Best Course to Improve My Breathing? #AskMark #scuba @ScubaDiverMagazine

Someone finally had the bollocks to say it. You can hold a little air if youre doing a chill dive.

My regs take very little effort to breathe, but deliver more than I need to do a controlled 3 in 3 out..even if the effort knob is fully tightened. I do a 2 count in, hold it for a few seconds, and a 4 second exhale. Greatly improved my RMV. That goes out the window if it’s a challenging dive, and yes I service my regs 😅

Try and practice Wim Hoff. Many are sceptical when they first encounter this technique but try it and you may be very pleasantly surprised

https://youtu.be/tybOi4hjZFQ

#ASKMARK
Mark thank you for the many informative videos.
My question as a very new diver and a heavy breather is will putting air in and out of my bed throw off my SAC rate. How will my computor know weather I’m breathing this air or using it for buoyancy control?

As a new(ish) diver I’d been watching a lot of videos out there lately about buoyancy and breathing in particular and I found most of them to be very confusing. Terms like “breath normally” or “be sure to exhale completely to force the CO2 out of your lungs since that will only force your brain to insist on breathing more”, things like that. The one thing they all, and I do mean every single one I’d seen, seem to fail to mention (probably because it’s second nature to seasoned divers) is that we need to think about breathing in terms of levels. What I mean by that is if you think of exhaling fully and completely until you cannot exhale anymore as your lungs being “empty” and inhaling as completely as you possibly can without gulping more air as your lungs being “full” then a “normal breath” or what some even refer to as a “full breath” is never between empty and full, but rather a range within those extremes. So a “normal” breath is going to generally be, say, exhaling to about the bottom 1/4 of that full capacity, not a complete exhale to empty, and an inhale to about 3/4 capacity, not all the way to full. In essence that “normal” breath is only about half of your total lung capacity (the numbers here are a bit arbitrary as I do not know the exact values they should be for certain but hopefully this helps illustrate what I mean).

So if your normal breathing is in that middle range you increase buoyancy by breathing in to full and breathing out only to half, instead of all the way down to your usual 1/4, and continue breathing in that range until you’ve ascended to where you want to be, then back down into the normal 1/4 to 3/4 range. To descend, then, you would exhale fully and breath in the empty to half capacity range of your lungs until you reach where you want to be. Simplified description, of course, as finer controls should be maintainable within the full lung range, but overall that seems to be the idea that nobody ever seems to explain. You’re mostly breathing within a range of your lung capacity at any given time, not fully exhaling or inhaling. Unless I’m way off base with that?

Next the idea of a 3-count, up to 4-count, up to 5 or even 6 count becomes one of timing your breathing within that range. Otherwise I could easily think “Well, I better count all the way to 3 so I better keep inhaling (or exhaling) to full (or empty) with as quickly as I’m breathing!” rather than thinking that it’s not that you would keep inhaling, but instead the idea is to slow how quickly you are taking in the same amount of air within that “half” lung capacity range. So staying in the normal 1/4 to 3/4 range that is the breath size you are trying to take while slowing down how quickly you are taking that same breath size (which sometimes make me want to take a quick deep breath every now and then, but that doesn’t seem like too big of a deal except for the slight buoyancy adjustment possibly required afterwards). Another tip I had seen was the idea of maintaining a level position also involves a little extra step of timing, one tied to noticing that the point at which you are just beginning to move up or down is the same moment that you are beginning to breath in the opposite direction, so as you just start to move up you are exhaling and by the time you just start to move down again you are inhaling. Not sure how good that advice is, but it seemed to make some sense to me, at least.