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Yoga. Lose weight. Work out and swim laps.
How to conserve air???
- Thread starter onefastpony
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lavachickie
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These two have helped me greatly improve my usage.
- At the end of each inhale and exhale, pause for just a moment. Don't HOLD your breath, simply... pause. This is something I learned while meditating years ago and it comes in handy. In 1-2-3-4; pause 1-2; Out 1-2-3-4; pause 1-2.
- Slow the exhale down by placing the tongue just behind the teeth, or even slightly between your teeth. This will partially block the exhale, thus slowing it down.
Both of these pale in comparison to the contribution of simply getting comfortable, improving fitness, and getting your weighting and buoyancy all dialed in.
But every little bit helps.
- At the end of each inhale and exhale, pause for just a moment. Don't HOLD your breath, simply... pause. This is something I learned while meditating years ago and it comes in handy. In 1-2-3-4; pause 1-2; Out 1-2-3-4; pause 1-2.
- Slow the exhale down by placing the tongue just behind the teeth, or even slightly between your teeth. This will partially block the exhale, thus slowing it down.
Both of these pale in comparison to the contribution of simply getting comfortable, improving fitness, and getting your weighting and buoyancy all dialed in.
But every little bit helps.
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Yes, I practice breathing on land. That's a major part of yoga.
Also, while swimming laps I meditate on my breath rate.
Swimming will improve overall fitness, comfort in the water and help with long, slow breathing.
You can be in great shape gym-wise and still be overweight. My mother is in great shape, walks 5 miles a day but she needs to lose 50lbs.
By dive buddy is my husband and he's an instructor. He's 5'9", 175 lbs, has thousands of dives and plays racquetball/lifts weights. I can dive on a 60cuft tank and he still has less air left in his 80 at the end of a dive. I can do a challenging (like Galapegos for example) dive with a short tank, spend time at 100 feet and still have 1,200-1,500 left at the end of an hour.
I could stand to lose 20lbs to get back to ideal weight for my 5'1" body. I'm guessing at 332, 5'11" that OP could easily lose 50, maybe as much as 100. That's a ton of drag to lug around under water.
Not being mean but as a doctor, I rarely meet an overweight individual willing to be true to themselves concerning ideal weight, actual calories eaten daily and total amount of exercise.
I challenge you to keep a log of everything you eat for one week and see what your average is. I use a great free ap for Iphone called "lose-it" which calculates your calories and helps you figure out how much you need to eat to lose weight.
Congratulations on quitting smoking and your new cert! I hope both will change your life!
BTW, I'm also retired Army, Huah!
TartanFrog
Contributor
Okay I'm going to throw in my 2-3 cents worth on this one. I am 5'11" and weigh 183 and every time I go through my physical/annual health check I am told that I am overweight. I teach and train martial arts 6 days a week and get pretty aerobic training for about 2 hours on each of those days. I also mountain bike, kayak and swim regularly. I also recently started yoga once a week. I am, IMHO, in pretty good shape but as a new diver I suck down a lot of air. I have been thinking that for me it is caused by a need to relax and get more comfortable with the environment. So what is the answer on air usage? How do I get it under control? In the big picture of things am I as overweight as the current weight tables tell me?
Oorah! (USAF ret)
Oorah! (USAF ret)
The other day I discovered I was doing something strange that might have been messing with my air consumption. Sometimes instead of exhaling through the reg I just breathe out the side of my mouth. However on Wednesday I was able to hear the poppet on my 2nd stage opening slightly while I exhaled, which makes perfect sense: the air flowing past the mouthpiece will make a small negative pressure. I usually wear a hood that I can barely have a conversation in which explains why I hadn't heard it before. On my next dive, my air consumption was dramatically better, however the profile was very different so it was sort of hard to compare.
Somewhat @ Tartan: I'm 5'11" and 190lbs with a large amount of regular exercise, but have very small upper body muscles and an unfortunately substantial beer gut. My lungs are also on the large side. My air consumption's been dropping slowly as I figure out how to move without moving. I've been told by a lot of people that their air consumption dropped dramatically around 50 dives, which I'm eagerly awaiting. I'd be hesitant to think that I'd get a substantial decrease from losing 15lbs (although I'd like to), given that a 10 mile run isn't a big deal for me.
Somewhat @ Tartan: I'm 5'11" and 190lbs with a large amount of regular exercise, but have very small upper body muscles and an unfortunately substantial beer gut. My lungs are also on the large side. My air consumption's been dropping slowly as I figure out how to move without moving. I've been told by a lot of people that their air consumption dropped dramatically around 50 dives, which I'm eagerly awaiting. I'd be hesitant to think that I'd get a substantial decrease from losing 15lbs (although I'd like to), given that a 10 mile run isn't a big deal for me.
First off, big lungs really don't have ANYTHING to do with gas consumption, except as they related to being a bigger person overall. How much air you need to move through your lungs in a given period of time is determined by your metabolic rate, because what you need to do (and what your body generally insists upon) is to keep the level of CO2 in your blood constant. A given level of CO2 production (which is related to basal metabolic rate plus activity level) requires a certain amount of minute ventilation. This is where the advice to get fitter comes from -- the less EFFORT involved in doing something, the less muscle activity and the less CO2 production. But, since most scuba is not particularly demanding from a strength and endurance perspective, this has a small impact on gas consumption for the average diver.
What has FAR more impact is learning to be relaxed and efficient in the water. I talk about some of the factors related to that in post #12 in this thread. A slow, steady respiratory rhythm, coupled with an efficient approach to swimming (no hand swimming!) and good buoyancy control, will have a huge impact on a new diver's gas consumption.
What has FAR more impact is learning to be relaxed and efficient in the water. I talk about some of the factors related to that in post #12 in this thread. A slow, steady respiratory rhythm, coupled with an efficient approach to swimming (no hand swimming!) and good buoyancy control, will have a huge impact on a new diver's gas consumption.
Just so that I understand, you're saying that big lungs are related to big people, and big people need more oxygen? So that if two similarly sized and shaped people had, for whatever reason, drastically differing lung sizes (but similar characteristics otherwise... I know this is a stretch), they'd have similar gas requirements, presumably because one would just need to fill their lungs more often than the other?
Sorry if this isn't clear (it's reading funny in my head). Thanks again for your input: it's always valued.
Sorry if this isn't clear (it's reading funny in my head). Thanks again for your input: it's always valued.
Yes -- big lungs are often on bigger people, and bigger people have more mass, muscle and otherwise, so they use more O2 and generate more CO2 (remember, it's the CO2, not the oxygen, that sets the gas consumption. There is more O2 in scuba breathing gas than anybody needs.)
If two people had the same metabolic rate and metabolic mass, and different lung sizes, they might have minimally different gas consumptions (related to the ratio of dead space to gas exchange tissue) but it wouldn't be noticeable. But if one is quiet and efficient in the water, and the other is not -- now THAT you would notice!
If two people had the same metabolic rate and metabolic mass, and different lung sizes, they might have minimally different gas consumptions (related to the ratio of dead space to gas exchange tissue) but it wouldn't be noticeable. But if one is quiet and efficient in the water, and the other is not -- now THAT you would notice!
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