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I do recall, around 1995, my dad telling me he had watched a documentary on a tribe of native pearl divers who exhaled their air before going down in order to 'make it easier to get down'. Unfortunately I was never able to track down which documentary or which tribe it was. Nonetheless as my dad knows nothing about freediving I have no reason to believe he was mistaken.
When I did the lung volume calculations in 2001 and figured that max volume was not necessarily the best, the first thing that sprung to mind was those native divers.
Kars,
Again the most obvious example is a person with a lung volume of 100L. Since you can overcome only about 25kg-force of buoyancy with a monofin, this person would need 75kg of weight in order to get down. On the bottom the 100L would be compressed to 10L at 90m. This means the person would have to overcome 65kg of negative buoyancy on the ascent. They would never get off the bottom. Thus 100L is not the ideal volume.
Using this same example, the maximum volume you could even ascend with would be a lung volume of 50L. This would give a starting ballast of 25kg, requiring the full max of 25kg-force to get down (with 25kg of positive buoyancy), assuming no wetsuit and no buoyancy in the monofin. At 90m the buoyancy would then be 5kg, requiring an ascent against 20kg of negative ballast. Ascending for most of the ascent with 20kg of negative ballast would cause leg failure and BO very deep. So 50L is still way too much volume.
Thus, the rule that more is better is clearly false. There must be thus some ideal lung volume, and this ideal lung volume would vary dramatically based on the experience, body type, equipment, and training of the diver. But more is not necessarily better.
Keep in mind also that the more volume you start with, the more energy it takes to get down to sink depth. This extra CO2 generated on the descent will greatly worsen the narcosis on the ascent. So in addition to energy savings or loss, the buoyancy configuration also affects narcosis, blood shift and many other variables.
So even if you could get down with 35L of air, you would probably black-out from CO2 narcosis on the early ascent.
I'm sorry but I'm not quite sure I understand your question, specifically. What exactly are you asking?