Scientific articles about breath-hold diving

[BennyB]

Hi Dr Lindholm,

Great to see you back on the forums. I purchased the DAN worlshop proceedings a couple of weeks ago and am half way through reading it. It's very interesting so far. One thing I have noted so far is that some of the testing (across all studies, not yours in particular) have small sample sizes (with relation to testing freedivers). Do you have any plans to do further research in the future with larger sample sizes? The World Championships each year have been attracting well in excess of 100 divers at each event, the WC in Slovenia in July will have 130 participants I believe.

Cheers,
Ben

[DrLindholm]

Yes unfortunately many studies during the last decades on breath-hold diving has been done on a few subjects, probably due to money issues, breath-hold diving is no major health problem that it greatly funded for research and there are usually only a few elite diver in each country, at least it has been that for a while. This "new" interest in science of breath-hold diving follow the development of the sport, since most of the breath-hold studies in the 1950-1960s were done on ama divers and freedivers without todays competitive selection and training techniques. The situation is getting better and more and more studies are done on larger samples, I usually try to have at least 10 subjects in my studies but when we did some of the studies on the glossopharyngeal insufflation (lungpacking) there were not so many divers around that could do the technique. One should remember that most studies you see published are done a few years ago, it takes a long time to analyse data, write and get the study printed. In the workshop book there is also a "historical" presentation by Dr Lundgren when he reports the studies on the maiorcas (3 subjects), those tests where done almost 20 years ago.

Peter