Techniques to help increase depth on FRC

[ktreloar]

Hey Crew,

Just throwing out a thought in regards to techniques to help increase depth for diving on frc. Would full exhale training to a specific depth, build up strength in your lungs walls, that way when you dive on frc the pressure is less on the chest????? just curious atm because the main limiting factor for me is not bottom time, not equilisation but chest compression itself. It would really appreciate it anyone could give me some tips on increasing depth on frc..

Cheers Guys


Kyle Treloar

If in doubt just dive.

 

[efattah]

Don't do full exhales. Instead just keep doing FRC dives, and do not dive into the point of pain. Once you feel a mild chest pressure, go back up. Keep doing that and your chest will eventually adapt. When in the chest pressure zone, do not use your arms at all.

 

[Kars]

It's about increasing your diaphragm and chest flexibility. Warmth, relaxation, repetition, patience, are the keys.

In addition to Eric's points I would add having a little hang at depth while consciously relaxing and letting the pressure stretch your body for a few moments before go up.

Another thing is to do the mouth-fill early so you can relax the body from then on as you fall down.

Try to have multiple deep diving sessions a week, do many dives and rank up the bottom times. Everyday a modest effort is much better than just 1 long good one at the end of the week.

When you cannot train in water dry stretches for ribcage and diaphragm are beneficial. For the deepdiving competition Nordic Deep in Sweden I did only do the dry stretches for my warm-up, NO dives before the the competition dive.

 

[ktreloar]

cheers guys for the replies, eric and kars you hit the nail on the head. Take it bit by bit, when it comes to depth. My usual diving grounds really limit me in regards to depth so usually im diving in only about 10m of water, so for training i will do a bit of a static and a fairly slow dynamic best frc times are around 3.30mins. Im finding that as soon as my chest and neck are used to the pressure my dive times go right up. For me ressure in the chest brings on early contractions not high C02 or low O2. When comfortable contractions will start after 2mins. Besides stretching which i do alot of is there any other way of adapting my body to pressure without necessarily going to deeper depths ie my max frc dive is 30m couldnt go any deeper ran outa water (haha needed a shovel).

Cheers for the feed back and advise guys..

regards,

Kyle Treloar

 

[Kars]

Dive with less than FRC.. Empty lungs to -10 is already VERY deep, may equal to a 100m dive. Please consider the enormous pressure on your system, and dive very slow down and up doing these less than FRC dives.

I did empty lungs dives in a dive-tank to -5m taking 45 seconds to go down feet first.
With a buddy close by. At the bottom he measure my heart-rate by holding my neck artery. The HR was below the monitor could register (< 30BPM). He could feel each individual pulse going very slowly. He measured for 30 seconds, than we went up slowly, letting the pressure on the hearty slowly readjust. It was a close to 2'dive, without noticeable contractions - maybe a few on the way up. The measured pulse was below 20 BPM... You see Empty lung dives are also extreme because of the change in HR.
In this light I recommend taking a similar dive time to what a full lung dive would take to the depth simulated. In this case around -50m.

Make sure you're covered with a good buddy and secure environment.
Keep a eye out for heart arrhythmia.

For more stretching techniques I think William Truebridge knows some more cool tricks.

Individual rib stretch:
With a buddy you ask him/her to put pressure on rib sections when you lay down on a floor face down and breath against this. Holding with you hands palm from the spine to the side a few ribs down while you breath in and thus expend others will help to flex up the ribs muscles allowing more independent movement and improving over-all flexibility.

 

[tcrusson]

In addition to the above, what really helped me was diaphragm stretching on land (cf. yoga-shala.net), for about a month every morning before starting deep diving training, and continuing until the training cycle is finished.