Wanna know best breath technique

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Working on breathing pattern helps a lot. I breath in quickly, to a comfortable point. Followed by a slow trickle out. When I need/want another breath I exhale quickly as much as is comfortable then repeat. Bottom line though, if you need a breath take one. Air is cheap, go crazy.

The bottom line is though, you need to be well weighted in good trim/streamlined. The less you have to work, the less you need to breathe. These things can be achieved both through improving technique and trying different gear to see what suits you best.

Also, dive, dive and dive some more!
 
The only reason to pay attention to your breathing especially in the early stages is that it's a good indication of your comfort level and how much unnecessary work you may be doing (not properly trimmed, not neutrally buoyant). Once you gain experience and gain efficiency your consumption will improve to it's best what ever that is. This does not guarantee that it will be the lowest around as it just varies person to person with women typically having better consumption than men. When you get to this stage, it is my opinion that then trying to stay conscious of your breathing and controlling it while diving will not improve it further and will certainly reduce the fun in diving.
I'm blessed to have good air consumption and I do absolutely nothing to have it. I just breathe normally.
 
Another factor I have not seen mentioned: Overweighting. New divers often use 5 or enen 10 lbs more lead than necessary to remain neutral at the end of the dive.

Spend some time to adjust your lead such that you don't sink like a cannon ball at the start and you can remain neutral at 10 at the end of your dive. Upon desent you should sink slowly after FULLY emptying you BC, or even invert to gently kick down. Spend some time at the end to test your bouancy again.
 
I've found that comfort is a huge part of your air consumption. If you go through my computer logs you will see that most dives I have a SAC rate of 0.54 to 0.65 (which I am told is a descent SAC rate for an average man), but you occasionally see it jump to around 0.80, every one of those dives I had a reason to be uncomfortable. From working against a strong current with a group that refused to duck behind things, to breathing in water on entry and my latest dive being extremely cold.

So my solution is to try to get comfortable, but larger tanks help.
 
Another factor I have not seen mentioned: Overweighting. New divers often use 5 or enen 10 lbs more lead than necessary to remain neutral at the end of the dive.

Spend some time to adjust your lead such that you don't sink like a cannon ball at the start and you can remain neutral at 10 at the end of your dive. Upon desent you should sink slowly after FULLY emptying you BC, or even invert to gently kick down. Spend some time at the end to test your bouancy again.
Yeah for sure. You'd have to figure that during most OW courses the instructor has students do a weight check at the checkout dives (can't recall, but I don't think that was done when I took OW). From what I recall, I think this was done on all the courses I assisted on. So you'd have to wonder why anyone would be so overweighted, or even a bit overweighted.
 
Overweighting is very common, especially with Drysuit newbies. There are a few more variables involved with drysuit. Overweighting hampers buoyancy control, adds more workload, and reduces bottom time.
 
I cannot really add much to what has already been said but one other thing that has helped me is to practice when you are not in the water. My weekend dives consist of heading to the Florida panhandle which is about a five hour drive for me. I take part of that drive to concentrate on my breathing pattern. Put a watch to it. See how many you normally take without thinking about it. In my limited experience most people take a lot of short breaths on the surface. In my case, I take between6 and 8 breaths per minute on the surface. During my drives I focus on taking 4 per minute (one breath cycle every 15 seconds). I think you will surprise yourself by how fewer breaths you need when you are breathing deeply and concentrating on it. I know I certainly was.
 
Concur with others that breathing naturally is the better option, since trying to control your natural breathing rhythm would almost certainly affect you ability to relax and consequently increasing your breathing rate.

One more tip that helped me was not to excessively control my buoyancy. When starting out, I was able to maintain my position in the water column without much issues, but to achieve that I made lots of unnecessary adjustments to my buoyancy via breathing, i.e. letting out too much air, then compensating by taking a deeper breathe, and on and on. Realized further on that if the buoyancy control was not that excessive, I could easily achieve a balance at the level of buoyancy using much less air.
Good weighting, buoyancy and trim skills would help in this respect.

Also, overall comfort in water would help a lot, since those would reduce stress levels (thus reducing tension in muscles and breathing rate, resulting in less air consumption). You can increase that by scuba diving, freediving or even swimming.

Fitness is also definitely in the equation, since better fitness would increase the efficiency of breathing, thus lowering consumption rate.

Lastly, being aware of, and practicing diaphragmatic breathing (and other freediving breathing skills) might help too, since those techniques would increase efficiency of breathing. But that being said, I only intentional practice diaphragmatic breathing on land, and use it underwater to the extent that it is part of my natural breathing rhythm so not to hamper my relaxation levels
 
Apologies if this has already been covered, but I would like to add a cautionary note about trying not to suppress or consciously control breathing too much.

I went to a very interesting presentation by a professor heavily involved in Hyperbaric Medical Science a couple of months ago. I am not intelligent enough to summarise his work, but he presented compelling evidence of the dangers of CO2 build up and how easily this can occur in diving. I always felt this applied mainly to CCR, but apparently it is also an issue for us poorpers on OC.

His conclusion; breathe normally.
 
I would like to add my own experience to this. I use to run out of air at about 30 to 40 minutes and was always the first one back on the boat. This meant that my wife, who had lots of air left had to come out with me since she is my buddy. On a trip to Cozumel, another diver noticed my frustration (I kept missing things the others saw because I was in the boat!) and suggested I try breathing in a little slower, pause for 3 or 4 seconds and then breathe out slower but controlled. I increased my time under water to about 50 minutes on the next dive and by the end of the week was routinely getting an hour per dive. I doubled my time under water! Naysayers can say breathing techniques don't work until they're blue in the face but for me at least, they have worked wonders.
Will this work for everyone? I don't know. I just know it worked for me.
 

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