Oxygenation of the whole body

[seaflower]

sort of a science-y, weird question, but:

does anybody know which kind of training would potentially saturate the whole body more with oxygen-
doing fast, continuous laps at a shallow depth (less than 2m), or slower dives in a row with a depth of 10m max?
Time spent underwater would be about the same for either method.

Would the water pressure at depth "make up" for the speed and power of lapswimming in terms of distributing oxygen?

 

[Markalongo]

Fun thoughts!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[seaflower]

The reason why this is important for my training is decidedly unfun, but rather serious.

Maybe I should have posted it in Freediving Science, though.

 

[sanso]

Hey seaflower,

If you are healthy, your body is as fully saturated as possible as long as you are breathing. (High intensity training being an exception)

No form of apnea will increase overall oxygen levels, but with training, oxygen distribution may change (look for info on the dive response)

The only way to get more oxygen into your body is to breathe a gas mix that has more than 21% oxygen.

The good news is that most likely, the amount of oxygen is not the limiting factor for your, unless you're one of a handful of extremely well-trained freedivers. It is much more likely that your limitation is efficiency, i.e. how well you use the oxygen that is available to you.

 

[Nathan Vinski]

While its true that the body, under normal levels of activity with normal breathing will be "saturated" with oxygen with 100% full oxygen stores, it is actually possible, with training to increase the amount of oxygen that your body can store, or that is available for you to use during a breath hold. Most of this training doesn't even require breath holding.

First you have to look at where the oxygen is stored; Blood, muscles, and lungs.

Exercise in general, specifically endurance exercise such as long distance running for example, will actually promote hemoglobin production which allows the blood to store more oxygen.

Oxygen is also stored in the muscles, bonded to a similar molecule to hemoglobin, called myoglobin. Myoglobin can be increased by desaturating the muscles of Oxygen by doing most forms of high intensity exercise.

Lung oxygen storage can be increased through flexibility and stretching exercises as well as learning to take a proper full breath will increase the amount of oxygen stored in the lungs.

General diving will strengthen the dive response. The spleen effect, part of the dive response, will become stronger meaning that during a dive your spleen will release more red blood cells increasing the total amount of oxygen that is available to you during a dive.

So while saturation will almost always be 100% before a dive, it is possible to increase storage capacities and make 100% more than it used to be.

 

[seaflower]

thank you, that was helpful.
I'll go with high endurance training then.