Breath holding to improve Sac rate?

[SailNaked]

I am learning to improve my breath holding ability for free diving and was wondering if it will have an effect on my Sac rate? before y'all go down a dark rabbit hole, no I am not holding my breath while diving scuba. I breath slow and deep.

With a little practice I was able to improve my breath hold duration from one minute to three, not much changed this was one hour of practice. I am considering what effect it will have on Sac. if any if I continue to practice.

would it be any benefit to practice breath holding before a dive? reduce heart rate, relax etc, however increase blood CO2? good? Bad? how long is this effect? is one longer than the other?

 

[Interceptor121]

Not sure, I would think effective finning and streamlining as well as keeping relaxed are more important but I may be wrong.
I have done breath holding apnea to 20 mt before starting diving and when I put the reg on at beginning my air consumption was crap

 

[Diver0001]

I've done a little bit of free diving practice and what *does* translate to scuba diving is recognising and releasing muscle tension. That will definitely have an effect on your SAC.

What it will also do, if you're relaxed is show you how much energy you're putting into to compensating for balance issues by using your muscles. If you relax your body and find that your feet float/sink or whatever, then you know that all that muscle energy is wasted and so is air you breathed to support it. In other words, working on trim as well as working on relaxing will help.

R..

 

[paddler3d]

I think the relaxation that you learn in free diving will help with your SAC rate . That is how we extend our bottom time on breath hold.

As mentioned above trim and proper weighting will help the most.

I have a crappy SAC rate, .7cfm, I think once I was able to get it below .65cfm. Getting myself balanced, trimmed and weighted properly was how I got it to what it is now.

Right now I'm taking yoga. I'll let you know how that works!

 

[Codiak]

It's called skip breathing:

http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/basic-scuba-discussions/34374-what-skip-breathing.html

 

[SailNaked]

It's called skip breathing:

http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/basic-scuba-discussions/34374-what-skip-breathing.html

No it is not! I definitely said, and warned yall not to mis-interpret what I was asking, that I was not asking about skip breathing or any form of holding your breath while diving on scuba.

 

[MauiScubaSteve]

As I understand it SAC is Surface Air Consumption, or the amount of air you breath normally at the surface. Breath hold training would have very little to do with the amount of air your body needs at rest at the surface. Breathing control and understanding where there is waste in breathing help you get near what you "need" but we need to get rid of CO2 more than we need to uptake O2, so learning how not to use muscles you do not need to use is a key; with each use of a muscle CO2 that must be eliminated is produced.

The problem for many divers is their true SAC is much less than the air consumption rates while diving, because using only the minimum muscles to dive is very hard to do. Even brain activity increases air consumption. If you are worried, or responsible for more than just your own diving, air use generally increases more than just neck muscle use increases (constantly looking back or up). A true "diving" SAC would be how much air you use at the surface swimming your normal diving pace in your dive gear and breathing off your reg, stopping to take pictures (if you do so while diving), looking at gauges, communicating with buddy, and getting tired as the dive time passes. Even this does not translate to actual diving air consumption, as the act of neutral buoyancy control can not be simulated at the surface.

How many divers make a simulated real dive at the surface for an hour to calculate their true diving SAC? I think a better approach would be to calculate a 2 ATM air consumption; how long does a tank last you for a normal dive at 33 fsw, maintaining depth and moving your body as you would on a typical dive. Efficiency and relaxation, trim and conservation of motion, using the topography to mitigate effort, practicing diving properly is how to get better at diving.

 

[SailNaked]

I calculate Sac by normal diving. my computer calculates average depth and time and then simple math to calculate Sac. I range between .5 and .6 sometimes as you say I am busy with a lot of distractions and it can get as high as .7 I do work to be as streamlined as possible and sometimes I like to see how low I can get my air consumption but things like stress and cold water have a greater effect on my air usage. I was just wondering if the ability to hold my breath would correlate to lower air consumption and if anyone had noticed this in their diving.

It would be very hard to track you would have to do a series of dives in one place then work on your breath holding then do the same dives again and see if in the average there was any change. not really going to happen. my only chance is that I have 24 dives in Bonaire well logged and the Sac rate for each one, so if I go back and do it again then maybe i will have some idea.

 

[Atomic_Diver]

I am not a Freediver, never have done it, but heres a website on how to improve Lung Capacity:

How to Increase Your Lung Capacity - wikiHow

I would think that a larger lung capacity would in the long run require more air to fill your lungs, thus requireing more air from your tank causeing a shorter time period a tank would last you... now I am not sure if thats accurate, but thats what I would assume would happen....(someone please correct me if I am wrong)

 

[bleeb]

In some endurance athletics, I've read some coaches use a training technique where you hold your breathe for brief periods during the workout. For example, if you're running, you may hold your breath for 50-100 m, while maintaining a constant pace before, during and after. The 'theory' is that the normal working CO2 level in the blood stream is significantly lower than what the body can tolerate, and this training resets the system to tolerate a slightly higher CO2 level. Since breathing is mainly driven by this CO2 sensing mechanism (strictly speaking, blood pH), it decreases the desire the breathe, which is using up a significant part of your effort in an endurance event. In 'theory' in the long term, something similar might have an effect diving, although with the relatively low exertion levels during most of a dive, any effects would probably be small.

On the other hand, a lot of coaching techniques seem to rely on voodoo and techniques not really proven in any scientific manner, so this could just as likely be just a lot of hot air.