Severe Headaches during training

[Herup]

Hi Mystiach.

Sounds a little different yes
Its been more than a year since I stopped using medicine, and I only did that for a two month tops.
I´ve tried diving in all kinds of ways and under many thinkable physical and psychological conditions. None have been able to provoke reoccurrence.

Very best regards
H!

 

[sdalli]

"I´ve tried diving in all kinds of ways and under many thinkable physical and psychological conditions. None have been able to provoke reoccurrence. "

Herup, i'm glad to here you say that. Well things have improved on my side as well. last tuesday i went diving and had a revelation. I discovered that if as soon as i surface i don't gasp for air but just take a few short sips of air before taking a full breath i can control my headache to a curtain extent where last thursday i managed to make 37.5mtrs dynamic without fins and without headaches. Actually just a very very mild headache but nothing compared to the headache i got on the first 25mtr dynamic.

that made me realise that although the headache starts during the breath hold the recovery breath has a great effect on the headache.

can any one explain to me what actually is happening? and can you suggest how to best take the first few breaths after resurfacing.

Thank you all for your informative posts.

 

[trux]

I do not know, but I'd second Kathryn, and recommended you to get your normal blood pressure down first, before anything else. As I wrote earleir, during prolonged apnea, you BP shoots up, and I guess you do not want to finish with a heart or brain stroke. So perhaps just trying to suppress the symptoms is no the best idea. Look at the root of the problem and get your BP down.

 

[sdalli]

I don't think that i'm just suppressing the symptoms, i think that taking small sips of air instead of gasping for air after the dive has a direct effect on the blood pressure.

what i think is happening is this, blood pressure increases during the dive (and i know this as i checked my pressure during a breathold and it went up to 158-99 compared to the 130-85 i had while relaxed and the breathold was just a 30 second full exhale apnea) but the heart rate is slow so the brain doesn't get that much of a pounding. but once you surface and take a huge breath of air, the heart rate increases instantaneously while the pressure is still high and that's what i think gives the brain a really hard time. by taking small sips of air for the first couple of seconds after the dive i think that the blood pressure lowers before the heart rate increases. i might be totally wrong, but it seems plausible.

on the other hand, i consider training at a pool a means of controlling my blood pressure. i am trying not to push too far thou. does this make any sense to you?

 

[trux]

Well, by taking only small sips of air after a prolonged apnea you make blacking out more likely. However, seeing that you have strong headaches already at distances of 25m DNF, there is probably something pathological causing it, so I would rather try working on diagnosing it, than trying to fiddle with the way you do your breath hold. There should not be any intense pain in first place when freediving. At least not regularly. Occasionally it may happen - for example at very intense hypercapnic training, or in relation with other conditions, but it should not be the rule. Your body tries to tell you something is wrong, so try finding what it is, instead of suppressing it. Taking small sips of air after a breath hold is definitely not the way freedivers use. And neither intense headaches are the rule. The high blood pressure you reported to have even at rest, is certainly an important indicator, and if you want to preserve your health, I would suggest you better work on it before anything else.

But then again, I am just an uneducated layperson. You better consult a medical expert - best someone having experience with breath hold divers. You may also get a check whether you do not suffer sleeping apnea - that's a frequent trigger of hypertension, and may be related to headaches too. Hypertension is also contraindicative to diving, so my advice would be really consulting a specialist and avoiding apnea until you know better what's the problem.

Just my 2 cents

 

[Herup]

Oh but Trux, you are indeed very well educated for an uneducated layperson rofl

Sdalli, did you try with the headache pills?

Regarding blood pressure measurement, there are some important factors worth taking into account:
The device used for measuring is not necessarily of a quality that makes it fast and exact enough for use in measuring BP during apnea.
The measurements taken with the usual device used on the arm does not necessarily reflect the BP in the circuit between heart, lungs and brain. Wonder what the experts say about this?
Measuring BP is a delicate matter, where many factors influence the output...
Whitecoat effect (google), body position, "time of day", digestion, stress, emotions in general, ability to relax and so on.
The scales by which doctors determine when hypertension is present is not necessarily identical.
Size, age and so on must of course be taken into account.

For example the first measurement I had taken by my doc showed a BP in the high end of normal but measuring with a device I wore for 24 hours and which measured every 40 minutes or so, showed that my average BP is actually in the low end of normal. So measurements must be made over a longer period of time to get an accurate picture.

So please do yourself the favor of making sure that you have a sufficient and accurate base of information to conclude from

Very best regards
H!

PS. I remember an often referred scientific paper where M. Ferrigno et al measured Enzo and his daughters BP to absurd high levels during apnea ("Cardiovascular changes during deep breath-hold dives in a pressure chamber" 1997). The results was later contradicted, when A. Sieber et al found that it was likely a flaw in the test setup leading to huge misreadings ("Underwater study of arterial blood pressure in breath-hold divers" 2009).

 

[sdalli]

I think you're right trux, in fact i'm going to see a blood pressure specialist next Tuesday if i find the time to make it to the appointment. I have no idea what his knowledge is about diving and if he knows how the body should react while diving, so i hope his analysis would be based on good background. Usually when i try to find something specific like this the doctors just refer me to one another until i just give up and stop seeing doctors.

I didn't try the pill, i didn't think i needed to take paracetamol since i managed to control it. By the way trux 25 mtrs might be notting for you but that was the first time that i tried DNF and i was trilled with a 25 mtrs dynamic. I barely can swim 25 mtrs at the surface without loosing my breath! rofl

 

[trux]

As for the aspirin, it can indeed work. For two reasons: first of all it is a painkiller hence suppressing the pain; and then aspirin has anti-hypertension effects, so it will lower the BP. Still, it is just suppressing the effect, not really fixing the cause. You should try finding why you suffer hypertension. It may come from the life style, from stress, diet, because of the earlier mentioned sleeping apnoea, and it can be caused by countless other reasons. Unfortunately doctors rarely bother to try finding the cause, but rather simply prescribe you drugs against the hypertension, which in long term only aggravates the problem (as long as the root of the problem is not removed).

I know it well - my father in law suffered hypertension decades ago, hence doctors prescribed him betablockers. Years later he started to have problems with low heart rate and they implanted him a pace-maker. When they tried to stop the betablockers, he had strong withdrawal effects and had serious complications despite the pace-maker. Finally they've put him back on the drug and he still continues using it (perhaps already for 30 years). I bet that all the troubles, including the pace-maker could have been avodied if he never started using the drugs, in fact, and rather tried to regulate the hypertension by natural means.

 

[sdalli]

I totaly agree with you. Infact i tried to find out what changed in my lifestyle that might have effected my BP. Recently i changed my job from a shipyard to a beer / softdrinks packaging company and stopped training martial arts so physical activity went down quite alot, second i started drinking more softdrinks than usual (since it's free and available at the factory). so now i went back to drinking water only and started training again, this time at the pool, and i think it might be starting to work, since even when not using the "small sips of air method" i feel much better than how i felt the first time i went to the pool and had that terrible headache.