Relaxation vs. CO2 Tolerance and performance

[Triton1715]

I've been reading the threads a lot lately again and have a question regarding relaxation and CO2 tolerance.

I'm curious where you have experienced your largest performance gains. Although it is ideal to practice everything together and have all the "categories" that pertain to making a good freediver grow together, the reality is that some areas are easier to fix than others depending on the person. It would seem that the 2 biggest factors for beginners/intermediate freedivers are building CO2 tolerance and learning to relax (since most can't hold into samba or BO - statically speaking since SWB is a completely different animal). Obviously, CO2 tolerance and relaxation are interlinked in that better relaxation decreases O2 consumption and therefore decreases the amount of CO2 present at a given time increasing the time one can hold their breath. But one can also increase their breath-hold ability by having good CO2 tolerance, hence the creation of CO2 tables (though this comes with the increased risk of hypoxia since O2 is could still be burned at a heavy rate if you weren't relaxing and you've suppressed some of your cues).

It seems to me, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that in the early stages of freedive training, freedivers really focus on these two issues (CO2 tolerance and relaxation) very heavily before starting to deal with things like O2 tables and such (no point on focusing on hypoxia if you can't hold your breath long enough to get there). My question then is, where did you first start making significant performance gains? Was it increasing your CO2 tolerance or was it learning to relax better and have better control of CO2 creation? I know these things often (and ideally) happen simultaneously and people may not even be sure which factor played a bigger role, but I'm just curious where some of your breakthroughs occurred at.

Thanks!

 

[esom]

Hi triton,
i have not really specific answers to your question about breaking through, as i could go "on the edge" quite comfortably almost instantanious, after meeting a trained buddy for the first time.
what i noticed for myself, but also for others to hold true is, that if you truly allow yourself to come up at any point, staying down can feel easy and like a gift.

Re-laxation is maybe -apart from other things- to not be attached to something stiff.

I think that redefining "performance" is more often needed than done in these contexts.

 

[Kars]

Hi Triton.

I think you forget to mention fear.

Beginners do not have the knowledge nor experience of breath-holds. So they're venturing into unknown territory, causing tension, inducing fear. Fear and it's effects consumes heaps of O2.

An knowledgeable freediver can reduce those fears, e presto there will be a series of steeply increasing personal bests.
Mathematically speaking the first freediving session yields the biggest percentages increase, I believe mainly because the beginner believes he's in good hands.

Another thing that greatly can help to improve the experience, and some time, is learning the ability to mentally distance oneself from the sensory input. Usually this involves meditation of some kind.


It's an interesting question Triton, and I'm looking forward to the list of factors and techniques that make up the breath-hold learning curve.

 

[Triton1715]

Hi esom,

Thanks for the reply. When you mention, "going on the edge", did you eventually improve from whatever time that is/was? I'm curious if you had a high CO2 tolerance to start, were really good at relaxing, or both, and/or also had good low O2 tolerance.

Regarding performance, I agree. It's not the destination, it's the journey. . .and all that other stuff ;-) I'm just generally curious about how people progressed as they trained and what areas specifically saw the largest differences in abilities.

 

[Triton1715]

Hi Kars,

Thank you very much for your input. I'm not quite sure why this question fascinates me as much as it does since all the factors must combine to make a good freediver, but sometimes the minutia of how that occurs becomes really interesting for me. I was training in the pool Saturday and started thinking about all the variables that make affect a freediver's performance. Everything from fear (as you mentioned), water temperature, core temperature, wetsuit drag coefficient, wetsuit flexibity, low O2 tolerance, high CO2 tolerance, ability to relax muscles, ability to relax thoughts (obviously something I was failing at then ), swimming technique, general form (streamlined or not), strong vs. weak dive reflex, fitness level, general metabolism, hydration level, time between meals and types of meals eaten. . .etc. etc. etc. It's really quite a long list and some bare significantly more weight than others. Yet, working to better any or all of them should have a positive effect on overall improvement. . . by varying degrees. As you progress through the learning curve some areas are far more important than others. For example, for a beginner, there's not much of a reason to focus on things such as diet or wetsuit drag. As you noted, there are plenty of other areas that will have a far more reaching impact on increasing one's abilities. Obviously, increasing one's CO2 tolerance (from a beginner's stand point) will yield vastly greater results than simply putting them in a low drag suit.

This has gotten my interest piqued lately since I've been messing around in the pool and markedly noticed some significant performance gains that I can directly attribute to better relaxation (by the way, thanks Kars! It was your advice that did it). It got me wondering how many others noticed large improvement directly because of either relaxation or doing CO2 tables or some other factor I'm overlooking right now. . . though I would note that there is a difference in how performance could be measured depending on the discipline. (i.e. Just because you do CO2 tables and increase your dry static, doesn't directly translate to increasing your dynamic if your muscles aren't conditioned for swimming because you've been doing this in your La-Z-Boy the entire time).

I'm thinking that it might be a fun experiment to list all the possible factors (within reason. . . Saturn being in the 3rd position or whatever doesn't count ) that go into freediving performance and assign them percentages out of 100 based upon the level of importance freedivers have found that it played in their abilities. Could make for a fascinating list!

You are right though, fear plays a BIG role. Without it, we'd be loosing freedivers left and right. Honestly, it's what keeps me extraordinarily cautious when on my own and frankly robs me of some of the joy and perhaps even much progress, but it exists for a reason. When I got my motorcycle license years ago, I remember the cop telling me to "ride scared" as it would help keep you from doing stupid things as well as make you more observant of other motorists (they all seem blind). I think the same could be said about freediving. "Dive scared". . .just not so much that it affects your O2 consumption . . .just enough to keep you fully aware of the consequences of your carelessness. . . "sure, I feel great. . .just a few more seconds here. . ."

 

[Kars]

Numbers give enjoyment after a dive.
Feeling the water gives your enjoyment during the dive.

Rest well, keep training short, efficient and easy, and make sure you'll make plenty of easy feel good dives before you leave the pool.

About safety, I always tell beginners that when contractions begin, they should slowly get back to the surface. If they want to stay down longer, and or swim further, they should focus on learning and improving relaxation and technique to do so. However I'm weary of feelings becoming dependent on numbers. Avoiding hyperventilation, dehydration and exhaustion, coming up just after the first contractions should provide enough safety margin for most. This rule also helps to avoid mental and physical tiredness and associated static burn out syndrome derived from overdepleting and overloading the various buffers we have.

It's easy to over-train in Freediving, so be sensitive to the signs of it. Enjoy the flow of water.

 

[esom]

Hi triton,

i don´t like "co2 tolerance" as a classic concept and so called factor. The reason for this is twofold.

First "tolerance" implies that you are in some way uncomfortable and that you have to bare this for whatever reason. Therefore i distinguish between freediving, in which i don´t try to tolerate anything, it either feels good or not, and on the otherhand producing numbers along a breathhold. And yes, here tolerating pretty much anything is "beneficial" and thus part of "improvement".

Second, i think the way "Co2 tolerance" is used as a concept is misleading. Mostly someone says or writes that he has CO2 tolerance (you too).
In practise it turn out that one does not "have" this at all. dives are so different. So it seems that this concept works much less well than navigating with the assumption that the Earth is a disc (that worked pretty well).

To answer your question, yes i improved: i got better at not tolerating. And thus i can hold my breath now for longer - or not.

Kars brings the two worlds together much better than i can... check out his posts