How to hold your breath in free diving and how to adjust your breath in free diving.

The ocean can attract many people's attention, so many people will choose to dive to see the underwater world. Today, Bian Xiao will talk to you about one thing that needs to be studied in diving, that is, free diving is an extreme sport, and many friends should pay attention to it.

Free diving has a fatal attraction!

However, unlike leisure scuba diving, freestyle diving is a real extreme sport that challenges the limits of your breathing, relaxation and persistence.

Therefore, learning to dive freely is not as easy as it looks in the photo. For most people, learning free diving requires some preparation and training in advance.

Free potential respiratory regulation

There are two common ways of breathing: chest breathing and abdominal breathing.

The common breathing method for adults is chest breathing. Chest breathing is dominated by rib and sternum movements, and the breast diameter increases before and after inhalation. Because when breathing, air directly enters the lungs, so the chest will expand and the abdomen will remain flat. Compared with abdominal breathing, chest breathing is shallow breathing, and air is sucked into the upper part of the lungs.

Abdominal breathing is mainly based on diaphragm movement. During abdominal breathing, the diaphragm will drop and the abdominal pressure will increase, which feels as if air enters the abdomen directly. At this time, if you put your hand on your navel, you will feel your hand slightly lifting up and down. In fact, the air does not enter the abdomen, but the movement of the diaphragm drives the movement of the abdomen, and the air is sucked into the bottom of the lung, which is helpful for full gas exchange.

Abdominal breathing can expand vital capacity, maximize the chest, stretch the lung wall and alveoli in the lower part of the lung, let more oxygen enter the lung and slow down the heart rate. Therefore, the pranayama of free diving is mainly abdominal breathing.

Free diving pranayama attention

1. Take a deep breath and breathe slowly.

2. Breathe only through your mouth

3. Exhale takes about twice as long as inhale (for reference only: inhale for 3 seconds, exhale for 6 seconds).

4. Abdominal pranayama is about 2 minutes before breath holding, and the last 1-2 breaths are total breathing (first to the abdomen, then to the chest).

How to practice holding your breath? Many people are worried that they can't hold their breath when considering learning to dive freely. In fact, as long as you go through simple and professional training, AIDA two-star course requires static breath holding for 2 minutes, which can be easily achieved.

Practice holding your breath.

Control the volume of the last full breath before holding your breath (full breath means sucking the abdomen first, then the chest). For beginners, total breathing will bring tension to the heart, chest and lungs, making it difficult to relax. Although more air is inhaled, nervousness will shorten the time to hold your breath. For students who have just started practicing, they can start from 85% full, and with the increase of training times, they can slowly suck more full.

Relax your body. The content of carbon dioxide in the body stimulates the desire to breathe. Relaxing the body can reduce the oxygen consumption of muscles and delay the production of carbon dioxide, thus delaying the arrival of breathing desire. When you hold your breath, you can try to feel every part of your body, just like an X-ray machine scanning your body, from your toes to the top of your head, relaxing the muscles of every part of your body and everything.

Just relax。 The oxygen consumption of the brain is a large part of the oxygen consumption of the body. Nervous or active conscious emotions will consume a lot of oxygen. The most relaxing way is to clear the brain, but it is not easy for beginners to clear the brain. The more you try to empty it, the more distractions come into your mind. Or you can try to relax by concentrating, such as focusing on the perception of the five senses, listening to sounds that you don't usually notice, and feeling the touch of the breeze, such as focusing on imagining a beautiful process, such as a beautiful diving trip and a beautiful night. ..

Accept diaphragm twitch unconditionally and challenge in an easy way! When you hold your breath for a certain time and degree, the stage of relaxation is over. At this time, with the increase of carbon dioxide content in the body, the desire to breathe slowly arises, and soon, the signal of the desire to breathe-diaphragm twitch begins to come. Don't be nervous at this time. This is not a dangerous signal. At this moment, your body still has enough oxygen, which you can accept unconditionally. Even if you can't calm down, you should continue to tell yourself to relax until the last time. You can imagine yourself lying on the beach at night, listening to the sound of waves lapping on the coast and looking at the twinkling stars in the distance. Now you can slowly transfer the air from the abdomen to the chest, which will make you better control the contraction and add some extra time.

How to easily master the pressure balance of the flange left ear is particularly critical for the free diving junior 2-star course. If the balance of pranayama, breath holding and ear pressure is divided according to importance, pranayama is 20%, breath holding is 20% and ear pressure is 60%.

To sum up briefly, the pressure balance of the left ear of the flange is to close the epiglottis, hold the nose and close the mouth to form a closed mouth. Follow the back and top of the tongue. Because it is a closed cavity, the air in the oral cavity is pushed into the nasal cavity through the movement of the tongue root, passes through the pharynx, enters the eustachian tube, and reaches the middle ear, thus balancing the pressure of the eardrum. Refer to the schematic cross-sectional view of the oral cavity in Figure 1 and the left schematic view of the flange in Figure 2.

Figure 1

Figure ii

There are many different versions of Franzo's practice methods circulating on the Internet, but the principle is the same. The exercises mainly involve epiglottis closure and tongue base movement. Combine your own practical experience and share two relatively easy-to-understand methods.

The first method: K-lock method.

1. epiglottis closed.

Step 1: Put your finger on the Adam's apple. Gently make a "hmm" sound from the nasal cavity, and then suddenly stop. Do it repeatedly, and you will feel that the muscles of the Adam's apple will close one by one with the pronunciation. The activity here is to control epiglottic muscles. When the pronunciation advances, the muscle movement opens the epiglottis, and when it stops, the epiglottis will automatically close.

Step 2: Repeat training and try to control the closure and opening of epiglottis independently without pronunciation.

Raise the base of tongue

Step 1: Open your mouth and make an "ah" sound gently. Then I'm going to put on Koyin. Before making the ke sound, you will feel the root of your tongue naturally lift up and stick to the upper jaw. This also completes the first step of tongue root lifting. In this step, the position of the tongue root is raised (see the figure below).

Step 2: In this step, after the tongue root is lifted and stuck to the maxilla, try to feel the position of the bottom behind the tongue root ③ and continue to lift it upward and backward. This step is to lift the tongue root ④ (see the figure below). The fourth place of the tongue root is hardly used in daily life (vomiting reaction will affect the fourth place of the tongue root, so there may be a slight vomiting conditioned reflex during practice). Need to feel and train again and again.

Step 3: Try to hold your nose and do the first and second steps above. When the base of the tongue is lifted to the highest position, you should hear the eardrum swell and make a "poof". At this point, your flange lock has been half successful.

Step 4: Finally, try to keep your mouth shut and do the above steps well. If you can still hear a "poof", it proves that the flange lock has been initially successful. What needs to be done later is to be more skilled and stronger.

The second method: swallow saliva.

The first step: open your mouth, gently make the sound of "ah" and suddenly stop. At this time, you will get tired of automatic shutdown.

Step 2: Shut your mouth and pinch your nose.

Step 3: Keep the epiglottis closed, imagine the air in your mouth as saliva and do swallowing. Because the epiglottis is closed, the swallowing action will not be completely completed (usually we say swallowing the first half of saliva). At this time, you may hear a "poof" in your ear. Because when swallowing, the root of the tongue lifts upward through conditioned reflex, pushing air into the nasal cavity and into the eustachian tube.