Freediver Related Query

[Hansika]

I've heard that freedivers get 'beyond the burn'. Does that mean that if you wait out the burn long enough it goes away, or is it more referring to practise eliminates the feel for burn?
How do you know you need to surface. (For my 20 second snorkel dives I feel like I need air now, or I'm going to explode! Do freedivers feel this too near the end of their dive - or does that 'uncomfortable feeling' go away with training / experience?)
By "burn", I suppose you're referring to the imperative to breathe? With routine practice and training specificity, you develop a tolerance to this "burn", which is a signal that CO2 is building up. Whether beginner or advanced the urge to breathe shouldn't be dismissed.

 

[trux]

At competitive freediving, where perfect safety is assured by experienced buddies, the urge to breath is irrelevant. Freediver can hold through it till loss of motor control (so called samba or LMC in freediving jargon) or loss of conscience (blackout or BO in jargon). A freediver cannot really count on the urge to breath (or the CO2 level as you correctly tell) as a reliable signal for safe surfacing, because it is greatly influenced by far too many factors. Light change in the ventilation, surface time, diet, fatigue, muscle work, may lead to too early or too late signals. That's why we see so many deaths at people diving without learning anything about the sport each year. There are yearly hundreds of people dying on so called Shallow Water Blackout, often because of hyperventilation, each year worldwide.

Besides it, the build-up of CO2 also changes significantly with depth, so if you dive deep, you get the urge to breath at different point than when holding your breath on surface. So from this point of view, waiting with surfacing till you feel strong urge to breath (or the burn as you call it), may be fine in some cases, in other cases it will cut your dive unnecessarily short, and it can also as well come too late and you black out on your way up, or just after surfacing (and sink back, if you have no buddy securing you).

Hence the only safe way to dive, is doing it with an experienced buddy, who knows how to assure your safety - accompanying you the last few meters on your ascent, and carefully watching you even after surfacing (at least some 20 seconds, or longer at hard dives). In this way you can learn knowing your body, and hypoxic signals better, and can push harder through the "burn" if necessary.

Don't do it alone, and do not use breathing techniques for delaying the "burn" - that's just a pretty good way to stay underwater for ever.

 

[sudhir.swarnkar]

Hi Trux,

Do you have any reliable data about the death during freediving? I strongly disagree that there are hundreds of people dying while freediving. I don't have any numbers myself but lack of number suggest no deaths (or rare occasions of death) rather than hundreds of deaths (which would be an arbitary number in case of any data).

 

[mrjomac]

Hi Hansika,
It sounds like you're pretty much at the same level as me = level 1
;-)

I found static tables to be really useful to start getting to know my body and hold my breath during contractions.
This is something you can do on the couch.

After getting to know my contractions dry for a while I wanted to stay underwater with them too because I was getting this urge to surface even before they started, as soon as the pressure built in my chest.
To do this I've been doing semi-static in about 5m where I'm positive by holding onto a rock (I'm neutral at 10m so I'll float up as soon as I let go at 5), with my buddy always watching above. I've managed to start feeling almost comfortable with contractions underwater and started using them dynamic too. My times underwater have gone from 0:30-45 to 1-1:30.
The length of time I can stay underwater is directly related to how relaxed I am, same with the dry static tables.
I still haven't found an answer to "when to come up?" so tomorrow I'm off to do a 5 hour apnea course in the pool.
I've been lucky enough to find a local group of apnea addicts too who do open water training and recreational dives.
Imo this is the best, fastest and safest way for me to progress, listening to other people's experience and diving with them.

Btw it took me quite a while and many searches to find this course and the apnea group, it really looked like there was no-one in the area, so if you can't find anyone at first, keep looking and maybe even consider a holiday with training.