co2 Table Best Practices

[Spear1]

Good morning. I'm a new spearfisherman and want to extend my bottom time, so a few weeks ago, I got into co2 tables with STAmina.

I have seen no improvement in my static breath-hold.

Before any training, I hit 2:20, and after two weeks of doing the "hard" co2 tables every morning (and diving 1 or 2 days a weekend for 5 weeks), that hasn't changed much at all.

YouTube has scrambled my thinking, frankly, cause some say to do tables every day, others every other. There seem to be multiple ways to do breath-ups, too, which I'm realizing I'm probably not doing right...

Is there an established best practice? I feel like I'm spinning my wheels, especially seeing videos and claims of people hitting 5 minutes in a few weeks.

 

[AndrianBLUE]

Hi. The 2 exercises that helped me improve the most where the following.

1) 8 repetitions of breath hold. On each breath hold I would wait for contractions to begin and then keep holding for 45 seconds. After each breath hold I would do one full exhale one full inhale and begin the next breath hold. So between each breath hold you only get one breath! This exercise builds a lot of co2. You spend a lot of time with contractions and also it is fast to complete since you will not do long breath holds.

2) Breath holds with empty lungs. This helped me a lot for deeper dives because you have the feeling that you have when you dive deep. I aim to increase each repetition by 10 seconds and I do 6 repetitions of this exercise.

Also in the pool I like to do 50m sprints with breath hold.

 

[Spear1]

Thanks. I'm going to add blocks of those exercises into my routine.

I've been reading this evening, and might have answered my own question, from another thread:

So basically:
CO2 table -> decrease breath time, hold time stays the same.
Minimum breath time is still enough to get your O2 saturation back to normal and it should not drop that hard anyways.
O2 table -> breathing time stays the same, hold times increase.
All the CO2 gets expelled from your bloodstream and you concentrate on the onsets of low O2.

https://forums.deeperblue.com/threads/question-regarding-tables.109281/#post-968573

S1

 

[Traxel]

Spear1 you did not mention how you feel with doing the tables. Maybe you got to add your body memory into the equation. If you can get some form of lust/reward/well being out of those exercises, go ahead. If those CO2 tables feel just awkward (like CO2 tables often do), maybe you should try to change them to a different training, because then your body keeps learning something like "breathhold is the most distressful exercise": it will refuse to improve but will do anything to escape such situations.

 

[Roger Moore]

Hi. The 2 exercises that helped me improve the most where the following.

1) 8 repetitions of breath hold. On each breath hold I would wait for contractions to begin and then keep holding for 45 seconds. After each breath hold I would do one full exhale one full inhale and begin the next breath hold. So between each breath hold you only get one breath! This exercise builds a lot of co2. You spend a lot of time with contractions and also it is fast to complete since you will not do long breath holds.

2) Breath holds with empty lungs. This helped me a lot for deeper dives because you have the feeling that you have when you dive deep. I aim to increase each repetition by 10 seconds and I do 6 repetitions of this exercise.

Also in the pool I like to do 50m sprints with breath hold.

Good reminder. I haven't done these in a LONG while. They are killer!

Plus the empty lung BH gets me right to the struggle. Meaning I feel it right away.