The mistake I made back then was to believe that being tolerant to CO2 meant being able to tolerate and endure the contractions caused by its increase… This is a common mistake in freediving that we will try to debunk here.

Let’s get outside of the freediving frame:

Let’s imagine that you have a lactose-intolerant friend who, when he drinks milk, has nausea and uncontrollable spasms.

Then, imagine that this friend explains to you that he wishes to increase his tolerance to lactose. He explains to you that he regularly forces himself to drink several glasses of milk and that thanks to this regular practice, he is more and more comfortable with nausea and spasms induced by lactose ingestion.

I hope we agree to say that this situation is absurd!

If the goal is to improve lactose tolerance, the result must be the ABSENCE of spasms and nausea when ingesting milk.

To return to apnea.

When we have a contraction, our body expresses a rejection. We tend to minimize a contraction but let’s be clear, it doesn’t matter if it’s a “small” one or if we manage to stay calm in its presence, it is anyway an uncontrolled movement of your body, an alert of your nervous system that something is wrong. You are no longer in control of yourself (and let’s be honest, we are not talking about an orgasm !). Being able to get used to it can certainly allow you to get a short-term result, but it is not a sustainable way to progress for most of us!

Freediving training

Generally speaking, the purpose of freediving training should be neurological desensitization to the stimulation that will be induced by your goal (CO2 in this case, but there are obviously other components in a performance). It is the very principle of adaptation. Once the training phase is over, we can enter a performance phase (much shorter) during which, if you wish (but it is not a requirement with a good periodization and a long term vision of your training) you will be able to sacrifice a little bit the quality of your dives to get a result. Nevertheless, these “performance” dives can only constitute a small fraction of your dives at the end of your training cycle.

How to improve your CO2 tolerance in freediving?

If you want to increase your CO2 tolerance, the first thing to do is eliminate stress-related contractions. I recommend that you repeat dives at 50% of your maximum with complete recovery until you consistently have zero contractions. 

Then you must build your training to try to expose yourself as often as possible to the period that PRECEDES the arrival of a contraction while remaining in perfect control and mastery of yourself:

If it is truly CO2-related, a contraction does not come on its own; you should feel heat and tightness in the chest before it arrives. This “pre contraction” feeling is the ideal training zone to increase CO2 tolerance. While in this zone, keep your composure and focus: use them to ensure that the dive experience remains positive. By injecting a small dose of CO2 (stimulation) into a general comfort level, you will be able to progressively reprogram your nervous system and delay the uncontrolled response to an increased CO2 (contraction).

Conclusion :

I hope this article has given you the tools to think about your training better. Wanting to learn to “suck it” to progress may seem tempting for some, but as in all sports, this mentality is mostly proof of impatience associated with intellectual laziness. It will only limit you from realizing your potential. The difference between freediving and other sports is that it is difficult to get badly injured in freediving. Therefore, it is possible to be in permanent over-training: Mood swings, irritability, squeeze, equalization issues, insufficient sleep, anxiety before a session, lack of motivation for training… Take care of yourself and do not ignore those signs; your training is probably too intense.

The article CO2 tolerance and contractions appeared first on Gaspard Freediving.

Nevertheless, you may not know that two drastically different visions of the definition of relaxation coexist in the freediving world. The first definition is the most commonly shared and will undoubtedly seem familiar to you. The second one is still not widely used but is, in my opinion, the future of the sport.

Relaxation is stress management.

This first definition is, as I mentioned, the most common one. It consists of starting from the principle that there is or can be a stressful situation, and relaxation happens when you can remain calm, concentrated, and in perfect control of yourself in the face of this situation. Therefore, it is a matter of not letting oneself be overwhelmed by one’s emotions and possible negative stimuli to limit (or even eliminate) the symptoms of stress. In the context of this definition, relaxation can be achieved with the help of different techniques with which you are probably already more or less familiar. These techniques will allow you to put these stressful stimuli in a “little box” to more or less limit their impact during the dives. In this sense, relaxation is a skill that can be developed.

Relaxation is the absence of stress.

This second definition assumes that relaxation “does not exist”. More precisely, being defined by the absence of stress, it is impossible to be “more” relaxed but only “less stressed”. This definition supposes that there is no “relaxation switch”, that it is impossible at a given moment to do anything to be “more” relaxed since, by definition, trying to “do” something is in pure contradiction to the notion of relaxation. The only option is to have previously removed or transformed the negative stimuli and make sure they do not happen (the role of training). Relaxation thus occurs naturally and passively. The supporters of this definition believe that relaxation is above all the result of a context and not an action that can be carried out at a given moment. On the international scene, Nathan Vinski clearly expresses this opinion (it is from him that I borrowed the expression “there is no relaxation switch“). We also find Aharon Solomons, who defends this point of view in an episode of freedive cafe (1h18 and 30seconds). Finally, this is the vision that I support in my Ebook “No, you don’t have equalization issues” still freely available.

Small analogy.

To be a little more explicit, we can put forward a “fictitious” example taken from daily life. Then we will come back to our main subject, freediving.

Let’s imagine that you have insomnia and frequent nightmares. You identify these sleep problems as being caused by a conflicting relationship with your boss.

Option 1: You take up meditation, yoga, and relaxation therapy. Your relationship with your boss is still stressful, but you can handle it better. As you progress in your use of relaxation techniques, your nights improve, and you find your sleep again.

Option 2: You contact the superior of your boss hierarchy and/or undertake to review this relationship during a frank conversation. Tensions subside, and your relationship is normalized. Little by little, your nights improve, and you find sleep again.

In both cases, you find sleep because you are more relaxed. But in option 1, the stress stimuli are still present, and you have learned to “deal with it”. In option 2, the stressful stimuli have disappeared. The definition of relaxation is, therefore, quite different in the two situations.

Life is complicated…

What is complicated in life in a very general way is that we constantly face stressful situations or stimuli that are likely to prevent us from getting sleep. However, it is sometimes difficult to decide what to do with these stressful stimuli: accept them and learn to “deal with them” (option 1) or suppress/transform them (option 2, with all the work, time, patience, or radical decisions that this can sometimes require). Chances are you know someone around you who is “stuck” in a situation because they have made a “choice” to deal with the existing stress (staying in a toxic relationship, for example) when from the outside, it seems evident that the best thing to do is to cut the source of stress. Sometimes cutting the source of stress involves a leap into the unknown that seems even more stressful at first, so we prefer to deal with the existing stress that has the advantage of being familiar. Sometimes removing stress seems simply impossible and completely utopic. Sometimes, managing existing stress is the only thing to do to continue to live/survive properly (inevitable events we have to face). Knowing how to choose what kind of behavior to adopt to find a form of appeasement is not easy, and we probably “make mistakes” in our attitudes. Nevertheless, I hope we agree that when this choice appears to be possible, the second option, removing the stress, is preferable in the long term. At least that is my opinion.

To come back to freediving.

No one is forcing you to practice freediving. Few people live by their freediving performance (and let’s be honest, you are probably not one of the chosen few). Whatever your life, you probably have enough “stress management” situations on your shoulders, and there is absolutely no point in adding one to your leisure time! Consequence? Nothing obliges you to inflict this stress on yourself, and therefore, nothing obliges you to manage it for freediving. In my opinion, the only definition of relaxation that is valid in the context of freediving is the second definition. Your freediving training should aim at eliminating the negative stimuli that can occur during a dive, not at managing them better. To do this, you should strive to make dives with a high level of quality and comfort that will allow you to be mechanically relaxed (definition 2) for the next dive. When you put it that way, things may sound simple but let’s be clear, training with this approach is quite complex. It requires more thought and knowledge to understand all the sources of stress that your dives and training can generate, and the help of a coach who understands this approach is certainly not too much. However, this approach is the only one that will guarantee you a healthy and sustainable progression without the emotional ups and downs that are sometimes difficult to understand when adopting (voluntarily or not) a training approach based on stress management.

To get an idea of what stress reduction training can do, I recommend that you try the static one contraction as I describe it in this article. I will also publish an article later to explain THE basic principle for anyone wishing to apply this approach in training.

To go further

Does this article seem to be in contradiction with what you usually hear about freediving? Learn how to deal with contradictory advice in freediving while optimizing your training.

The article Is relaxation a skill ? appeared first on Gaspard Freediving.

• First of all, we want to eliminate any risk of injury, and stretching at depth is a particularly important potential source of injury.
• Secondly, we want to have an efficient hydrodynamic position that will make us produce as little effort as possible and therefore improve our oxygen consumption. It is, therefore, necessary to favor a “neutral” position that will be more restful.
• Moreover, the equalization will be easier with the chin in a neutral position.
• And finally, having the line in front of you is the best reference point to adjust your finning or freefall position when these elements are not yet 100% acquired: by looking down, you will lose this particular reliable reference point and your technique may suffer.

However, in addition to the body/head position, which is particularly important, I frequently correct the “eye” position of my students.

Indeed, once I ask them to keep the head and the body in a neutral position, some of them always want to look down and will look (often unconsciously) towards the ball while raising the head as little as possible. One could easily say to oneself “why not”: since finally the essential is safe! Is trying to correct the orientation of the eyes should be then seen as being “over picky”?

In my opinion, not. The position of your eyes will have a direct impact on your mental state. If you look towards the ball, if you look where you are going, you automatically project yourself into the future, your “goal” is to reach the bottom, you are mechanically in “challenge mode”. Conversely, if you look straight ahead, you will be more inclined to stay focused on the present moment, on your feelings, on your sensations, which will only improve. If the line has been placed at a depth that corresponds to you, you don’t have to ask yourself if you’re close or not, you don’t have to ask yourself where you are, you only have to concentrate on your technique and your equalization, the rest is anecdotal. You will see that reaching the end of the line will become almost a surprise, you will no longer say to yourself “cool at last!” but rather “ah well already? Okay, turn around then”.

As I mentioned above, some divers are not always aware of the direction of their gaze and it is often unconsciously that they look down (you often have to show them the video of their dive for them to be convinced!) An exercise I frequently give when students continue to look down unconsciously is to focus on the surface: during the descent, it is always about having the line in the foreground but constantly having the surface in the field of vision: not the surface just above, the distant surface is enough. This usually helps to find an adequate mental state which will only make your dives easier and more enjoyable.

The article Why eye orientation is important appeared first on Gaspard Freediving.