Hold Your Breath
I’ve been swimming pretty regularly at the local YMCA and started swimming underwater again. When I first started swimming again, I could not make it the entire length of the pool underwater – 25 meters – without coming up for air. I took some deeper breaths, relaxing between attempts, and tried again and again. In a few weeks, I made it the whole way without coming up for air! But it was a lucky lap. I only recently got enough lung capacity to do one length after another with a 1 minute rest in between. Not bad for a dude my age.
I didn’t swim much last week (I was recovering from a cold) but started swimming today and after doing a few dozen laps of the breast stroke and some kicking-only lengths, I did some underwater lengths. I wondered if I could ever swim underwater down and back – a complete 50 meter lap – without coming up for air. I asked the guy sharing the lane with me if he ever swam underwater. He said the most he could do is a length and a half. From that I suspected that I could do better than a single length, but how would I train for such a thing?
My friend Jeremy introduced me to freediving a few years ago and I liked it so much, I bought a bunch of specialized gear and tried holding my breath without moving in the local swimming pool one evening. He called it static apnea, and it was an amazing thing. I held my breath for a few minutes while I was completely still. He told me the importance of not moving a single muscle and not thinking either. He believed that thinking consumed as much oxygen as muscle movement. I was intrigued, and tried not to move or think and without knowing it, I had remained, face-down in the water for a few minutes without breathing. But that was a few years ago. I haven’t really tried it since then.
Swimming underwater is a little different. In this case, you are definitely moving your muscles. But could you go farther if you stilled your mind well enough to stop thinking extraneous thoughts? My training will involve getting to the pool to do laps and trying to go farther each time without thinking. I’m already practicing being more present so applying it to swimming underwater seems natural and even obvious. But how can I hold my breath for longer periods of time?
I asked myself this question today around 4:30 PM while swimming laps at the pool. Synchronicity seems to be my friend these days.
A few hours later at 9:30 PM, I was debating how to spend the last few hours of my day before going to bed. I was talking to my friend Vivian on the phone and just before we ended the call, I opened a browser window and went to TED.com. There I found a video showing David Blaine (the magician) talking about how he held his breath for 17 minutes underwater.
I just watched the video and realized I’d never really seen him before. He’s sexy! And his conversational style is informative and humorous. He tells a great story. He started by listing the things he attempted to do to avoid having to hold his breath for that long, including surgically inserting rebreathing tubes down his throat, breathing a rare liquid form of oxygen, and bypassing his heart and lungs with an embedded heart and lung bypass device that could breathe for him. None of these ideas were feasible (according to him), so he decided to learn how to hold his breath naturally. What a concept! Not just a man of deception, David Blaine decided to figure how to do it au naturel. And he managed to train himself to do without oxygen for 17 minutes and 4 seconds on 19 September 2008 (Oprah Winfrey Show). He had to lose some weight to get a larger lung capacity. And he slept in a hypobaric chamber every night to increase his red blood cell count and basically simulate sleeping in a lower oxygen (13% O2) environment while training in a normal oxygen level (21% O2) during the day.
Some MMA wrestlers use hypobaric sleeping tents to help them become acclimated to higher elevations (for a contest in Denver, Colorado as one example) and get all of the benefits of sleeping in a reduced oxygen environment. But these tents have to cost some money. I know this because the website that sells them doesn’t list the prices for the tents or airflow generators. They force you to fill out a form or call someone in “Sales” to get more information. How 1980′s right? Anyway.
There is a simpler (but more determined) method of hypoxia training called IHT or Intermittent Hypoxia Training used by Russian cyclists. This method requires some dedication to a 2-hour daily ritual of breathing exercises as follows:
15 minutes:
- Hold your breath for 1 minute
- Breathe normally for 15 seconds
75 minutes:
- Hold your breath for 1 minute
- Breathe normally for 10 seconds (5 seconds less than before)
30 minutes:
- Hold your breath for 1 minute + 5 seconds
- Breathe normally for 10 seconds
I could try that right now. But it’s already 11:30 PM and I’m tired. I could see this being turned into an iPhone app. Or does it already exist? I just searched for “IHT” and “hypoxia” on the iTunes App Store. No one has thought of it yet. Curious.
[I geeked out for an hour trying to make my own audio-based IHT training tool using iTunes... with limited results.]
Now it’s 12:30 AM and I’ve spent the last hour making audio files of voice over cues for the breathing exercise above. I tried creating playlists in iTunes to loop the sequence of the cues (“Hold your breath” … 60 seconds of silence … “Start breathing” … 15 seconds of silence) – Repeated 24 times for the first part alone. But iTunes has a limit of 65 tunes per playlist. At least that’s a limit I’m running into right now. I tried using Automator (the scripting application that comes with OS X) but my attempts to loop an iTunes playlist from within a workflow failed. The loop condition continued before the playlist finished, causing a stuttering performance of the first track of my voice cues. Very Max Headroom. But it’s late. I’m putting this on my OmniFocus inbox as a new project to consider tomorrow. Stanford University has a free online iTunes University video course available on iTunes for developing iPhone Apps. That might be a kick-start. Or I could just breathe. But that takes all the fun out of not breathing.
