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I'm new to freediving, and just bought some weights. How much would you say I need to get started? I've got a 7mm suit and I weigh around 155. Thanks.
If you are really new, and only freediving 15 to 25 feet or so with 30 seconds to 1 minute bottom times, you can probably weight yourself as either dead neutral on the surface ( meaning slightly negative at 20 feet), or, you could go 1 or 2 pounds heavy at the surface, a weight which you would "neutralize" by very slow forward swimming while "breathing up" for the next drop....this could facillitate the relaxed drop, which is very new to a novice freediver--where you slow your heart rate down on the surface while breathing up, and then keep the HR low and falling as you begin your drop. To do this, you should really use an elastic freedive weight belt that allows instant dropping of the belt in an emergency. and you should have another competent diver with you.
You would NOT use negative at the surface weighting for anything deeper than 20 or 25 feet, as your suit would be compressing and your bouyancy loss would become excessive at 60 feet with your thick wetsuit---you would end up too heavy at depth, particularly if you ever had trouble returning to the surface---you want to make sure if you ever did have a shallow water blackout, that you would float up. But this type of event ( shallow water blackout) is really a risk for the deeper freedives ( 50 or 60 feet and deeper) particularly for freedivers that have been practicing static apnea, and have largely compromised their body's "need to breathe" mechanism , involving this new "skill" to ignore CO2 buildup.
Weight yourself to be neutral at 30 ft. If you experience shallow water blackout, being positively buoyant shallower than 30 ft will bring you to the surface.
Weighting yourself to be negative at the surface can cause you to drown.
Weight yourself to be neutral at 30 ft. If you experience shallow water blackout, being positively buoyant shallower than 30 ft will bring you to the surface.
Weighting yourself to be negative at the surface can cause you to drown.
Walter, while this is the advice given most often to freedivers ( and it is generally excellent advice) , I do not feel it is practical advice for a brand new freediver.....In the first place, if brand new, 30 feet is about the deepest they can dive to, and in the second, they have not done any of the stupid CO2 mechanism blocking static apnea drills, so with their shallow profiles and functional breathing reflexes, shallow water blackout is next to impossible.
As a new freediver, the hardest challenge they are likely to have is to sufficiently relax their heart rate, and being able to just relax and drop without having to fin hard to get down, will help them enormously in this first step to getting comfortable on shallow drops to 20 or 30 feet...this portion of their "evolution" as a freediver could take a couple of weeks or much longer for many people....for someone with exceptional athletic abilities in this direction, it might just last for a couple of days, but it would still help them in this initial "relaxation" learning portion.
they have not done any of the stupid CO2 mechanism blocking static apnea drills, so with their shallow profiles and functional breathing reflexes, shallow water blackout is next to impossible.
New free divers are more likely to hyperventilate. Hyperventilation makes shallow water blackout a very real possibility.
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Originally Posted by robomatic
