Freediving Tools and Resources

Written by Monterey Bay spearo and PFI Freedive instructor Giray “Pumpkin” Armağan

It is said that you will see a wild amount of progress when you first start freediving. You may think 10 feet is deep, but just a few dives later find yourself in 30’. With regular training, within a year you could be hitting 100’. Enjoy this “honeymoon phase” and try not to rush it, because inevitably the momentous progress will become slower. After you delve into the world of apnea (breath hold) diving, learn about various diving styles, and adapt certain techniques, there will come a point where your progress in freediving will plateau if you don’t continue to tune into your apneic diving skills. Taking a course is an ideal way of being introduced to these skills, one or two courses will not be enough for long-term progress. For some, that point of plateau is as far as they will get in apnea diving, but motives vary greatly among divers—some want to compete for depth, while others might want to harvest fish, others may only want to take pictures. Your motivation to dive will drive your commitment immensely, and in some cases, this may translate to deeper dives, longer bottom times and more taxing dive days.

While it is true that diving is the best practice and the ideal exercise for building capacity, unfortunately, regular access to depth or confined water may be seasonally or geographically unavailable to some apnea divers. Focusing on dry training during the off season may help you fight obstacles like relaxing through contractions or increasing your CO2 tolerance. Regardless of your access to water, it is important to fine tune and master the skills and techniques necessary for executing a safe and efficient dive. This guide will recommend some tools and resources that will help you to get in tune with your body, strengthen your dive reflex and overall help you in your dives.

Remember, training hard will allow you to dive easy, and while training hard, you also have to train smart to avoid injuries and monitor progress. Therefore, approach with an open mind and take advantage of all tools and resources you can when you first begin.

Resources

Knowledge is half the battle; the most important resource one can access is freediving education. Did you know that our bodies don’t have O2 sensors and the urge to breathe is actually your CO2 build up sensor kicking in? Or that you can hold your breath longer if you put your face in cold water? Courses that are offered by various agencies and at various levels are invaluable. You will find that instructors, as well as the student community are incredibly tight knit, almost like a family!

Essentially, a freediving course is two resources: an instructor and a curriculum. A freediving course will teach you about the building blocks of freediving such as proper breathing, physics, physiology, safety, equalization and proper diving technique. An instructor assisted dive will always be done with the instructor diving with you on the line, face to face. During descent (or ascent), the instructor will address any observable flaws in your dive and give you feedback on the spot, underwater, with hand gestures. This helps you to address the mistake as you are making it. In a sense, it breaks the muscle memory cycle, and it is far more efficient than watching yourself later from a recording, and trying to fix the mistakes the next time you dive.

Training

A freediving course will help you in understanding what areas of your diving need work. Some people have no issue equalizing or dealing with depth, but they have low CO2 tolerance. Others have great breath-holding capability, but experience depth triggered contractions that are purely due to not relaxing, and have nothing to do with their lung capacity. Therefore, in your journey of strengthening your apneic diving capacity, you will find that pool training is necessary to fine tune certain skills. Depth practice may not always be possible, but hypoxic training is certainly doable in a pool. With the right safety and regimen, you can definitely improve your freediving skills by regularly doing pool exercises. These exercise routines can range greatly, and are only limited by your imagination.

Simulating a 20 meter dive: Swim down to the bottom of a pool that is deeper than 10 feet, put your hands on the bottom and hard kick for X cycles, and soft kick Y cycles, where X and Y are the number of kick cycles that took you to 20 meters during your course. While the safety is watching you from above, another person can record and/or correct mistakes or give feedback.

Surface Swimming: The laziest but the most effective exercise (for me) is surface swimming with a kick-board. This develops leg strength and you become very comfortable in your gear. Just put on your fins, mask and snorkel, hold a kickboard in front of you and start kicking like there is no tomorrow. Big, large and strong kicks on the surface until those legs are softer than an udon noodle and you’ve made it to the end of the pool. Then take the fins off and tread water for 2 laps, and repeat the kicking cycle. Make sure to relax and recover during treading, so you can avoid injury and gauge your body’s response to get a sense of how many reps is healthy for you.

Dry CO2 & O2 Tables: STAmina Apnea Trainer and Low2 are great apps. Every other morning I go through a CO2 table. These are not only strength building exercises, but also very informative. The apps contain an array of breath hold time tables with a round of breathing followed by an allotted time to hold your breath. Typically, a table consists of 8 rounds and as rounds progress, you decrease the amount of time you breath and increase the amount of time you hold your breath. Time difference of 15 seconds is most common. The apps generate your own custom table depending on your personal best static breath hold. CO2 tables are a great way to build tolerance to high levels of CO2 buildup while laying down on your bed. This allows you to tune out other variables and completely focus on your body’s response. You may experience contractions or start to sweat while pushing yourself, but having a safety there with you will may help ease the mental stress.

Community

Another invaluable resource is your local online Facebook group (so long as it is active and has freedive instructors available to answer your questions). If you are in Central or Northern California, there are two groups to pay attention to: Monterey Bay Spearfishing and Monterey Freedivers. These groups are a great resource for beginners or advanced divers, because it allows for freedivers to connect with each other and arrange line diving or spearfishing sessions. Sessions are organized periodically by more experienced divers, giving beginners an opportunity to learn immensely from the more senior divers. Not only can this improve your diving ability, but you can learn so much about gear rigging, safety, and techniques in diving/fishing from a single session. Keep an eye out for sessions organized by locals in these Facebook groups to gain knowledge about the area, as well as understand difficulties one may face when entering our waters. For instance, we use lanyards when line diving here in Monterey due to low visibility, so this may be a new skill to master for a person coming from waters with 100ft visibility. A lot of spearfisherman/spearfisherwomen use kayaks to venture off to kelp beds and hunt fish, joining a spearfishing session with some of these divers will help you learn how people rig their boats and use them safely while diving. Tapping into your local dive community may open a whole new world of diving and spearfishing. Therefore, keeping in check with a group forum will pay off in the long run.

Freedive Tools:

If Leonel Messi was given a watermelon instead of a soccer ball when he was a kid, he probably would have been the most talented watermelon salesman, but luckily for Argentina, he had nothing to do with watermelons, and everything to do with perfectly orchestrated, beautifully organized goals. Messi is a machine of a soccer player, and his skills are directly related to the amount of time he spent playing with the soccer ball in and out of controlled environments. The same logic applies to us freedivers.

Line Diving: In order to master the depths at which we want to operate, we have to spend a significant amount of time working on the line diving in a controlled environment with a proper safety team. This means in order to become the Messi of freediving, we must spend time on the line making repetitive dives, with fins or free immersion (by pulling yourself on the line), and be able to do short hangs. Therefore, a line diving setup is necessary to own the depths that you practiced during your course. In rudimentary form, what you need is a dive float (round SCUBA style), rope (length depends on your certification level), weights, and some carabiners. You suspend the rope (with markings every 1 meter or 5 meters) to your desired depth with weights tied to one end and a hoop and carabiner attached to the float. Always dive with a buddy.

Dive Watch: A dive watch is very important to have, and not just a SCUBA watch, but a freedive watch. Our waters here in Northern California are undeniably cold, so as soon as I see the temperature readout I am ready to pee in my wetsuit and get myself cozy and comfy. Joking aside, in addition to the temperature, freediving watches are capable of telling you some very important information such as your rate of descent/ascent, surface interval, bottom time and number of dives you’ve made, as well as the obvious depth mark. Using the watch to your advantage will help you gain more bottom time. Ideally, you want to go at a pace no slower than 3ft / sec. Having a watch will give you insight to the pace and efficiency of your diving. You want to recover on the surface for twice the amount of your bottom time. Having a freedive watch makes this a breeze, because as soon as you surface, your watch has already initiated the stopwatch feature, and it has logged your bottom time on the screen. So, as the diver, all you do is look at your watch and decide how  long you need to stay on the surface breathing without doing any time arithmetic or pressing buttons. This is nice to have, because it minimizes the unnecessary tasks which can distract you from focusing on your next dive.

Oximeter: One of my favorite tools is an oximeter, which reports your O2 saturation levels in your blood, as well as your heart rate. It’s a non-intrusive device clipped to the tip of your finger and I use it when I do my CO2 and O2 tables. During your CO2 tables, a safety will be able to read the oximeter data and relay back to you. This way you can see at what level of O2 saturation contractions start to kick in, and with time and training, you can lower your O2 saturation to levels that were causing you to have massive contractions before, without having the urge to breathe at all. The utilization of oximeters to CO2 and O2 tables is truly a game changer. It is like fishing with a fish finder, or tuning a guitar with an electronic tuner. Your bodily feedback is right in front of your eyes, and you realize the control you have over your cardiovascular and psychological systems.

There are a countless number of ways you can utilize other tools and resources. I have listed a few of the most effective ones I found useful for me. As you take more advanced freediving courses and get more in tune with your aquaticity, you may realize these may not be enough. I urge you to come and find me so together we can push ourselves to become better and stronger divers. Until then, keep an open mind, stay humble and remember, in freediving, slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

For more information on freedive and spearfishing gear (read this article).