Speaker 1: In this section, we're going to cover the
breath hold diving. We're going to cover the problems and the solutions. What I'd like
you to do right now is pause the video and take three consecutive breath holds. First
one, until you feel a bit uncomfortable and stop breathing again. It doesn't matter what
time, maybe it's 10 seconds, or 30 seconds, or a minute, it's not important. Give yourself
two to three minutes rest, then take another breath. Take this breath until you're decidedly
uncomfortable, then breathe out, relax. Now the two to three minutes recovery, take a
final breath, hold it and do this one until you're decidedly uncomfortable, but we're
not talking here... I mean, that it is possible for some people who can hold their breath
and blackout straight up. So we're not talking extremes here, please don't get caught up
in that. We're just getting you used to holding your breath and observing what happens.
So in this final breath, I want you to have a look at when you get the urge to breathe
what is happening to your body? Where do you feel the urge to breathe? Where do you feel?
Is there any contractions going on? I want you to have a look at that? Because we're
going to discuss all of that shortly. When we hold our breath, the oxygen is used up,
and it's converted into CO2, carbon dioxide. Now it's the carbon dioxide, the byproduct
of your breathing and exercise that gives you the contractions and the urge to breathe.
It's not low oxygen. It's important to know this, it's high carbon dioxide.
With carbon dioxide high, your body goes into a different mode. It tries to get as much
out of the oxygen as it possibly can. So it does a few things. And these, we call the
mammalian dive reflex. Mammalian has to do with mammals. Mammalian dive reflex, and reflex
is something that happens when you're doing something, a reflex it's automatic. Now all
our aquatic mammals have this on as their usual situation, but humans don't. Most person
when they hold their breath within 15 seconds, they struggling and next to no reaction in
their body. So let's cover the mammalian dive reflex so
we can see what it entails. The first thing about this dive reflex is the urge to breathe.
This is brought about by the carbon dioxide. This is your body's effort to stay alive.
It will tell you to breathe. You want to breathe. And to some degree we have to work against
or around that, to be able to extend our breath holds. The second thing that the dive reflex
involves is that it slows your heart rate down. So you may have a heart rate, 60 or
something like that. When you've got a good dive reflex and you start holding your breath,
it can drop down 30 without too much problem, it's like half. So you've got to understand
a good dive reflex is going to give you longer breath holds. There's another action here
that happens. And it happens in the spleen where hemoglobin rich red core parcels are
injected into the bloodstream. A diver that's trained a long time can get
a huge injection. And this means a much longer breath hold. The reason that the average person
out here can not get that immediate strong breath holds is he doesn't have enough hemoglobin
in the blood to carry this oxygen. The hemoglobin is a protein. It's a protein that helps carry
the oxygen around the body. And there's another thing that happens with this dive reflex,
and that is the restriction of blood to the extremities, arms legs, these are extremities.
So you'll find that there's less blood goes in there. It contracts extremities, is called
vascular constriction where all the blood vessels contract and the idea is to send to
the blood, to the center with your heart, lungs, and brain and get that as the focus.
So this is all a very survival thing. Now, when you're training, we'll talk about
training soon, but when you're training, you're training to get this kicked in. So you can
get the most out of your breath hold. So of course, a question on most people's lips size,
how to increase your breath hold. We all want an longer breath hold. What does a long breath
hold mean? It means more time underneath, more terrain you can explore, more time to
encourage the fish to swim up to you. So a good long breath hold, safe breath hold is
what we want. So how do we do this? So probably the way it's been done for many years is you
just go diving, and you keep diving, and you keep diving, and you just keep your body in
the position where it is being used underwater, breath holding, and you will develop over
time a good dive reflex. However, this can take years. And especially
if you're in Brisbane where you're only diving sometimes once a week, or once every two weeks,
or sometimes once a month, if the weather is bad, sometimes you don't get out that much.
So it's a long-term process, if you only use diving as a way to increase your breath hold.
So the other you can do it is you can start training and we train in the pool.
Why do we do this? Well, we can use our nighttimes and rather than pound the pavement, or push
bike around the neighborhood, we can use our nighttimes to train. And we've got some systematic
and good techniques to bring about change in the person's breath holding ability. However,
when you bring free diving and training for spear fishing into the pool, you've got a
lot of safety concerns. Why? Because you think because you can see the bottom and the sides
and that, and you have no waves, there's no current, you think you're safe. And so you
tend to push. And if you're not training with a responsible trainer who knows what to do,
you can get into trouble and people have. People have died in the pool because they
pushed too hard, they just went unconscious. So you need a system to handle this. And we
now have got a series of clubs around the main centers of the Australia, major they
are freedom club. However, you got to understand that a free diving club deals in breath hold
diving. And whether you're doing breath or diving for one single dive, or a couple of
deep dives, or you're doing breath hold training for multiple dives of a spear fisher, the
training is similar, but different. I've always focused on having something for spear fishers.
Why? Because when I got into spear fishing, there were a lot of blackouts in a series
of about three years. And I decided I wanted to do something about that. And so I studied
what was occurring and why they were blacking out.
And I found out a few things which I'll mention later on in the safety section of this briefing.
One of the things we found out was when you train, you have to have your safety system's
good, not just okay, they got to be good. They got to be drilled. So these clubs we
have around Australia, they will have an induction, and the induction brings a person's safety
up so that he or she can save someone if they blacked out, and knows exactly what to do,
bring them round, and what to do afterwards. This is vital for the safe operation of these
clubs, so it's their normal procedures. These clubs are good to join. In Brisbane,
we've got the Brisbane Bullsharks. We've got the Brisbane Freedivers both very good training
groups. We have Sydney Freedivers in Sydney. We've got Melbourne Freedivers in Melbourne,
South Australian Freedivers in Adelaide, very strong group there. We've got Perth Freedivers,
I'm not sure their name, but there's a group over there who train.
So you could rock up there and say, "I want to actually do stuff to help me in spear fishing."
And people will be able to help you. There's a lot of exercises that you can do. In the
Brisbane Bullsharks, We have probably half to two thirds spear fishers, and the other
third free divers. So we're catering a lot for the spear fishers. And we find the spear
fishers get very interested in free diving. Why? Because it's a great cross sport for
their spear fishing. That's very possible to get good gains from this training. However,
it's never to be done alone, not even in the bath. A breath hold that results in a blackout
will drown a person in a bath. So you got to be responsible for that. I think
Hawaii had lost use of swimming pools, right round the state because someone drowned doing
static apnea in one of their pools. So this person had the bottom of his feet on the bottom
or whatever. We just cannot afford... It's tragic. Of course, and we can not afford such
a loss of life, but it also means we lose training, and venues all around so we could
lose everything just from some carelessness. So it's also possible to do apnea training,
walking around. It's called apnea walking, and you do so many steps holding your breath,
and then you do so many steps breathing, and then you do so many steps holding your breath,
and then you do so many steps breathing. If you had nothing else to do, didn't have access
to a pool, so apnea walking is a good way to increase your breath hold.
You can change it around a little bit, for example, if you increase the distance you're
getting used to working with low oxygen. If you start decreasing the recovery, then you're
working with CO2, and you're getting used to, or tolerating the actions of CO2 on your
body. These will all result in increased breath hold. At this point in time, when we're talking
at training, we must be a bit disciplined here every now and then I'll hear someone
say, "Well, I'm better now because I was blacked out."
And it's like, they use that experience. This is an experience I needed to have or something
like that. I think this is a dangerous viewpoint. The fact of the matter is any blackout is
a failure. You've got to take it, getting to learn a blackout is a failure. Yes, if
you ever have a blackout, you've got a lot of stuff that you can use to help you never
have another blackout. And that's probably the best use of this. Never train to the point
of blackouts and sandbars as a usual thing.
Speaker 2: Thanks for watching guys. If you'd like to
see more, we have loads of content on our YouTube channel. So be sure to check it out.
Also, if you enjoyed this video, don't forget to like and subscribe and be sure to check
out our stores or you can shop online at www.spearfishing.com [inaudible 00:11:51].