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Freediving - aerobic or anaerobic?

Thread Status: Hello , There was no answer in this thread for more than 60 days.
It can take a long time to get an up-to-date response or contact with relevant users.
hmmmmmmm......

Interesting slant anderson. Is the type of muscle fibre that is being fired solely dependant on the movement need?

What I mean is if there is an absence of Oxygen would your brain start to fire muscle fibres that use less? Or does it not work like this?

Paul
 
paul,
actually it does. when you walk, you're using primarily slow twitch(typeI). that's why you can walk for miles and miles. you don't have to exert a tremendous amount of energy to do so. but, take it a bit farther. even if you were to take a running stride in slow motion(literally). you'd be able to last longer than if you were doing it faster. so... either way, you'd still be going through the same range of motion and your muscle groups would be contracting over that entire range, but the speed diff would determine which group gets fired. granted, there's always a medium. your body's going to fire a combination. to best suit you and your condition.

sturgeon,
i used to coach basketball and volleyball for high school varsity and jv teams(girls ). i was also the plyometrics trainer for all the teams. my personal training had gotten my vertical up to 37". (my dad ran track and did the high jump..6'11" was his pb) so, i've acquired some genes for the white mscl fibers. but, since i've been training in a different style lately, my performance underwater has increased exponentially. even at this altitude. uwhockey rocks, by the way.

eric f,
food for thought... since your body slides over to anaerobic activity in regions early into your dive, would you assume that the less aerobic muscle groups would tend to take over? ie. no blood, no O2 for the more vascular muscles. i would assume you might always have sharing. hence the skeletal muscle composition of our sealife.


andrsn
.._[:]p
 
seals

Eric,

Note that seals and marine mammals have a lot more myoglobin (= an oxygen carrier in the muscles) than we humans do.
We poor human freedivers have to rely mostly on what oxygen we have in our lungs, our blood volume (a tiny amount of oxygen can be carried freely in the blood stream, without being binded to hemoglobin*) and our quantity of hemoglobin (*= the oxygen-carrier molecules in our blood). The quantity hereof is also far smaller than in seals + seals have more blood/kg bodyweight than we do.
This (the quantity of hemoglobin and myoglobin + the blood volume) is the reason why human freedivers mostly dive with their lungs full...and seals don't.
Ergo, it is very difficult to make a good comparison of seals vs. humans in a discussion on the aerobic-anaerobic aspects of freediving because of our 'slightly different' way of oxygen storage !


Interesting topic, by the way...

Lynn :duh
 
Comment

Lynn,

You overgeneralize when you say that seals have more myoglobin than humans. Seals have more myoglobin than most humans. A human can increase his myoglobin to nearly the same level as as seal; I have spent months trying to discover how to do this.

However, seals do have some insurmountable advantages; a human can never have the blood volume to body mass ratio that a seal has. However, a human can have a higher hematocrit than a seal; Andean natives have hematocrits of up to 80%, while seals are typically around 68% during dives and 50% while on land.

A human with excellent blood & myoglobin can dive with empty lungs; I have tried this, and it works quite well, due to the fact that there is no buoyancy change or narcosis.

Never say never!


Eric Fattah
BC, Canada
 
Reactions: zazuge
seriously, eric...

i respect you tremendously for your feats, accomplishments and research as a freediver, but is there any chance you might ever be able to politely discuss someone's theories with them instead of always playing devil's advocate?

i think there are some great minds here on this forum, and i feel everyone would more than likely benefit from just constructive criticism and support rather than.. well, just plain criticism and having the soapbox kicked out from under their feet.


respectfully,
anderson york
denver, colorado
 
Last edited:
Hypocritical

Mr. York,

I try to state facts, as I have learned them; I'm sorry if it appears as though I criticize.

What is ironic is that you openly criticize me, for criticizing people. If you advocate against criticism, then you yourself should not criticize.


Eric
 
eric,

i apologize for jumping on you like that. i wasn't criticizing your subject matter. i feel everything you say has tremendous weight behind it. i just think that there's an issue behind all of your comments.

i'm beginning to think that our members might be bighting their tongues on some of these issues for fear of being slammed. i believe esoteric subjects are more easily understood if a person tries to relate his/herself to it directly and get right in the middle of things. they shouldn't worry about posting a "stupid" comment or even suggesting a total different way of thinking about the subject. you've been through an EE curricula, you know how what we learned was not straightforward in the least. and, it needed to have a tremendous amount of discussion/feedback before we could understand it. just because someone can't spell Fourier, doesn't mean they don't have something beneficial to contribute to a discussion.

as a forum mentor, i want to make sure people aren't intimidated by the superior intellects of others. if that were strictly the case, you wouldn't have anyone left to talk to here, now would you?

please accept my apologies, but understand that i felt obligated to bring this out in the open.


sincerely,
anderson
 
Re: Comment

Originally posted by efattah

A human with excellent blood & myoglobin can dive with empty lungs
Eric Fattah
BC, Canada
Click to expand...

...and reach the bottom at roughly .9m/sec, where he will remain at the bottom, completing the natural cycle.

I see both of your points guys, I really do, but I think we're discussing the same thing from two very differen standpoints, that of an individual of no less deadication than Eric, and Anderson's more, uh, pragmatic stand. Point is that we are delving into an arena of making the body do what it doesn't want to do, that being, not breathe and under pressure.

Go on and wax poetic about man turning back to the sea, ala Mayol, but the millenia that got us humans to this point of walking, breathing and bitching about it, happened for some reason. I choose not to overly tempt fate by developing a fondness for a Samba, though I will be the first to applaud the poor guinea pig that wants to try.

Trouble is, when he does exceed that line, then the community suffers from both his loss and the bad press. So go ahead and study, theorize, pontificate as well as ask, demand, question and accept.

Wow. That was beautiful man....must be the O2 up here.

sven
 
Good reply Sven. Did you have to do some O2 prebreathing before writing that? And that pontificate thing, I'm impressed.
Jay
 
Eric F. and Training Routine?

Guys,

In Eric F.'s defense, he does pretty much speak in facts and personal experiences. I know the stuff he talks about blows me away and I enjoy reading what he has to say. It may actually be kind of difficult sometimes for Eric to try and pass on his knowledge to us in layman terms but I definitely don't think he does it in an arrogant manner. Please don't stop posting Eric!

Anderson,

How about elaborating a little bit on that new training routine you got going on that's improved your diving? Although, I'm not sure if I even have any slow twitch muscle fibers anywhere in my body.

Scott Turgeon
West Palm Beach, FL
 
Thanks Jay. I actually recited a couple opf serenity prayers. It seemed better than logging on and calling bullshit.

Like I said, both of you clowns have valid points, and in both defense's you're both a leeetle bit tweaked over this- I can appreciate Anderson wondering if Eric is a Spock-reincarnate, as his manner sometimes seems a mite...dry. And Eric certainly has his fans for his efforts.

In the end, it's 13 days until abalone season opens, where I and we can actually put this theorizing and speculating and quackery to practice, and that's a good thing.

sven- your DB Martha Stewart in rubber
 
hey, this was never about factual differences (by the way sven, how was your AA mtg?).

i think this issue was down to a few personal conflictions of ideas and i wanted to add another angle. i think my addition of fiber types proves eric's theory to be correct. i DO think freediving is both aerobic and anaerobic, but i think the two terms go way beyond textbook definitions for describing freediving.

i think eric's addition about seals pulls up another great avenue of discussion, and then lynn's clarification of seal's blood/body comp took it even further. but, eric had to kill her theary just like he blatently suggested "end of argument!" on the first page, insinuating that both porky and skindiver were totally wrong on their theories.

folks, these aren't arguments, they're discussions! :naughty

i think this issue comes down to "how would one train for freediving?" personally i've had tremendous success in my training at altitude, and i'll share. but, i would still love to hear about eric's and other's research into stimulating human production of myoglobin and increasing one's hematocrit level(other than altitude training and blood doping with epogen and stuff like that.)


cheers everyone,

andrsn
 
Not wrong

efattah wrote:

Freediving is not an anaerobic exercise. Freedivers DO USE their respiratory system to eliminate CO2, even though they are not breathing. The CO2 moves from the blood to the lungs, eliminating most of it from the blood.
Click to expand...

I don't know how you can eliminate CO2 without breathing, if you solve this question you will win the nobel prize. Just measure the CO2 content in an Arterial Blood Gas sample and you will see how high the CO2 level is during breath-holding. You have to remember that CO2 doesn't travel mainly as a gas, It goes as Carbonic Acid/bicarbonate (H + HCO3, then H2CO3 then H20 + CO2, that's why you exhale CO2 and water. The diffusibility of CO2 in the alveolo-capilar barrier is very high and the PaCO2 (arterial pressure of CO2) is almost the same PACO2 (Alveolar pressure of CO2), if the CO2 goes to the lungs but isn't exhaled the PACO2 will rise and the blood to lung flow of CO2 will stop or goes contrary. You mentioned some papers where that is explained. I'll like to know the references, because it's imposible. The CO2 is an Independant controller of acid-base balance and if you are not breathing you can't eliminate it from blood. I can send you the reference of Dr. Stewart a canadian researcher in acid-base control, where he explains very well the paper of CO2.
As I said in my post an anaerobic exercise doesn't means that you don't use oxygen at all, it is related with the use of ventilation.
 
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CO2 elimination

Frank,

I guess I need to clarify what I meant about CO2 elimination during apnea.

Measure your arterial CO2, during apnea on an inhale.

Measure your arterial CO2, during apnea on an exhale.

The latter increases much faster. Why? Because with the lungs empty, the CO2 has no where to go, except to accumulate as carbonic acid in the blood. With the lungs full, the lungs offer a secondary CO2 'storage' area, so some CO2 molecules leave the blood and enter the lungs; equilibrium between the lungs and blood still occurs.

So, full lungs allow the body to partially eliminate CO2 from the blood. Empty lungs do not allow the body to eliminate any CO2.




Eric Fattah
 
Reactions: zazuge
Yes, That it's true.

If my lungs are almost empty, the driving pressure of CO2 from blood to lungs is lower.

With full lungs the driving pressure is higher and most CO2 is removed from blood.

But you have to clarify the concept of CO2 elimination without breathing.

During apnea with full lungs, the CO2, initially will go to the lungs, becauese the CO2 content in the alveolus is very low. But if you are not ventilating, the alveolar CO2 will be higher and higher. And the CO2 production of tissues will remain constant or increased (exercise), that will make that the blood level of CO2 finally increases. Is the same with oxigen,about the first 30 seconds of apnea (1) are hyperoxyc, after that the tissues are in an Oxygen debt and the anaerobic glycolisis is the main way to get energy.
We can not think in the gas exchange as an static process.
I think this argue is merely semantic.

1.Qvist J, Hurford WE, Park YS, Radermacher P, Falke KJ, Ahn DW, Guyton GP, Stanek KS, Hong Sk, Weber RE, et al. Arterial blood gas tensions during breath-hold diving in the Korean ama. J Appl Physiol 1993;75(1):285-93
 
Ha i was wondering (for any one who knows) how many different types of anaerobic cellular respiration systems the body can use and how many ATPs each one produced. I would also love to know how I should exercise in order to increase my breath hold and my depth all at the same time.
Thanks!!!
 
I do not see a problem in re-generising a 9 year old thread. Especially since I find the subject matter quite interesting.
 
I agree with Poida, this is the reason we have search functions. To revisit etc.
 
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