Hold your Breath for 5 minutes

1. Take a breath
2. Wait for 5 minutes
3. Recover

Congratulations, you just held you Breath for 5 minutes! If only it was that easy. When I first started freediving I was amazed at how hard I found it to hold my breath for long periods of time. Our bodies are programmed to breathe out of the water. Kicking a 300 million year old habit takes a lot of work. If you’ve ever tried this you will know exactly what I’m talking about. Temporary side effects may include contractions, cramps, sweating and an excruciating urge to breath. So why would anyone want to do this? Apnea creates physical health benefits (e.g. increased lung capacity and improved anaerobic performance), in my experience it can be useful in addressing mental obstacles like anxiety as well. It’s relaxing and benefits our health but most importantly, the longer I can hold my breath for, the longer I can dive for. That’s why I hold my breath but whatever your reason is, hopefully this information will held you to hold your breath for 5 minutes (or whatever your target is).

Before we get started, the obvious but necessary.  Apnea can be dangerous, never practice it alone or if you are in poor health. Depriving your body of oxygen can damage your brain and even kill you, use the techniques in this guide at your own risk.

The Theory

Just so we are clear, the atmosphere has a component of oxygen in it (O2). We take a breath, inhaling O2 which is metabolised to carbon dioxide (CO2). During a Breath Hold, it’s the increasing levels of CO2 which trigger that urge to breath, not the decreasing levels of O2. Hyperventilation is dangerous because it purges CO2, our O2 levels can get dangerously low before the CO2 levels force us to take a breath. Don’t hyperventilate.

A breath hold is made up of three parts: the breath up, the breath hold and then recovery.

The BreathE Up

Some people refer to this as the “relaxation period” now but that’s just the same thing. A breathe up is the period of time before you do a breath hold. It has two main purposes:

1. Relaxing your body and mind
2. Saturating body tissue with O2

Relaxed muscles only consume a tiny amount of oxygen, so relaxing your body allows you to hold your breath for longer. Finding a calm state of mind can decrease your heart rate which again improves apnea performance. Breath holds are just as much a mental challenge as a physical one, being in the right state of mind is crucial. The key to achieving this is through your breathing which also helps with point 2, tanking up on O2 (but without altering the O2:CO2 ratio).

• Get comfy, lying down on something like a yoga mat works well for me. Make sure you are a good temperature, I normally get warm during breath holds so don’t be too wrapped up.
• Belly breathing, you want to use your diaphragm to begin your breath. Put your hand on your stomach, when you breath in, you should feel your hand rise.
• Expand the breath into the chest, relax your shoulders back until you are full of air. Hold the air for a few seconds, you can hear your heart beat here easily.
• Let the air escape slowly, the exhale should last approximately twice the length of the inhale. This is normally 4-6 second in, 8-12 seconds out but the more relaxed I get, the longer the breaths take.
• You can do this breathing cycle 3 – 5 times or until you feel relaxed and ready to go for a breath hold.

I’ve been taught by some people to breath in as if I were sucking the air through a straw. This helps increase the breath length and I’ve been told that the increased flow rate “stimulates the nerves which influence the brain”. I’m skeptical about that as an explanation mainly because of the terminology so I will leave it up to you. However you breathe up, just get relaxed. Once you have finished your breathe up, you can begin a breath hold.

The Breath Hold

I find the best way to hold the air in my lungs is to close my airway at my throat. I’m sure there is a fancy anatomical name for this but I have no clue what it is, maybe someone can comment to tell me.  At first I tried keeping my diagram “down” towards my pelvis, kinda like pushing your stomach out but I found that it takes more effort and after 2 or 3 minutes the muscle gets tired. The first way of holding the air takes much less energy and I’ve noticed it makes it easier to equalise during dives. The way to do it is to take a breath and then push the base of your tongue backwards. If you have an adams apple, you might feel it drop a bit, once you’ve done this you will know it’s worked if you can’t breathe in or out without relaxing that part of your neck / tongue. This dude gives quite a graphic demonstration of the frenzel maneuver for equalising, I think this way of breath holding is closely related to the maneuver.

Once you start the breath hold you should focus on relaxing every muscle in your body. Any tensed muscle uses oxygen and will decrease the time you can hold your breath for. I “scan” my body, checking each muscle group individually and relaxing any subtle tensions. Once you’ve checked that your body is shut down as possible the mental game begins. It sounds crazy but try to think of nothing. Obviously this is pretty much impossible because the voice in your head just doesn’t shut up. As your heart rate drops I find that there are spaces in between thoughts and that’s what you are aiming for. Time whizzes by in these gaps, I find that trying to think more slowly helps. If the thought “Has it been 2 minutes yet?” pops into your head, make the voice in your head drag each word out “Haaasssss iit beeeeeeen 2 minnnnnutes yet?”. The other thing to consider is what thoughts you allow yourself to think.  “Has it been 2 minutes yet?” is not a very good thought, don’t think about time.

CO2 and O2 Tables

These tables are a great way of training out of the water. A CO2 table increases your CO2 tolerance and an O2 table increases your static breath hold time. If all you are interested in is achieving the hold your breath for 5 minutes goal then focus on O2 tables. If you want to use you apnea skills for freediving or want some of the anaerobic fitness benefits then work on CO2 as well. One of the best ways of getting these is free apps. I use “Freedive” and “Apnea Tables”, the generate tables for you or allow you to make custom tables.

An O2 table has fixed breath up periods with alternating breath hold periods of increasing length. The idea is to fully recover from each breath hold then repeat it with a slight addition to the length. This trains your body to deal with low O2 levels and allows you to hold your breath for longer periods of time.

A CO2 table has fixed breath hold periods and decreases the breath up periods incrementally. This results in an accumulation of CO2 in your body making the urge to breath very strong. They are great for building a tolerance to CO2.

I would focus on the O2 tables for this breath hold target. I find the best time to do the training just before I go to sleep, it’s very relaxing. Just download an app or write out an O2 table and get started. Get a starting point by doing a breath up and a hold. From that time you just need to keep practicing. The real secret is persistence, commit to doing a table every night and you will amazed at how quickly your times improve. Going from 2 minutes to 3 minutes only took me a week of doing 1 table every night.

Apnea Walking

Apnea walking is exactly what it sounds like, hold your breath and walk. I find it really useful training cause a do quite a bit of walking to / at work and it’s kinda boring so I use it to train. Try to give yourself a target of a number of steps and don’t allow yourself to increase in pace or stride length. You will find that even the light exercise of walking decreases the amount of time you can hold your breath for a lot! Use this as your main CO2 tolerance training, it means you can use your tables to improve breath hold times faster.

Monitor your progress

Keeping track of progress really helps keep me motivated when I’m trying to achieve something. It sounds a bit geeky but a spreadsheet can be very handy. If you record the date and your max breath hold, you can look back and see how far you have come. If you really want to geek out then get yourself a heart rate and O2 monitor. It’s pretty satisfying to see how low your heart rate drops during a breath hold and a little scary to watch the O2 monitor! These things are available on amazon etc for not too much money and are pretty accurate.

It’s all in you’re head

One last thing to remember is that this is a mental battle. He who believes he can and he believes he cannot are both usually right. Stéphane Mifsud held his breath for 11:35 to get the AIDA static apnea world record. You can manage less than half that right?

Summary

So here’s 5 point for how to hold your breath for 5 minutes.

1. Learn good breath up technique
2. Train with O2 tables consistently
3. Use Apnea walking to improve CO2 tolerance
4. Monitor you hold times, heart rate and O2 saturation
5. Remember it’s all in your head

The post How to hold your breath for 5 minutes – a guide to dry apnea trainning appeared first on Angus and Vivian Adventures.