Ever envied dive-guides for their ability to blow a succession of flawless bubble rings while you're hanging out with them on a safety stop?
Pro divers do get plenty of time to practise, but a few simple tips should set you on your way to similar opportunities to show off. US freediver Amelia de los Rios has taken the pastime to extremes and, after recently breaking two Guinness World Records for most bubble-rings blown under water, has been sharing her technique.
Lying at the bottom of a shallow pool in the Philippines, de los Rios broke the first record by producing 56 air-rings in a minute, but scored double-bubble by also producing the most air-rings blown under water in an unlimited time. For that record she produced a total of 81 – nine more than the previous champion.
Forming an air-ring is easy enough, says de los Rios – it’s finding the best depth and setting the correct rhythm that is the trickier part.
“Trying to produce bubble-rings at 5m is much harder than trying it at 1.5m,” she says. Go too shallow, she says, and the bubbles will break each other up.
Depth set, you create the bubble-rings: “All you do is you put some pressure in your cheeks, and you stick your tongue out, and you suck it back in,” de los Rios told Guinness World Records.
“Then the thing you have to do is get a rhythm,” she says. “If you make it too fast the bubbles will kill each other, so the speed is really important for the survival of the bubbles.” If one ring makes it to the surface intact within another, all the better.
Hawaii-based de los Rios, who describes herself as a ”bubble clown”, says that air-ring practice had been part of her freediving training, while developing her lung capacity through freediving was key to her success.
Static apnea is her competition speciality, and 7min 7sec her current breath-hold record – a time that broke her own US national record earlier this month at the AIDA Panglao Pool Championship in the Philippines.
“I was a kid that failed physical education several times and was never picked for any teams,” she admits. “And then suddenly, I found my superpower: holding my breath for diving or making bubble-rings!”
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