible body awareness
Correct. Usually you need to perform a so called surface protocol after surfacing to show you are still conscious enough. This can be e.g. the removal of your mask, an OK sign and saying "I'm OK". Only if you do that within 15 seconds after surfacing your performance will be valid.
And regarding easy to blackout. Yes and no, I personally avoided it for over 12 years, but then again, I'm no world class athlete and only an enthusiastic hobbyist.
When I was a kid in the 70s, I think the record was somewhere in the neighborhood of 3–5 minutes (maybe seven?) and we used to think that was such a short time that we could do it and then trying in the backyard bucket pools that were endemic in my neighborhood we found that cracking a minute was enough of a challenge.
Such contests are more dangerous than they first appear: Many kids will grasp the obvious trick of hyperventilating to improve their time, but that can lead to abrupt unconsciousness and drowning.
As a teenager I did about 4.5 minutes, as I recall, in a bucket of water. I played the trumpet quite a bit at the time, so I think my capacity was above average. It was a competition and I got first, and the second place fellow was also a trumpet player.
All three of us trumpet players in my middle school band would sit in the back and have breath holding contests while the director was working with other sections or whatever.
I once held my breath for 5 minutes when I was 14, sitting in class. I suppose it’s possible I was accidentally breathing through my nose a little as I wasn’t underwater.
I somehow thought that pure oxygen was poisonous[1], and it needed to be a nitrogen mix. I mean, I guess this stunt demonstrates that I'm clearly mistaken, or that the nuance is in the pressures involed?
Pure oxygen puts oxidative stress on your cells. Your body can handle that just fine at 1 atm, but at elevated partial pressures the increased concentration will (quickly) overwhelm your cellular mechanics.
Underwater, the maximum operating depth for 100% O2 is 6 meters (20 feet) - which isn't very much at all. If you dive any deeper than that, you'll be at severe risk for a seizure and unconsciousness, and likely drown. (I'm simplifying, see [1].)
Which is why you don't go diving with pure O2.
However, in this case the freediver wouldn't be breathing compressed O2 gas underwater. They would've been breathing it at the surface, at 1 atm.
Oxygen weathering is a primary constraint on life on Earth, and every carbon-hydrogen based organism in the past 2.5 billion years has had to develop biochemical coping mechanisms for this toxic gas that wants to react with carbon and with hydrogen; It is harnessing this reaction ("respiration") with biologically mediated processes and modulating it to specific rates that permits us life.
For humans, acute breathing gas toxicity only happens in a high pressure environment.
Air approximates an 80/20 nitrogen-oxygen mix. Atmospheric pressure is 14.7psi.
The 120psi air compressor in your auto body shop is equivalent to a dive only 81 meters deep. SCUBA divers and later saturation divers have probed the various limits of the human cardiopulmonary system using very specialized gas blends all the way down to 700 meters. Too much oxygen partial pressure causes all the symptoms you see listed, and higher partial pressures cause symptoms to appear faster.
> The curves show typical decrement in lung vital capacity when breathing oxygen. Lambertsen concluded in 1987 that 0.5 bar (50 kPa) could be tolerated indefinitely.
This means you could breath 80/20 nitrox at 2.5 bar, or 37 psi, or 25 meters depth, "indefinitely" in the sense of hours or days.
PS: Chronic use of 100% oxygen at atmospheric pressure causes other types of toxicity. Some of the oxidative damage therein, accumulated over the years at a normal 20%, probably directly analogizes parts of the human aging process. Other types of oxidative damage probably work faster than proportional exposure. We only start to notice damage like this in people with impaired lung function who rely on an artificial supply of oxygen boosted to beyond an 80/20 ratio, to breath.
700m! That's wild, I mean nuclear submarine crush depths are at like 400-500m? I get that it's not like you can compare a hard steel tube with a human body but regardless, it's wild.
The published data for military submarines is the nominal test depth, not the actual design limit. The operational depth may be much deeper but that will be classified.
Recent US submarines all have test depths described by as being in excess of the same few hundred meters. In all likelihood that is a throwaway value. It seems unlikely that they produced generations of submarines that were less capable than their older ones.
To add to this, when diving with compressed air most people get woozy and otherwise intoxicated from oxygen around 30 meters from the surface. For some people 25 meters is enough for such symptoms to occur.
Indeed, the grandparent post is a pretty good summary of the takeaways you get from taking PADI’s enriched air nitrox course (which is a requirement if you ever want to dive with enriched air).
In the olden days this was tracked manually (the ratio of your depth to percentage of air and time under water) via so called “dive tables”. The purpose and output of the dive table is to determine the safe amount of time you could dive at a certain depth without risking narcosis.
As this is a sliding window based on multiple variables - and you are very rarely maintaining a constant depth as you dive - it’s of course annoying and less accurate to hand calculate this. Modern dive computers just seamlessly calculate it all for you nowadays.
Fun fact: those dive tables were created by the US Navy conducting experiments on its own divers, there was a real human cost to acquire that information.
It’s really several factors. Supplemental oxygen is common for people with diminished lung capacity, carbon monoxide exposure etc. However long term it’s not a good idea for healthy people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_therapy
At low pressure pure oxygen can similarly be beneficial, mountain climbers eventually need supplemental oxygen for Mount Everest though a few have made the trip without it they can’t stay at that altitude indefinitely. It can even help on airplane flights as commercial airlines don’t set things to sea level.
Where healthy people run into issues is when partial pressures get well over 100% at sea level. Part of the issue is people adjust their breathing based on carbon dioxide not oxygen levels. So at say 10 atmospheres at normal atmospheric mixtures your breathing the equivalent of 210%, but you don’t slow down enough to compensate. Thus why divers care so much about gas mixtures, however people with diminished lung capacity are going to encounter issues at different levels than normal divers.
Yes, partial pressure is what matters. Normal air at 1 bar (1 atmosphere) contains about 0.2 bar of O2. Pure oxygen at sea level is 1 bar of O2.
The article you linked has a graph showing that 0.5 bar of O2 can be tolerated pretty much indefinitely, and it takes hours for significant toxicity to show up at 1 bar. Higher partial pressures cause much faster symptoms.
It is, kinda sorta, but at 1 atm you need to be breathing pure o2 for ~24 hrs before its meaningful (and longer than that before treatment is anything beyond "stop breathing pure o2". The dose isn't even cumulative. Just being on room air for 20-30 minutes resets the clock.
How is it even possible to hold breath for 11 minutes? I tried it last week (to avoid inhaling insecticide fumes) and could manage about a minute after trying very hard.
Can you use the oxygen trick to practically extend snorkelling dives?
I used to do a little scuba, but overall didn't like the reliance on often poorly maintained kit. But I do love snorkelling - the lightness and simplicity of it.
Can I breathe pure oxygen for half an hour on the boat and be able to repeatedly snorkel longer?
Assuming I understand such a feat even with exposure to pure O2, how does he manage to avoid CO2 build-up? Or, how did he train to retain CO2?
Cells use up O2 and release CO2 into the blood to form carbonic acid (keeping it simple), so the blood pH levels drop, which the body does not care about at all. This is what induces the suffocation reflex.
I wish I had known this while trying to master breathing while swimming freestyle: it is not just their VO2 max, but also their ability to retain CO2. Both aspects need to be trained.
The body doesn't notice a lack of oxygen. Hence the danger of carbon monoxide poisoning or air without o2 etc, as you won't notice o2 lacking. What you notice is co2 buildup, and as long as you keep breathing that's not happening.
When freediving, you can't really avoid it. What you learn however is how to deal with it. Control your diaphragm when it wants to start breathing, as the spasms are wasted energy. It's mostly a mind thing. With simple exercises (co2 tables) and just getting used to the feeling, it took my quite a short time to reach 5 minutes.
One "trick" btw is hyper ventilating. But DONT DO IT! It get rids of lots of co2 in your blood stream / lungs, so it takes a bit longer for the co2 buildup. But you need that buildup. Even though it's painful, that's your only signal as to how you're doing and which you kinda calibrate against. Especially when diving, hyper ventilating before can make it so you suddenly go unconscious before you felt the urge to surface.
Wow, TIL hyperventilating increases the danger! My brothers and I used to compete against each other in swimming pools, and we'd always hyperventilate at the beginning, thinking this 'got the oxygen in'. In any case, it definitely helped. Glad we never got into trouble this way.
My personal record is ~3:30, but I'm pretty sure I could go well past that if we had practiced instead of just competing.
You cant avoid co2 build-up, you can only slow it down, main factor here is relaxation. Particularly your brain needs loads of o2, so if you can keep that calm it helps a lot. Obviously a slow metabolism helps as well, so before big static performances fasting is common.
And regarding co2 tolerance, it is a training effect. With training you can withstand much higher levels of co2 without resulting in panic
And co2 build up isn't even that dangerous, just really uncomfortable. Lack of co2 (from hyperventilating) actually inhibits oxygen uptake and causes dizzyness (up to passing out) that way
I briefly got into breath holding. It's impressive how long you can go with simple techniques; slow stretches with lungs full of air, packing, and iterating animal names.
But I started to question the brain damage and couldn't find good science to confirm it either way.
I read an article years ago on this. It was interesting. There'a a big psychological component to holding your breath. If I remember correctly, you go through the alphabet and think of an animal that corresponds to each letter. You can also try to think of a person you know for each letter. It's to help you stay calm and focused. The fear and accompanying response will have you out of the water fast. I suspect it's also dangerous. If you start freaking out underwater you're in trouble. I tried applying it while doing Wim Hoff exercises and it helped a lot.
Again I read this in an article. I'm just some guy on the internet. Please don't try without investigating how it's actually done and about any associated dangers.
Did you ever try wearing a pulseox and seeing what your sat looked like? As long as sats aren't ever dipping below (NOT medical advice, but I'm being conservative here), say, 90%, brain damage is very remote. Plenty of COPD patients walking around with sats in the 80s, or even 70s.
But as someone with bad lungs...yeah, you only get one set and most meds/treatments are partial symptom relief at best.
Hey, I happened to try this recently when I was holding my breath for another reason! It hit 70% or a little lower by the end*, but that was after having exhaled for a while. I do wonder what effect that kind of thing can have, even minor.
I'm curious about breath holding and freediving: When you're depriving your body of oxygen for such a long time, do you not risk cells dying, in particular in your brain?
And he should avoid high impact sports and never get into a motorcycle accident.
Spleens are big bags of blood, and trauma to them, especially when enlarged or inflamed, can be fatal. It's one of the easiest accidental ways to bleed out.
I'm surprised they don't make any mention of how dangerous this sport can be. Particularly if you are taking steps to avoid CO2 build-up, which is the thing that triggers the suffocation reflex.
The funny thing is the co2 isn't doing much in the short term except make you feel completely terrible, because that's how most mammals evolved not dying in caves and underground tunnels. You can't feel low o2 (well, you can with training like aviators get) so you feel excess co2 instead.
True story here. If you're fit you can train this pretty easily. I count my time pushing against the current in Northern CA with free diving fins, a 5mm suit and a speargun and I can manage 2:30. In a warm pool with no current, no sharks and plenty of time to relax I can hit 3:45 and I'm old and out of shape.
When I was in high school I could hold my breath all the way through comfortably numb. None of my friends could even come close. My technique was to breath in and out real fast until I felt tingly.
Which is dangerous and should not be done that way, see my other comment here. Doing it that way masks the signals you get, drastically increasing the chances of blacking out.
While that is true, and the full context only makes it worse, the important reminder is that a lot of people have died doing "Wim Hof" breathing before diving. It is not safe to hyperventilate before going into the water, because you are not saturating your blood with any more oxygen (normal breathing accomplishes that), but you are rejecting CO2. Your urgent need to breath is not triggered by low O2 but by high CO2.
So if you hyperventilate and then go under water, you will experience an urgent need to breath after you start to become hypoxic. This has killed people and will kill again. Don't let it be you.
Note this is oxygen assisted - the diver breathed pure oxygen and (from the article) can increase available oxygen from 450mL to 3L in doing so.
Still impressive nonetheless and I didn't know that this trick is sometimes used in Hollywood to extend underwater filming time. Avatar 2 comes to mind when I was impressed to find out Sigourney Weaver trained to hold her breath for 6 and half minutes in her 70s!
Coming back to the article, I'm disappointed that the details were sparse - how do they check whether the contestant is conscious? How does the contestant know what his limits are before passing out?
> Sigourney Weaver trained to hold her breath for 6 and half minutes in her 70s!
That is crazy. It seems Kate Winslet broke Tom Cruise's old record while filming Avatar 2; over 7 minutes(!) in her case:
https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/kate-winslet-beat...
This is nuts. I remember reading that Hollywood gave up on underwater filming after near death accidents on sets of The Abyss and especially Waterworld making such productions too risky and expensive so they resorted to VFX faking long underwater scenes after that. Obliviously Cameron didn't get the memo.
James Cameron, maker of The Abyss, probably got the memo. But the memo read “You’re going to need to make much more successful movies before they let you do that again.”
Your username is great.
These actors and actresses don't have to do it, are well compensated for the risk, and likely sign the most air tight waiver that can ever be forged.
> the most air tight waiver
I see what you did there.
Obliviously [...]
I love that, thanks! :D
I'm making it my new email sign-off.
To answer your questions:
- A coach / safety will give a signal to the athlete, e.g. pinching of the arm and the athlete will react to it by e.g. lifting a finger.
- Training. You get to know your body and limits very well when training freediving for a longer time. That does not mean that you always avoid blackouts, particularly in competitions they happen but that's what safeties are for. In the end, a free diving competition is one of the safest places to explore your limits.
In a documentary about freediving they explained that during competitions there are strict rules and steps for the diver to follow after they emerge from the water surface. Only when followed the dive is considered ok.
For sure - what I find interesting is that passing out is a disqualification (I assume) so there is a fine line between achieving your utmost limit and being disqualified. Which is like most sports but my understanding is that it is quite easy to accidentally slip under so the guy must have incredible body awareness
Correct. Usually you need to perform a so called surface protocol after surfacing to show you are still conscious enough. This can be e.g. the removal of your mask, an OK sign and saying "I'm OK". Only if you do that within 15 seconds after surfacing your performance will be valid.
And regarding easy to blackout. Yes and no, I personally avoided it for over 12 years, but then again, I'm no world class athlete and only an enthusiastic hobbyist.
It’s a classic at this point but David Blaine held the record for a while and gave a fantastic TED talk on his process: https://www.ted.com/talks/david_blaine_how_i_held_my_breath_...
Another factor is that it's easier to do it underwater than on land. The mammalian diving reflex is what helps.
That's 29min 4sec after breathing pure oxygen.
The record for regular air is 11min 35sec.
Pretty impressive either way.
When I was a kid in the 70s, I think the record was somewhere in the neighborhood of 3–5 minutes (maybe seven?) and we used to think that was such a short time that we could do it and then trying in the backyard bucket pools that were endemic in my neighborhood we found that cracking a minute was enough of a challenge.
At first.
I was also a kid doing this, my cousins and I held ourselves underwater with the ladder rungs in a swimming pool.
At first, yeah a minute was tough. But then it rapidly increased. Unfortunately I don't remember where we topped out, but I think ~3 minutes.
We would also swim pool lengths underwater(but it was a relatively small pool at a condo building). I think I swam 9 once.
They'd let us stay out all night at that pool, it was great. Florida summers don't really get chilly.
Such contests are more dangerous than they first appear: Many kids will grasp the obvious trick of hyperventilating to improve their time, but that can lead to abrupt unconsciousness and drowning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shallow-water_blackout
Funny, I did exactly the same things in my childhood, in my cousin's pool.
But it was on the other side of the pond!
As a teenager I did about 4.5 minutes, as I recall, in a bucket of water. I played the trumpet quite a bit at the time, so I think my capacity was above average. It was a competition and I got first, and the second place fellow was also a trumpet player.
All three of us trumpet players in my middle school band would sit in the back and have breath holding contests while the director was working with other sections or whatever.
I could do 3 minutes pretty easily as a kid, again, sitting in class like another poster. Maybe we had the same boring classes.
I once held my breath for 5 minutes when I was 14, sitting in class. I suppose it’s possible I was accidentally breathing through my nose a little as I wasn’t underwater.
Glad I'm not the only one who was bored enough in class to do this.
I somehow thought that pure oxygen was poisonous[1], and it needed to be a nitrogen mix. I mean, I guess this stunt demonstrates that I'm clearly mistaken, or that the nuance is in the pressures involed?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity
There's definitely nuance here.
Pure oxygen puts oxidative stress on your cells. Your body can handle that just fine at 1 atm, but at elevated partial pressures the increased concentration will (quickly) overwhelm your cellular mechanics.
Underwater, the maximum operating depth for 100% O2 is 6 meters (20 feet) - which isn't very much at all. If you dive any deeper than that, you'll be at severe risk for a seizure and unconsciousness, and likely drown. (I'm simplifying, see [1].)
Which is why you don't go diving with pure O2.
However, in this case the freediver wouldn't be breathing compressed O2 gas underwater. They would've been breathing it at the surface, at 1 atm.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_operating_depth
Oxygen weathering is a primary constraint on life on Earth, and every carbon-hydrogen based organism in the past 2.5 billion years has had to develop biochemical coping mechanisms for this toxic gas that wants to react with carbon and with hydrogen; It is harnessing this reaction ("respiration") with biologically mediated processes and modulating it to specific rates that permits us life.
For humans, acute breathing gas toxicity only happens in a high pressure environment.
Air approximates an 80/20 nitrogen-oxygen mix. Atmospheric pressure is 14.7psi.
The 120psi air compressor in your auto body shop is equivalent to a dive only 81 meters deep. SCUBA divers and later saturation divers have probed the various limits of the human cardiopulmonary system using very specialized gas blends all the way down to 700 meters. Too much oxygen partial pressure causes all the symptoms you see listed, and higher partial pressures cause symptoms to appear faster.
> The curves show typical decrement in lung vital capacity when breathing oxygen. Lambertsen concluded in 1987 that 0.5 bar (50 kPa) could be tolerated indefinitely.
This means you could breath 80/20 nitrox at 2.5 bar, or 37 psi, or 25 meters depth, "indefinitely" in the sense of hours or days.
PS: Chronic use of 100% oxygen at atmospheric pressure causes other types of toxicity. Some of the oxidative damage therein, accumulated over the years at a normal 20%, probably directly analogizes parts of the human aging process. Other types of oxidative damage probably work faster than proportional exposure. We only start to notice damage like this in people with impaired lung function who rely on an artificial supply of oxygen boosted to beyond an 80/20 ratio, to breath.
> all the way down to 700 meters.
700m! That's wild, I mean nuclear submarine crush depths are at like 400-500m? I get that it's not like you can compare a hard steel tube with a human body but regardless, it's wild.
The published data for military submarines is the nominal test depth, not the actual design limit. The operational depth may be much deeper but that will be classified.
Recent US submarines all have test depths described by as being in excess of the same few hundred meters. In all likelihood that is a throwaway value. It seems unlikely that they produced generations of submarines that were less capable than their older ones.
To add to this, when diving with compressed air most people get woozy and otherwise intoxicated from oxygen around 30 meters from the surface. For some people 25 meters is enough for such symptoms to occur.
Found the SCUBA diver
Never done it, never gonna.
Thank _Neoshade_'s legendary story in a Reddit comment for that - https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/dv99nf/til_t...
With a side helping of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, and the submarine / treasure hunting arc which describes decompression sickness.
I have over 5000 logged dives and have only suffered DCS once, with the right training SCUBA can be very safe.
Indeed, the grandparent post is a pretty good summary of the takeaways you get from taking PADI’s enriched air nitrox course (which is a requirement if you ever want to dive with enriched air).
In the olden days this was tracked manually (the ratio of your depth to percentage of air and time under water) via so called “dive tables”. The purpose and output of the dive table is to determine the safe amount of time you could dive at a certain depth without risking narcosis.
As this is a sliding window based on multiple variables - and you are very rarely maintaining a constant depth as you dive - it’s of course annoying and less accurate to hand calculate this. Modern dive computers just seamlessly calculate it all for you nowadays.
Fun fact: those dive tables were created by the US Navy conducting experiments on its own divers, there was a real human cost to acquire that information.
It’s really several factors. Supplemental oxygen is common for people with diminished lung capacity, carbon monoxide exposure etc. However long term it’s not a good idea for healthy people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_therapy
At low pressure pure oxygen can similarly be beneficial, mountain climbers eventually need supplemental oxygen for Mount Everest though a few have made the trip without it they can’t stay at that altitude indefinitely. It can even help on airplane flights as commercial airlines don’t set things to sea level.
Where healthy people run into issues is when partial pressures get well over 100% at sea level. Part of the issue is people adjust their breathing based on carbon dioxide not oxygen levels. So at say 10 atmospheres at normal atmospheric mixtures your breathing the equivalent of 210%, but you don’t slow down enough to compensate. Thus why divers care so much about gas mixtures, however people with diminished lung capacity are going to encounter issues at different levels than normal divers.
Yes, partial pressure is what matters. Normal air at 1 bar (1 atmosphere) contains about 0.2 bar of O2. Pure oxygen at sea level is 1 bar of O2.
The article you linked has a graph showing that 0.5 bar of O2 can be tolerated pretty much indefinitely, and it takes hours for significant toxicity to show up at 1 bar. Higher partial pressures cause much faster symptoms.
Yes. It’s under pressure that oxygen toxicity becomes an issue. It’s why you’ve gotta pay attention to your depth when diving with enriched air.
It's dangerous in an enclosed environment, see Apollo 1 for more details.
It is, kinda sorta, but at 1 atm you need to be breathing pure o2 for ~24 hrs before its meaningful (and longer than that before treatment is anything beyond "stop breathing pure o2". The dose isn't even cumulative. Just being on room air for 20-30 minutes resets the clock.
holding your breath for 11 minutes is asking to see the gates damn
Holding your breath for more than 11 minutes?! That's absolutely crazy, wow.
How is it even possible to hold breath for 11 minutes? I tried it last week (to avoid inhaling insecticide fumes) and could manage about a minute after trying very hard.
Training and genetics.
Can you use the oxygen trick to practically extend snorkelling dives?
I used to do a little scuba, but overall didn't like the reliance on often poorly maintained kit. But I do love snorkelling - the lightness and simplicity of it.
Can I breathe pure oxygen for half an hour on the boat and be able to repeatedly snorkel longer?
Incredible!
Assuming I understand such a feat even with exposure to pure O2, how does he manage to avoid CO2 build-up? Or, how did he train to retain CO2?
Cells use up O2 and release CO2 into the blood to form carbonic acid (keeping it simple), so the blood pH levels drop, which the body does not care about at all. This is what induces the suffocation reflex.
I wish I had known this while trying to master breathing while swimming freestyle: it is not just their VO2 max, but also their ability to retain CO2. Both aspects need to be trained.
The body doesn't notice a lack of oxygen. Hence the danger of carbon monoxide poisoning or air without o2 etc, as you won't notice o2 lacking. What you notice is co2 buildup, and as long as you keep breathing that's not happening.
When freediving, you can't really avoid it. What you learn however is how to deal with it. Control your diaphragm when it wants to start breathing, as the spasms are wasted energy. It's mostly a mind thing. With simple exercises (co2 tables) and just getting used to the feeling, it took my quite a short time to reach 5 minutes.
One "trick" btw is hyper ventilating. But DONT DO IT! It get rids of lots of co2 in your blood stream / lungs, so it takes a bit longer for the co2 buildup. But you need that buildup. Even though it's painful, that's your only signal as to how you're doing and which you kinda calibrate against. Especially when diving, hyper ventilating before can make it so you suddenly go unconscious before you felt the urge to surface.
Wow, TIL hyperventilating increases the danger! My brothers and I used to compete against each other in swimming pools, and we'd always hyperventilate at the beginning, thinking this 'got the oxygen in'. In any case, it definitely helped. Glad we never got into trouble this way.
My personal record is ~3:30, but I'm pretty sure I could go well past that if we had practiced instead of just competing.
You can still do it, just never do it alone
We used to hyperventilate before underwater training to extent our time under water
Actually knew someone who didn't make it, after (presumably) using the hyperventilation technique. Such a senseless way to go.
You cant avoid co2 build-up, you can only slow it down, main factor here is relaxation. Particularly your brain needs loads of o2, so if you can keep that calm it helps a lot. Obviously a slow metabolism helps as well, so before big static performances fasting is common.
And regarding co2 tolerance, it is a training effect. With training you can withstand much higher levels of co2 without resulting in panic
And co2 build up isn't even that dangerous, just really uncomfortable. Lack of co2 (from hyperventilating) actually inhibits oxygen uptake and causes dizzyness (up to passing out) that way
I briefly got into breath holding. It's impressive how long you can go with simple techniques; slow stretches with lungs full of air, packing, and iterating animal names.
But I started to question the brain damage and couldn't find good science to confirm it either way.
What do you mean by “iterating animal names”?
I read an article years ago on this. It was interesting. There'a a big psychological component to holding your breath. If I remember correctly, you go through the alphabet and think of an animal that corresponds to each letter. You can also try to think of a person you know for each letter. It's to help you stay calm and focused. The fear and accompanying response will have you out of the water fast. I suspect it's also dangerous. If you start freaking out underwater you're in trouble. I tried applying it while doing Wim Hoff exercises and it helped a lot.
Again I read this in an article. I'm just some guy on the internet. Please don't try without investigating how it's actually done and about any associated dangers.
I assume a mental strategy to distract yourself from the pain
Did you ever try wearing a pulseox and seeing what your sat looked like? As long as sats aren't ever dipping below (NOT medical advice, but I'm being conservative here), say, 90%, brain damage is very remote. Plenty of COPD patients walking around with sats in the 80s, or even 70s.
But as someone with bad lungs...yeah, you only get one set and most meds/treatments are partial symptom relief at best.
Hey, I happened to try this recently when I was holding my breath for another reason! It hit 70% or a little lower by the end*, but that was after having exhaled for a while. I do wonder what effect that kind of thing can have, even minor.
* sensor accuracy not guaranteed
Were you engaging in a highly scientific study of the deco song whip it?
Not the OP but I used to do breathe hold training for surfing and bought a pulse oximeter. I don’t think I ever got below 90%.
I'm curious about breath holding and freediving: When you're depriving your body of oxygen for such a long time, do you not risk cells dying, in particular in your brain?
If not, how do we know it's not happening?
It does happen-- which is why we're told to watch out for high CO2 levels in our living spaces and let fresh air in often
> “the longest breath held voluntarily under water using oxygen”
Voluntarily is an important point here.
Probably even more important that you have to come out alive
His spleen must be enormous[1].
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/bajau-sea...
Archive-link: https://archive.is/ZR8JL
And he should avoid high impact sports and never get into a motorcycle accident.
Spleens are big bags of blood, and trauma to them, especially when enlarged or inflamed, can be fatal. It's one of the easiest accidental ways to bleed out.
Impressive hack and performance, though!
And injury to it can cause spleen cells to colonize other parts of the abdomen. You could end up with extra spleens!
I wonder if their babies also have enlarged spleens
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It's so crazy that this is even possible. A lot of our old assumptions about the limits of human performance are being rewritten.
I'm surprised they don't make any mention of how dangerous this sport can be. Particularly if you are taking steps to avoid CO2 build-up, which is the thing that triggers the suffocation reflex.
I wonder if the diver used any assistance to improve their oxygen capacity?
Adding extra red blood cells into our body?
Increasing the oxygen capacity of existing cells?
Is there anything we can eat/drink that would soak up excess carbon dioxide?
Just lots and lots of training. And probably some good genes to start with.
The funny thing is the co2 isn't doing much in the short term except make you feel completely terrible, because that's how most mammals evolved not dying in caves and underground tunnels. You can't feel low o2 (well, you can with training like aviators get) so you feel excess co2 instead.
Huffing O2
No Guybrush Threepwood joke in here yet?
Most people on this forum could hit 3 minutes with normal air in an afternoon of training.
True story here. If you're fit you can train this pretty easily. I count my time pushing against the current in Northern CA with free diving fins, a 5mm suit and a speargun and I can manage 2:30. In a warm pool with no current, no sharks and plenty of time to relax I can hit 3:45 and I'm old and out of shape.
When I was in high school I could hold my breath all the way through comfortably numb. None of my friends could even come close. My technique was to breath in and out real fast until I felt tingly.
Which is dangerous and should not be done that way, see my other comment here. Doing it that way masks the signals you get, drastically increasing the chances of blacking out.
I increased my lung capacity using Wim Hof breathing technique and can now hold my breath for 3 minutes.
Same.
Strong recommendation for Wim Hof method if you're undergoing acute stress. Really calms me down.
But stay away from water. Do it on your bed.
Yes, not to be gratuitous but doing Wim Hof breathing before diving can and does lead to drowning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freediving_blackout#Shallow_wa...
reminder that wim hof blew his intestines apart because he was using a public fountain to blow water up his own ass.
he'd done it plenty of times before, he said, but they recently changed the water pressure and he wasn't aware.
While that is true, and the full context only makes it worse, the important reminder is that a lot of people have died doing "Wim Hof" breathing before diving. It is not safe to hyperventilate before going into the water, because you are not saturating your blood with any more oxygen (normal breathing accomplishes that), but you are rejecting CO2. Your urgent need to breath is not triggered by low O2 but by high CO2.
So if you hyperventilate and then go under water, you will experience an urgent need to breath after you start to become hypoxic. This has killed people and will kill again. Don't let it be you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freediving_blackout#Shallow_wa...
I did not need this reminder.
Free diving wouldn't be mainstream conscientiousness if it wasn't for possibly one of the greatest movies of all time
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095250/
You really have to be from the Balkans to do something like this :)
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