So, what would a typical week look like given this overall philosophy? Here are a few scenarios based on my own preferences. Substitute your own preferred activities when applicable:
WINTER (1 dive per week: October - April)
-2-3 x 90 min open water swim (2-4km): swum at variable speed and effort
-5-7 x 60 min morning yoga session
-1 x rec FRC dive session (60-90 min): no stress diving: depths 5-25m, dive times 1'00" - 2'15" (depths and times should be comfortable, not forced)
-2 x 60 min Concept II rowing machine: 20 min warm-up, then 5 x 1:00 at 90% maxHR on 4 min rest between sprints, 15 min cool down.
SUMMER (May - September)
-3-4 x 90 min open water swim (3-5 km)
-5-7 x 60 min morning yoga session
-2-4 x rec FRC dive session (60-120 min): start with 1-3 no suit dives then continue with 3mm/5mm diving and repeat 2-3 times per session, longer rests between dives for better quality dives; depths 5-40m, time 1'30-2"30".
-2 x high intensity exercise (hiking, rowing machine, pool sprinting, cycling, etc)
Here's some more info about these training components:
-Open water swimming: I love being in the water and long distance swimming activates my dive response despite the aerobic exercise, it uses freediving specific muscles (I don't use fins much anymore while diving), and gets me outside. And I hate chlorine. Often, I’ll take a break and make some no fins dives to check the area I’m swimming in for future diving days. It’s amazing what I’ve found doing this. Swimming and diving is also a very practical skill.
-Yoga: Keeps my torso strong and supple without injury and instills better breathing habits. I am also a firm believer in the importance of isometric exercise whether through yoga or other approaches. I find yoga a more interesting activity with additional benefits. I tend to take things slowly and not worry about achieving acrobatic poses. I try to do the simple poses as best I can without much effort and breathe properly.
-Rowing machine: This improves my ability to withstand high CO2. I don't do it much when I'm just diving for fun because I am pretty happy with my depth/time parameters. But I've used it in the past and found it very effective. Fast running would be another great substitute.
What is absent from this approach:
-pool workouts: I get my technique work done during my swims and diving sessions
-negative pressure dives
-dry apnea exercise
-static breath holds
I've whittled everything down because I found that many of the pool training or apnea exercise wasn't fun and that has put me off diving many times in the past.
I recognize that many of you have limited access to open water, especially in the winter. My advice to you is if you want to be in the pool, focus primarily on technique. Learn some new skills like no fins dynamic and spend more time building a good cardio base and working on anaerobic exercise. And if you do dive in the winter or your “off season” limit your depth to a safe range until you can dive more often and achieve depth with a gradual increase in that range with the methods discussed above.
So many times I hear of people stuck indoors all winter who either get a vacation somewhere warm or wait until the start of summer and fully expect themselves to be where they left off the previous year. That’s a recipe for a lung injury and it’s also a bad habit to get into. Rushing things makes you anxious, whether you are aware of it or not.
Skill work is vital and there are many ways to work on that. The essential principle is to imprint good technique with short repeats and fresh muscles. I did repeats of 25m no-fins with more than 60-90 seconds of rest between each rep focusing merely on relaxing as much as possible and trying to find the balance between propulsion and effort. I spent two months simply doing that. No apnea exercise or other cross training. No max effort dynamics. Two months later I set a personal best and, even better, that in-depth skill work has stayed with me years later.
Perhaps I haven’t really convinced you that you don’t need negative pressure dives and CO2 tables. Let me attempt a more convincing case here:
1. Negative Pressure dives: I stopped doing these in 2003 after some bad squeezes. In late 2003 (November, I think - Eric Fattah would remember exactly when it was), we both started doing FRC dives on a line to experiment. After two weeks of repeated dives to 20-35m FRC with super slow descents (Eric went to 40m) and no negatives, I tried a negative pressure dive to see if anything was different. Previously, my best depth was 7-8m with great discomfort (after more than 3 years of doing negative pressure dives. After several weeks on intense FRC, I made 15m. FRC with slow descents really seemed to give my body the chance to adjust to the increasing depth in a way that negative pressure dives don’t allow for.
The main difference is that negative pressue dives are usually one-off things that most do several reps of during a pool session or before a diving session, whereas FRC is a diving mode. You benefit not only from the less stressful effects of having lungs at FRC volume (vs full exhale) but you experience it over and over again.
Yes, a full negative pressure dive will jump start your dive response. But I know Eric Fattah occasionally does one or two after a series of FRC dives – ie. only when his body is actually ready for them on a physiological basis. FRC, in my opinion, is far more reliable for initiating a sufficient dive response.
The other proof to me was after diving for six months on FRC in 2005 I could equalize without the mouth fill far deeper that ever possible before, without straining (40m FRC).
2. CO2 tables. I think that emphasis on withstanding C02 contractions from inhale statics put us on the wrong path for getting better at
diving. I think we should be looking to minimize C02 production (but not by over ventilating!) with efficient diving technique and proper ballast. That’s the real secret of getting better. High intensity and regular cardio exercise then helps your body become more efficient with oxygen and store more energy for movement with reduced blood flow (vasoconstriction).
In the time when I was learning to dive FRC recreationally, following my competitive “burn-out” at the time of CAFA Nationals in 2004, I stopped doing static apnea of all kinds. And yet, gradually my dives got better and better, eventually exceeding the level of my previous inhale dives.
Yes, CO2 tables probably help inhale divers overcome the C02 contractions that they experience because of the effort needed to overcome buoyant lungs and reach their depth. However, I think this is the wrong approach. Why use energy when you don’t need to? That being said, it’s up to you to decide what lung volume you are comfortable with.
Okay, this is a bit of a ramble. Sorry for the length.
And to try and summarize this with one overarching principle, I really believe that training to improve your recreational freediving should be varied, fun and engrossing. It's another reason why I am reluctant to use any of the unpleasant or logistically complex training methods I've tried in the past. Remember, this is
recreational freediving, so it's all about enjoyment, long term improvements and insights, inner peace, hakuna matada, and all that. I think there's something especially liberating and zen about committing to diving no deeper than say 20m for a month or more and exploring all that is possible within those 20m.
Let’s discuss this and I’ll work on the competitive training approach next, which will be a lot more complicated and of course partly theoretical, since I haven’t competed in several years and as you can tell from the paragraph above, it's something I'm not really personally interested in at the moment, even though I enjoy thinking about how to solve the problem of training properly.
Pete
