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Empty Lung dives

Thread Status: Hello , There was no answer in this thread for more than 90 days.
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Dangers of empty lung dives?

Everytime I have read something about this, someone has mentioned that it can be very dangerous.

Can someone tell me what are the specific dangers of empty lung dives? Blackout is obviously one, but are there others?
What about lung squeeze, for example?
 
Black-out risk?... providing you don't hang about at depth, the risks are very small. There is much more risk of lung injury in my opinion. The rules that I follow are these:

don't stay at depth on an empty lung
turn around if the pressure feels uncomfortable
turn around if you fail to equalise (never bend your ear drums!)
only do empty lung dives along a line

My empty lung dives take about 25-30seconds down to about 10-12m. Gentle slow pull down and back up at normal speed. I could go deeper but it's just not necessary. (If I was diving over 100m+ on the sled, then I would probably go deeper to simulate greater depths.)

For me the main benefit is flexing the diaphragm and rib cage. (Empty lung dives do nothing for equalisation if you use the mouth fill technique. Your ability to equalise depends on the amount of air in your mouth, and nothing else. It is a good exercise if you use any other method though.)

alun
 
Since this was put in the Hunting/Photography section, I'll put in my dos pesos...

We never really do "empty lung" dives, but many times we descend w/o fully inhaling so that we're negatively bouyant at shallower depths. This is so that we can get down to a target w/o spooking it. Many times, an aggressive dive will scare fish, but if you just sink down to them w/o really moving, it helps. This mainly occurs when your prey is shallow or is coming in to investigate.

Later,
Anderson
 
Hey cheese mate, another thing - with empty lung dives, I've found even with shallow stuff (ie 2.5m) I don't get contractions at all -so you can be sitting on the bottom thinking 'hey I can stay here forever' then bang, samba. I'm lead to believe this is fairly common?
 
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