DevonDiver
N/A
There are three issues:
1) Improving how your body deals with effort (cardio-vascular fitness).
2) Reducing the effort (proper weighting, horizontal trim, effective buoyancy control, streamlining, efficient propulsion, diving slowly).
3) Overall Water Comfort (general level of anxiety, irregular breathing patterns and muscular tension)
I'd suggest that cardio-vascular fitness was a more symptomatic cure. It never hurts to be fitter though. If you're breathing/working hard on a scuba dive, you're doing something wrong (see: reduce the effort) and/or diving beyond your physical capabilities and psychological comfort zone. It also means you will have little additional performance left in reserve should an emergency arise.
If your respiration rate increases beyond normal, then stop and rest. Pace your dive to ensure a very relaxed breathing rate.
Water comfort is primarily experience-related. It develops slowly over time, as more dives are done. It is also linked to comfort with specific activities and conditions. I've seen experienced open-water divers dramatically increase their air consumption when first learning overhead environment (wreck/cave) diving. COMFORT ZONES are important and do relate to air consumption.
The old adages "dive within the limits of your training and experience" and "identify and respect your own personal comfort zones" apply significantly to air consumption control.
Efforts to artificially regulate/improve breathing patterns typically show poor results (worrying about breathing causes more tension, increasing air consumption). Stress increases air consumption. Stressing about your air consumption is inevitably a negative catch-22 scenario. Visualization and relaxation/meditation type techniques, before and during the dive, do more to help, than breathing modification alone does.
Reducing effort (i.e. good diving skills and prudent choice of dive activity/location/conditions) tends to be the underlying problem with most novice divers - and easier to fix for the majority.
1) Improving how your body deals with effort (cardio-vascular fitness).
2) Reducing the effort (proper weighting, horizontal trim, effective buoyancy control, streamlining, efficient propulsion, diving slowly).
3) Overall Water Comfort (general level of anxiety, irregular breathing patterns and muscular tension)
I'd suggest that cardio-vascular fitness was a more symptomatic cure. It never hurts to be fitter though. If you're breathing/working hard on a scuba dive, you're doing something wrong (see: reduce the effort) and/or diving beyond your physical capabilities and psychological comfort zone. It also means you will have little additional performance left in reserve should an emergency arise.
If your respiration rate increases beyond normal, then stop and rest. Pace your dive to ensure a very relaxed breathing rate.
Water comfort is primarily experience-related. It develops slowly over time, as more dives are done. It is also linked to comfort with specific activities and conditions. I've seen experienced open-water divers dramatically increase their air consumption when first learning overhead environment (wreck/cave) diving. COMFORT ZONES are important and do relate to air consumption.
The old adages "dive within the limits of your training and experience" and "identify and respect your own personal comfort zones" apply significantly to air consumption control.
Efforts to artificially regulate/improve breathing patterns typically show poor results (worrying about breathing causes more tension, increasing air consumption). Stress increases air consumption. Stressing about your air consumption is inevitably a negative catch-22 scenario. Visualization and relaxation/meditation type techniques, before and during the dive, do more to help, than breathing modification alone does.
Reducing effort (i.e. good diving skills and prudent choice of dive activity/location/conditions) tends to be the underlying problem with most novice divers - and easier to fix for the majority.
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