Muscle Mass and Free diving, works in favour or counter active?

[dom12]

Does having more muscle mass make breath hold difficult due to having more muscle to oxygenate?

Or does your body adapt to having more muscle and copes the same as a skinnier diver, and the factors that contribute to breath holding capacity (lung volume, mind power, streamline, co2 tolerance, correct breathing) remain the same?

 

[Bill]

Static is one of the few times that those of us without fast twitch muscle aren't at a disadvantage. Every other competition favours fast twitch; especially. trained fast twitch, otherwise known as a/b fibers.

 

[cdavis]

In theory, having a very large muscle mass is probably counter productive for some kinds of freediving, static for instance. In practice, there are so many other factors that are more important, technique, relaxation, etc, that muscle mass isn't going to be a major issue for anything except maybe static.

 

[Grimorkin]

Not directly freediving related, but there was an underwater hockey buddy of mine (who had more than enough muscle mass) who noticed the breathhold difference even in a game of UWH and even started building down to improve his bottom time.

Having said that, though, that's UWH and relaxing while playing it is next to impossible. For freediving, as cdavis mentioned, I would suspect that your state of relaxation is probably more important than your muscle mass (or lack of).