Never Ever Hold Your Breath But......

[Roadtrip]

SWB is one very valid reason for teaching people not to hold their breath.

Short and simple, yet refined.

Cheers, Roadtrip

 

[bracdiver]

this reminds me of one of my check out dives for OW. At one point in the dive, my instructor said she thought that I was holding my breath during my buoyancy skill. I told her: "nope...wasn't holding my breath...honest...I was just breathing very slowly to remain neutral."

 

[underwasser bolt]

pausing breath while having the airway open is the only way to gain control. difficult to explain to beginners. but, you do not pause your breath under water the same way you hold your breath to get rid of hiccups. that is a closed airway. the next question a beginner may ask would be how do you keep an open airway without letting out all of your air. so, while not in water, open your mouth wide, inhale, but leave your mouth open. that is the concept, but you can leave the airway open through the nose or through a regulator (your mouth is already open in a regulator, but when you hold your breath, like to clear hiccups, you lock your diaphram muscle: NEVER do that diving). hard to explain.

 

[Windwalker]

I have a friend who was also a gas guzzler, he can easily empty a 120 CF in 30 minutes. Over time he was able to control his buoyancy better.

These are things I learned when helping him:
Getting a grasp on how much weight you need is important. If you carry too much weight, sometimes one might compensate with lots of dumping and adding of air in the BC; This can chew up air fast. (Once he was solid in the water, his dive time increased A LOT.)

The other thing to watch out for is swimming with your hands. Keep them tucked away. Turning and twisting and waving the arms around also burns a lot of air.

Also, depending on where your diving (PNW for me) the water temp can get real cold. If you get cold you will use more air. Make sure you are warm and well hydrated (Hydration helps stay warm too).

As you continue to dive, you will become more calm and relaxed in the water. Don't let your friends get to you for being a gas guzzler. You might see about getting larger tanks until you work out your gas management kinks. I am not going to comment on holding your breath, that was already well answered.

 

[Jim Kerr]

I have a friend who was also a gas guzzler, he can easily empty a 120 CF in 30 minutes. Over time he was able to control his buoyancy better.

These are things I learned when helping him:
Getting a grasp on how much weight you need is important. If you carry too much weight, sometimes one might compensate with lots of dumping and adding of air in the BC; This can chew up air fast. (Once he was solid in the water, his dive time increased A LOT.)

Windwalker, you hit it right on the nose here.

DAVECOBRA,
The "KEY" to better air consumption is proper weighting. Once you have it, diving will be "much" easier. You'll be more relaxed and won't have to work as hard because you're not struggling with your buoyancy. If you're not working hard then your using less energy and "ALOT" less air. Then you'll be able to use some of the techniques that have been suggested to you like using your lungs and not your BC and you will "glide" thru the water effortlessly.

Most new divers use alot more weight than they need. As you dive more you will get more comfortable in the water and you will start shedding weight off your weight belt. To make a point, record how much weight you're using now with your gear set up then compare it a year later. You will be suprised at how much weight you've droped. Be patient, it will come.

 

[MauiScubaSteve]

The "KEY" to better air consumption is proper weighting. Once you have it, diving will be "much" easier.

IMHO, this a crutch! Before the invention of the BC, and still today for the retro's out there, every diver was over-weighted at depth. All diving was done negative and there were still plenty of good divers (watch Thunderball again).

Instructors and guides often dive with twice as much weight as they need (sometimes more) and the neutral concept is not radically changed. For many beginning divers the OW training messes them up, because you are told to breath deep. As pointed out above, to fill your lungs you must expand the rib cage with the rib muscles, which then need more O2, and you are more buoyant.

I teach normal breaths with full exhalation, which leads to less flexed muscles and less buoyancy change. The new diver also must learn breath control in that sometimes you can't take a normal breath and be in the right place underwater; sometimes we have to exhale after a quarter breath and rarely we do need a full breath.

Proper hovering is shallow rapid breathing, not long slow breathing; you want lung volume to change very little (not recommended for long periods); it's just a breathing training skill, not a dive style. Lot's of new divers who breath deeply need too much weight to stay down; the KEY is proper breathing and then amount of weight matters very little.

 

[haha49]

i jsut take a deeper breath when i want to rise and when i want to decend exhalle a little faster.. it takes some time to get used to but after a couple of dives you should be able to do it easy.. the key is never hold your breath just controll your breathing rate.. slow deep breaths and just a little bigger when you want to rise..

 

[ClayJar]

Regarding the "What does 'holding your breath' mean?" sub-thread, it's rather simple for me to think about. Inhale normally. Now, inhale slowly. Okay, at the top of your next inhale, try to inhale a little more, *really* slowly. Think about how slowly you might be able to inhale. Perhaps you could inhale *so* slowly, it was *almost* as if you weren't inhaling at all. Obviously, you're not holding your breath, since you *are* still inhaling, but you're inhaling so slowly, it works out basically the same for using your full lungs' buoyancy to get over that rock.

So, *always* be either inhaling or exhaling, but you can be inhaling or exhaling *really* slowly, as long as you're still doing it. If you think of this super-slow inhaling/exhaling as being a completely different animal than holding your breath, you can easily make peace between the lungs-for-fine-buoyancy-control side and the never-hold-your-breath side.

Then other people said that they also hold their breath [...] even as a way to save air.

Holding your breath to save air is like trying to empty the shallow end of the pool by splashing all the water to the deep end. You breathe because your body needs to get rid of CO₂ (and to a lesser extent, because you need to replenish your O₂). The CO₂ is the result of cellular respiration, i.e. the work you're actively doing and the work your body does to stay alive. If you want to breathe less, you need to go to the source: make less CO₂, and you won't need to exhale as much CO₂.

A little example: Slowly walk around the room for a minute. You're burning a few calories, but not many. Now, time your breathing. Okay, now put your feet together and hop around the room as fast as you can and as high as you can. Do this for a minute. You're quite obviously burning many more calories, which means you're generating a lot more CO₂. Now, time your breathing again. As you'd certainly expect, you're going through air at a significantly accelerated rate.​

If you want your air to last longer, you need to do less work underwater. Thankfully, there are several ways you can go about this. For most divers, one of the first is *slow* *down*. It uses vastly more energy to go fast, and you miss all the little things (which are often the nicest things, too). Perhaps the next best way to use less air is to dive in horizontal trim...

Why horizontal? Consider the standard mall escalator. When a negatively buoyant diver stops swimming, what happens? Like anything else, they start sinking, just like you would if you stood still on the down escalator.

Now, look at a neutrally-buoyant diver in a semi-upright position, leaning forward. They're floating there, like you would be if you were standing still on a turned-off escalator. If they start swimming, they'll go in the direction they're pointed: forward and up.

So, let's say you're a diver swimming along in a semi-upright position, but you're staying at the same depth. Obviously, that can be done -- divers do it every day -- but if they were neutral, they'd would be going shallower and not staying at the same depth. To hold them at a level depth, then, they *must* be negatively buoyant. It's as if you're walking up the down escalator. As long as you're walking, you can stay at the same level, but as soon as you stop walking, you start going down. Obviously, it takes work to keep walking up the down escalator, and if you try to keep it up for a whole dive's length of time... well, that's one place tired and cramping legs can come from.

How do you swim forward without "swimming uphill" the entire dive? There is but one way, and that's to point yourself in the direction you'd like to go. When you trim yourself horizontally, your swimming *only* moves you forward. If you're neutral when you're stopped, you'll still be neutral when you're moving, and if you're staying level at depth when you're moving, you know that you *must* be neutral. You're only spending energy to move forward, and none of it is wasted holding up any weight.​

Of course, carrying too much lead makes buoyancy management more involved, and it can make it harder to distribute your weights such that you can relax horizontally (a ton of weight at your waist with none elsewhere may pull your waist down quite effectively). Once you're down to something decently close to your "ideal" weighting, it's usually quite simple to move a few pounds to trim yourself horizontal, and achieving horizontal trim is often a step-change in a diver's air consumption.

 

[Jim Kerr]

That doesn't make any sence. How can proper weighting be a crutch? Instructors and Dive Guides carry extra weight for students and divers who may have underestimated their weight and need more to finish the dive, not because they like to dive overweighted. Why the heck would anyone want to lug around all that extra weight they didn't need? Now you've lost breathable air to inflate your BC with to compensate. That's rediculous. :smileysto:

I agree that proper controled breathing is "part" of the Key but if you're working hard you're breathing hard. If I go to a new environment and go in with more weight than I need "I can feel it". As soon as I shed what I don't need I'm much more relaxed and the dive becomes much more enjoyable which means, "ALOT" more BT.

And sorry, but the BC has been invented and Mike Nelson no longer fights off sharks with his dive knife.

IMHO, this a crutch! Before the invention of the BC, and still today for the retro's out there, every diver was over-weighted at depth. All diving was done negative and there were still plenty of good divers (watch Thunderball again).

Instructors and guides often dive with twice as much weight as they need (sometimes more) and the neutral concept is not radically changed. For many beginning divers the OW training messes them up, because you are told to breath deep. As pointed out above, to fill your lungs you must expand the rib cage with the rib muscles, which then need more O2, and you are more buoyant.

I teach normal breaths with full exhalation, which leads to less flexed muscles and less buoyancy change. The new diver also must learn breath control in that sometimes you can't take a normal breath and be in the right place underwater; sometimes we have to exhale after a quarter breath and rarely we do need a full breath.

Proper hovering is shallow rapid breathing, not long slow breathing; you want lung volume to change very little (not recommended for long periods); it's just a breathing training skill, not a dive style. Lot's of new divers who breath deeply need too much weight to stay down; the KEY is proper breathing and then amount of weight matters very little.

 

[Windwalker]

IMHO, this a crutch! Before the invention of the BC, and still today for the retro's out there, every diver was over-weighted at depth. All diving was done negative and there were still plenty of good divers (watch Thunderball again).

Instructors and guides often dive with twice as much weight as they need (sometimes more) and the neutral concept is not radically changed. For many beginning divers the OW training messes them up, because you are told to breath deep. As pointed out above, to fill your lungs you must expand the rib cage with the rib muscles, which then need more O2, and you are more buoyant.

All my instructors have stressed proper weight management and go to great lengths to ensure that they and their students are properly weighted. I think there diligence pays off with better trained students. I think overweighting yourself on purpose without a BC went out before the J-Valve

I am absolutely POSITIVE its possible to be an excellent diver and be overweighted. I also believe that an excellent diver who is overweighted has the skills to compensate for it better then a student who is overweighted.

Just out of curiosity, What did cold water deep divers do when they were 20 pounds overweight at 110+ feet while diving wetsuit?:11: