Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Scuba Diver Magazine. My name is James and I am Scuba
Diver Magazine's man in Miami. Scuba Diver Magazine have brought me over from my own
YouTube channel, Divers Ready, with one simple goal in mind, to help make you a better scuba
diver. So if you haven't done so already, make your next dive on that subscribe button,
click the little bell icon, and that way you will never miss any of our awesome content.
This video is the next in our series that we're calling, Dive Like a Pro. And this week
we are focused on breathing. Later in this video, I'm going to be giving you my single
biggest instructor-level tip to help you get your scuba diving breathing under control
and make it the best it can be. But first I want to answer the three most
common questions that I get as a dive instructor with regards to breathing as a diver, starting
with why is breath control so important to scuba divers? Well, I'm a big fan of breathing
in general. I mean, I do it every day, all day, and you know, for far back as I can really
remember. I'm a massive fan of breathing. Whilst some people would put ability to fog
a mirror on their resume, I've never really considered a breathing skill until you get
underwater. Now, the reason that breathing is considered
a skill when you're scuba diving is there's a right way to breathe and a wrong way to
breathe when scuba diving. And you need to bear in mind that breathing, as we've been
saying through all the core skills of scuba diving, is interconnected with the other core
skills. So you have breathing, propulsion, trim, and buoyancy control. And if one of
those is off, it's going to affect the other three.
How does breathing affect the other three? Well, the first thing to remember is that
your lungs, not your buoyancy-compensating jacket or back-plate and wing, are your primary
buoyancy adjusting device. So if your breathing is off, your buoyancy is instantly off. If
your fitting is off, that's going to affect your breathing, which is going to affect your
trim and your body position in the water. Everything is interconnected. And on top of
that, the slower and more controlled your breathing is, the longer and more enjoyable
your dives are going to be. Question two that I get asked all the time
is how should I be breathing when I'm diving? That's a fair question. I can understand why
you'd be asking that. To answer it, I'm going to draw on my experience as a technical diving
instructor and give you some next level advice and hints and tips for techniques that we
use to minimize our gas consumption. If you're able to master it, I highly recommend that
you develop diaphragmatic breathing. That means using your diaphragm muscles to draw
air into your lungs rather than pumping it in with your chest muscles. So you're drawing
it deep down into the bottom of your lungs and then emptying from the top, using your
chest muscles in a traditional way. What this does is it cycles the gas in your lungs as
much as possible and gets as much CO2, which is the gas that actually drives your need
to breathe, out of your lungs and pumps fresh gas in there. In technical diving, this is
known as ideal breathing. Now, if diaphragmatical breathing just doesn't
seem to work for you, there is something else you can do, and that's try to regulate the
amount of time you spend breathing in with the amount of time you spend breathing out.
So breathe in for a four count, one, two, three, four, and breathe out for a four count.
When you can do that through your diving, and you realize that your breathing has evened
out, inhale and exhale, go to a five count. And when you can do that without having to
count to five on each inhale and exhale, and you just find that that's become your natural
pattern, go to a six count. Then you're pretty much instructor level. Having that nice rhythmic
breathing is going to help slow down your heart rate, make you more relaxed, and it
is going to cycle gas through your lungs as efficiently as possible.
Then the third question I get asked all the time as a dive instructor is, James, my breathing
is horrible, my gas consumption is embarrassing, what can I do to fix it? Well, lots of things.
Aside from the obvious of do more cardio and get into a better physical condition, there's
a lot of things you can do to reduce your gas consumption. Some of which are about breathing
and some of which are about other gas uses while you're on a dive.
One of the things I recommend any scuba diver to do that's looking to improve their gas
consumption is refine their finning and trim. Now, we've already made videos on finning
and trim techniques and I'll link those one after the other up there somewhere. But needless
to say, if you get your fitting and trim as efficient as possible, you're going to be
expending less energy underwater. You're going to be creating less drag and each kick is
going to be more efficient. So what that's going to do is mean that your body isn't working
so hard, you're not going to produce as much CO2, and CO2 buildup is the gas the action
triggers your desire to breathe in and that's what's causing you to consume more gas. So
take it easy, chill out, bro, and also get your finning and trim on point.
In addition to working on your fitting and trim, I also want you to work on your weighting.
We've made a video about weighting too. I'll link that up above. But essentially, you always
want to be diving with the least amount of weight you can get away with. If you're overweight,
it means every kick you're doing, you're proposing more mass through the water then you should
have to, which is going to mean you're going to have to breathe harder. If you go for two
jogs, the first jog you just go for a jog as you are. And the second jog you do the
same exact run, but with heavy shopping, you're going to breathe harder on the second run.
It's the same thing we're talking about here. Another top tip that I tell my divers all
the time, if you're just down there breathing like a pissed off dragon, it's just plan easy
dives. Stick with drift diving, just low energy, super chill, super relaxed dives. And on that
subject as well, manage your stress. Make sure you're not turning up late to the dive
site or departure site. Make sure that you got all your gear, double-check everything.
Remove anything that could cause you potential stress so that you're as relaxed as you can
be under the water, and your brain's not trying to play catch up. Make sure you're, well-hydrated.
Make sure you get a good night's sleep the night before a dive. Remove as many of the
psychological and physical stresses as possible and make sure you show up to the dive as relaxed
as possible. And then if you wonder, why does your instructor
kick your ass at gas consumption so badly when you're basically doing the same dive
in the same conditions, and you consider yourself to be fit, how come they're significantly
better than you? It's because we dive all the time. We dive every damn day. The more
you do something, the more relaxed you are at doing it. So there you go, there's a top
tip for you, do more diving. I know that might not be practical if you've got a day job,
but it is what it is, man. So they have it ladies and gentlemen, there
are my answers to the three questions I get asked the most as a dive instructor, when
it concerns improving a diver's breathing. Now, as it has become our one on this channel
and with this series of Dive Like a Pro videos, I'm now going to give you my single biggest
piece of advice that any diver can implement to improve their gas consumption. It is this,
learn how to and keep track of your SAC rate. SAC stands for surface air consumption, and
it's basically a rate expressed in either cubic feet per minute or liters per minute,
for how much gas you used on the dive relative to your depth at the surface.
It's a very simple piece of math. I know it sounds scary, but it's actually very easy
to work out. And if you keep track of that number, liters per minute, cubic feet per
minute, whatever you prefer to work in, you can look for improvements over time. Now,
if you want more information on how to calculate your SAC rate, I actually made a video about
that on my channel, Divers Ready, and I'll link it up above there. Strongly recommend
that you check it out because breathing is one area in the core skills of scuba diving
that is actually mathematically measurable. And if it's mathematically measurable, then
over time, as you get more data points, you can look for a trend. Are you getting better?
Are you getting worse? What changes can you make to make improvements?
Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed this video. Please give it a thumbs up if you did.
And don't forget to subscribe if you haven't done already, because here at Scuba Diver
Magazine, we are passionate about one thing and one thing only, and that's making you
a better scuba diver. You know how it works by now, just over here, I'll put some other
videos that I've created for Scuba Diver Magazine. And in the description of this video below
is a link to my channel Divers Ready. So feel free to head over there if you'd like to see
more content from yours truly. Until next time, ladies and gentlemen, my name is James,
Scuba Diver Magazine's man in Miami. Dive safe, dive often, and dive like a pro.