Where do you draw the line between swim training and apnea?

[MartinTee]

I swim twice/three times a week with no buddies and although the past 6 months has mostly been technique/strength training as I don't have a background of swimming, I've started doing breathing pattern swimming on top of my normal routines. A basic set would be to breath every 3/5/7/9 arm strokes for 100m at a time, so by the time I've done 400-500m I'll only be breathing every 9 strokes.

What other similar things can I do which are on the boundary of swimming but is related to holding my breath which you think I could do safely by myself?

What do you do?

 

[hteas]

I do 25 m repeats with no breathing. Minimal recvoery and then another.The minimum recovery time is up to you. based on your condition and effort.

 

[baiyoke]

hteas +1 that's what I do

Perhaps a better question could be: What would safe apnea related training consist of if going alone to the pool?

25m is 18% and 25% of my pb in DYN/DNF so I'd say that is fairly conservative and safe even alone... Mind however that I do it very slowly, not for safety reasons, but nonetheless doing it faster could potentially make it more dangerous, because of potential oxygen debt.

You could try something I've only done once, but will try again tomorrow: Dive any distance or time, but go up now and then and breath out and in again only one time every time you breath... You won't get all the CO2 out, but you will allways have lot's of oxygen (again can't say if you sprint, so take it easy). This is CO2 training, but if you got a strong vasoconstriction, you can train lactic acid also I think. At least I got lactic when I tried (going slowly). Now I'm not 100% sure this is entirely sae, but as far as I can tell, you will always be full of oxygen, or a little low only... but high on CO2...