Speed Apnea World Record

[Andrew the fish]

Anyonbe experimenting with speed using a fin with higher aspect ratio?

You guys may be overfinned for the top speed.

Just a thought

Howard

I am thinking about it all the time. I don't have a shop, too many ideas and nowhere to try them out. Not only higher aspect but the whole shape of all monofins on a market are so last millenium. There is much to work on and so far the whole monofin business is nothing better than lap assembly and slide ruler at best for engineering.

 

[trux]

Have a look at the DOLfin, guys: http://forums.deeperblue.com/monofins/85969-extreme-dolfinism.html

 

[Andrew the fish]

Have a look at the DOLfin, guys: http://forums.deeperblue.com/monofins/85969-extreme-dolfinism.html

I checked those fing types, that one and lunocet too. Wrong approach I think. One have to have closer look at a mother nature. Tuna tailfin is probably the best shape to try and copy. It has visible strands of fiber spreading out like sun rays, carbon strands can be manipulated in the same manner. Exactly what was said here earlier - high aspect ratio, low drag shape. No corners or anything, no straight lines. And feet could be buried in half way to the knees, blended in just like tuna's backbone. Who said our monofins must be build to finswimmer's specs? We are free divers, right? Sorry for hyjacking, this is last time I promise.

 

[trux]

I do not think the DOLfin is a wrong approch. Otherwise Natalia Molchanova would not use it in the finals of the last WC just a week after seeing and testing it for the first time, and almost breaking her own world record with it. That's speaks enough about its potential.

 

[dannybuoy]

It'd be interesting to see what a fin that starts at the knees and v-shapes well past the feet would do. Kinda like the shinfin, only bigger. Transferring power with your whole lower leg would probably make a nice difference.

I agree with Chris Marshall -to whom i'm increasingly partial- that it's unlikely we'll get anywhere near the finswimmers with the bottle; once your oxygen runs out and you start running on acids, the power just saps out of you. But 35 seems a doable time -not so much for me as i died trying for 44, but a proper quick swimmer probably could do it.

 

[Kars]

Streamlining also makes a huge difference at those speeds.

 

[efattah]

Fins that start at the knees don't work, I tried it.

The blade must be far from the body.

 

[tcrusson]

I had been toying with the idea of doing underwater sprints since I saw Fred Sessa's 255m swim, and just started using them for training to get past the 200m wall, and preparing to dive 100m CWT later this year. I tried to summarise the rationale here:

Blog post: New Training Drills

I'm making quite a few assumptions, and would be keen to get your views on them:
- Doing sprints without warm ups helps a stronger MDR (i.e. stronger lactics). Do we actually have bloodshift happening in the pool when there's no pressure involved?
- CO2 tables are not that useful after a while (say, if you can swim to a blackout) as you are always full of oxygen and hypoxic tolerance is what you need past that stage.
- I'm assuming you can get close to muscle failure with still plenty of oxygen available to your brain. My "intuition" tells me that if you do the same number of kicks, even stronger, on a shorter timeframe, you actually use less oxygen as your brain and heart are the highest consumers. But I have no idea how the heart rate behaves when one kicks stronger - and do we have strong bradycardia in the pool?

Any ideas/thoughts? Wouldn't it be great to have a team of doctors following freedivers to inject some science into this ;-)

Cheers,
Tanguy

 

[Kars]

Hi Tanguy,

Some wild assumptions there!

What type of body/muscle do you have?

I've explained it on other DB threads about my situation. I happen to be able to do good statics and depth, but suck at dynamics. When doing dynamics I have to give up because of lack of O2 in the brain, not because of my muscles failing. In fact they feel rather ok. I figure the reason is because my gas to muscle exchange is really good. My muscles are very good in exchanging gasses with the bloodstream and therefore go very late into anaerobic mode. Because this happens so late, my O2 supply gets more drained resulting into the need to give up because of O2 for my brain.
To counter this, I figured that I should start with a slow relaxed speed, allowing myself to fall into flow, and when the contractions appear step on the gas and force my muscles to go into anaerobic 'sprint' mode. I did test this, and the result on land was a big pb, from 180m to 240m. In water it went from 134m to 150m. Currently I'm working on swimming technique and flow. I think I'm yet to try a max under total stress conditions to maximise MDR. But I do my maximum dives without long apnea warm-ups. I just warm-up my muscles, and do a couple of 25m+ turns to check technique and pool.
For technique I recommend you make small undulations.
I hope this may be useful to your situation. 200+ is still remote in my mind, though I'm working on it.

 

[tcrusson]

Hi Tanguy,

What type of body/muscle do you have?

I don't really know how to answer that... Let me try: very nice/extremely powerful? ;-)

When doing dynamics I have to give up because of lack of O2 in the brain, not because of my muscles failing. [...] But I do my maximum dives without long apnea warm-ups. I just warm-up my muscles, and do a couple of 25m+ turns to check technique and pool.

I actually gave up any facial immersion or any warm-up before a max (outside of stretching), and the results were quite amazing. Before that, I used to feel very hypoxic at the end of swims. Now I just feel pain. Maybe worth a try? It's stressful, I feel like shit before the swim, but as soon as I'm immersed it all makes sense.

My questions around lactic training are the direct consequence of this way of preparing for a swim (no warmup = more lactic)

 

[Mullins]

Sprint training has improved my CWT diving quite a lot. I'm coming up quite a bit faster now - just need to work on my equalising. Sigh.

 

[tcrusson]

Sprint training has improved my CWT diving quite a lot. I'm coming up quite a bit faster now - just need to work on my equalising. Sigh.

I always thought I was diving too fast:

and then saw your dive profile ;-)
Good luck at VB! There's still plenty of time for that WR...

 

[MikkoP]

Sprint training has improved my CWT diving quite a lot. I'm coming up quite a bit faster now - just need to work on my equalising. Sigh.

Slowly starting to contemplate sinus flooding?

I've been thinking about adding more sprints to my training too. Usually (in other sports) sprints less than 30 seconds are using mostly the phosphagen system and sprints between 30 s and 2 min are producing more lactic acid. So, maybe 75 m - 100 m sprint dyn intervals with rest times around double the dive time would be good training. Have to try, at least that makes sense on the paper.

 

[aris ioannidis]

sounds like a nice plan Mikko... might give it a try myself... would probably start with 75s and try to work upwards

 

[laminar]

If CMAS is now doing speed apnea, perhaps they should have a more modern timing system?

I'd say eventually the world record will be beaten in 10ths and 100ths of a second.

Not hard to implement, either.

 

[dannybuoy]

Yeah, i was wondering, when do you start the clock? The moment your face submerges or the moment your fin is off the wall?

I found another benefit of speed apnea, besides technical stuff, that it's quite good fun -though the third and fourth sprints in a session are gonna be killer.

 

[Simos]

This might sound like a silly question, but do you think it's easier to BO during UW sprints or is it harder to suppress the urge to breath due to more CO2 being produced? (or doesn't make a difference?