Freediving, Breathholding, Iceman Wim Hof, Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible Training, How To Use Static Apnea Tables & More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

As a freediver, I have to tolerate low levels of oxygen and high levels of CO2. So there are these breath holding tables that are designed by doing repetitive breath holds. They're designed to make you have lower and lower oxygen levels, or you do CO2 tables where they're designed to put your body in a higher level of CO2. If I can make the ribcage more flexible, then that allows me to take a bigger breath. As a freediver, I don't need fast in and out movement. Maybe like a cyclist or a triathlon. I just want to take the biggest breath I can.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And just a few weeks ago, I published an extremely popular article. It was called how breath holding, blood doping, shark chasing, free diving, and ketosis can activate your body's most primal reflex. And in that particular article, I talked all about this freediving journey that I went on a few weeks ago down in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. And, and in the article, I also talked about how I wanted to learn how to do everything from stay calm in the face of extreme stress to activate my primal mammalian dive reflex, which you'll learn more about in today's podcast episode. To learn a little bit more about how to get into the sport of spearfishing. But my guide, my mentor on that week long journey that I took down in Florida was a guy named Ted Hardy. And Ted is a freediving instructor. But he's much more than the freediving instructor. The guy is like the guru when it comes to everything from breath holding to the mammalian dive reflex to getting your body to do what you need it to when it comes to controlling your sympathetic fight or flight nervous system, shutting that down and getting yourself to the point where you can do things like breath holds and staying calm underwater. And also getting all the benefits that all these Olympic athletes all over the world are now tapping into and using when it comes to breath holding and free diving. And I'm pleased to inform you that Ted is here with me on the call today. So, Ted, thanks for coming on, man.

Oh, looking forward to being here and talking with your listeners about freediving.

Yeah, me too. Because, you know, having sat with you for a very long time in a classroom and then spent lots of time in. In the pool, in the ocean with you, I know you're a wealth of knowledge. And I want to tap into some of the things that you talked to me about down in Fort Lauderdale that I think would be really helpful for the folks listening in. And the first question I have for you is, I know that you did not always or you were not always a free diver before, I believe you were a scuba diving instructor and you had to kind of whip yourself into shape for this whole freediving thing. So can you talk about what took you from being, I believe, what you described as a fat, out of shape scuba instructor to being a free diver and how that worked? Because most of the freedivers I see are just like these, you know, skinny mini dudes, and you're like a big built ex scuba instructor. So how'd you kind of get to where you're at?

Sure. So I started, you know, getting into freediving when I worked at the dive shop. So I worked at a busy dive shop in the Keys. I was teaching every day, which was pretty much exactly what I wanted to do. And I remember kind of first getting exposed to free diving when I had free divers come out on the boat, obviously when I knew what freediving was, but I had never seen real freedivers. So these two guys come on the boat, they've got crazy long fins, they've got camouflage wetsuits. And, you know, I'm watching them and they're, you know, 20, 30ft, but they're staying down there for a minute, a minute and a half, and I just, I couldn't believe it. I'm like, oh, they must have, like, a little spare air or something. There's no way they can stay down that long. So, you know, I was really just shocked that these guys were doing that. So, you know, the next trip we went out, I'm like, well, shoot, I'm gonna free dive. So I, you know, told the captain, hey, I'm gonna hop in with just my mask and snorkel and cruise around for a bit. So I jumped down to 20ft where the reef was, and I get down there for, like, 10 seconds, and I'm like, wow, freediving is awesome. I can, you know, it's so quiet. And after, like, 10 seconds, I feel, you know, I feel, oh, my God, I feel like I'm gonna drown. And I fly up to the surface, you know, out of breath. And on that one dive, I dismiss free diving. I'm like, free diving is totally stupid. Just wear a tank down and stay down for an hour. So after that one dive, I tried free diving, decided it was pretty stupid. So what ended up happening is working in a dive shop, working on a boat, you just can't get away from it. For instance, someone drops their mask at 20ft and you're thinking, do I really want to have to put my scuba gear on and get that? No, I'll just dive down and get it. And then all of a sudden, just from freediving with repetitiveness of it, then all of a sudden I could go to 30ft, and then all of a sudden I could get the mask at 40ft. And so just slowly, through repetitive exposure to freediving, I gained some sort of basic ability.

So there's obviously a lot of benefits that come with learning how to free dive. And one of the things that I've seen you talk about, that I believe you wrote an article about in Spearfishing magazine that I get now is this whole concept of the MA dive reflex. And we've got a lot of smart cookies who listen in and who aren't afraid of the physiology side of things. So can you explain what exactly the mammalian dive reflex is, how it's tied to free diving and how it actually helps people, like why it's a good thing to be able to activate in your body.

All right, so the mammalian dive reflex is something that you'll hear free divers talk about quite a lot. And basically the mammalian dive reflex is genetically encoded in every human being on this planet. So if you look at dolphins, seals and whales, they are mammals, they are full time residents of the water, and they clearly have this mammalian dive reflex. We as human beings, we are mammals, we are part time residents of the water. So we still have genetically encoded in us that mammalian dive reflex. Now, the dive reflex is talked about, you know, in general is one thing, but in fact, it's a long list of well understood and well documented physiological responses to breath holding and immersion in the water. So one of them is bradycardia, which is rapid slowing of the heart. You know, if I'm doing static apnea, holding my breath for time, for instance, for a competition, and my heart is beating 50, 60 beats a minute, well, that's the main thing that's consuming oxygen if I'm not moving in the pool. So one of the things that will Happen is during the breath hold, my heart rate will drop quite rapidly and quite severely. The last time I've checked it with a heart rate monitor, it was down to about 30 beats a minute. So that rapid slowing of the heart is going to consume less oxygen, which is going to allow me to hold my breath longer. There's another interesting part of that bradycardia that has to do with the face being submerged in water. You probably remember us doing this in the class, but the idea is dolphin, seals and whales, before they make a deep dive, the thing that their face, their eyes go in the water and their bodies have learned, the seal has learned. When that eyeball gets submerged in water, that seal's about to do a long deep dive. So let's drop that heart rate down for the seal so that it can perform better on the dive. Well, we get the same response, which is why you remember in our class at some point, us having the mask, instead of wearing the mask, actually putting it on our forehead and putting the snorkel in our mouth and getting that cold water across the eyes, because our body, when you do that, because of the genetically encoded dive reflex, your body goes, oh, Ben's about to make a dive, so let's slow down the heart rate so that he can dive better. So there's a lot of, I hate to use the word tricks, but ways that I know how to activate that dive reflex and make it work for us.

Now, some people will say that when they stick their face in water, especially cold water, or even when they take a shower, people are into the cold shower thing and the cold water hits their face, that they feel like they're, they're sympathetic. Their fight and flight nervous system takes over and their heart rate goes up and they have this sharp intake of breath and it almost gets them a little bit panicky. How does that kind of like, does that feeling go away when you learn the mammalian dive reflex, or does that mean that those people aren't able to activate their mammalian dive reflex?

Well, my response to that would be cold. I mean, when the water becomes so cold that it's shocking, then I can understand why that's going to get triggered. For instance, if I jump in a cold, cold shower. Yeah, I'm going to get that. I would just say that in the environments that we are doing this, like you did in class, the water wasn't that cold. So we're getting the benefit of that. I would tell you that generally speaking, the colder the water is, the stronger that dive reflex would be. But again, that is for, you know, for instance, if a competitive freediver is in cold water and they're breathing up, about to do a 200 foot dive, and they stick their mask on their forehead and get that cold water across their eye, that's someone that's very comfortable with what's going on and so is going to get the benefit of that, you know, more so than, you know, just Joe Blow jumps in some really cold water and, you know, doesn't. Doesn't feel relaxed at all. Right. Just feels kind of.

Well, what I thought was really interesting was you had us prior to actually doing a dive, stick our faces in the water, put our mask and our snorkel on and simply stare kind of down into the deep blue and do a specific breathing technique that you taught us to lower our heart rate. And just the simple act of putting the face in the water seemed to drop the heart rate and activate this mammalian dive reflex. It took a little bit, I guess it took a little while to learn how to overcome perhaps the fear of seeing sharks and jellyfish and getting your face in there and thinking about water coming into your snorkel. And then once I got over all that, it was almost instantaneous that I'd stick my face in the water and the heart rate would begin to go down. Now, a lot of people listening in, they're experimenting with these things like cold thermogenesis and cold water swimming. But one of the things that you talked to us about was the fact that that may actually not be conducive to say, like learning breath holding or practicing long breath holds, freediving, things like that. Can you explain how cold could technically work against you when it comes to breath holds or free diving?

Well, I would say, generally speaking, colder water will in fact enhance that dive reflex. For instance, if I were to have my mask on my forehead and do breathing up like I had you do in class, and I did that in pool water that was 90 degrees. I did that in pool water that was 80 degrees. I did that in pool Water that was 60 degrees. I mean, generally speaking, what you would find is the colder that water is, the stronger that part of the dive reflex would come in. So in theory, it sounds like cold water is awesome for the dive reflex, and technically it is. But in reality, for instance, you look at all the freediving competitions in the world, the best ones are all going to be in warm water. Yeah, there's freediving in Vancouver, and you probably saw videos of the class of guys diving in Vancouver in 50 degree water. And yes, theoretically, it increases the dive reflex more. But for most people, because they're just not acclimated to that cold condition, that just the fact that they're uncomfortable and cold ends up overriding the benefit that you would get from the dive reflex. Now, that being said, there are some very highly accomplished free divers that tend to work in those cold waters and able to make that work for them. But for instance, I'm not used to that water. You put me in 50 degree water in Vancouver and I'm just going to be uncomfortable and the thermoclines are going to. Any advantage I would get from the colder water would just be, you know, negated because of my not being acclimated to cold water.

Yeah, that was one of the things that you taught us was this simple act of shivering. Right. Like any tiny little movement of your body that could, for example, require your heart to need to shove blood into your extremities or would require your muscles to use up oxygen that your heart is delivering, technically uses up just a few extra heartbeats, which exhausts your breath that much more quickly, Right?

Sure. So, you know, competitive, I mean, in freediving, you know, we're very concerned about the wetsuits that we're wearing. Like you remember in the class, we have these high performance wetsuits that are very different than your typical scuba wetsuit or what they might wear at a triathlon. Because as a free diver, as soon as we shiver, as soon as you're in the water and you're shivering, what's happening is every muscle in your body is trying to generate heat through friction. So now every muscle is moving back and forth and that just crushes your oxygen consumption. It goes up by almost a factor of five. For instance, I had a guy in the last class, we had a cold front come through and we were doing static apnea the second day. Now, the first day he was doing, I think he was doing four minute breath holds the second day because the temperature was much lower and he didn't have a really good suit. And now all of a sudden a cold front came through and it was like 60, 50 degrees outside and windy. His breath hold was a:30 just because he was shivering so much. So as soon as that shivering happens, your ability as a freediver from a breath holding standpoint is pretty much shot. Which is why we're really concerned about what kind of suits we have.

You know, this whole concept of conserving energy when you're trying to hold your breath reminds me of a recent movie I saw, the Mission Impossible Rogue Nation with Tom Cruise. Did you happen to see the freediving scene in that movie?

Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I saw that. And you know the agency that I teach for Performance Freediving International, Kirk Kroc is the head of Performance Freediving. He actually worked directly with Tom Cruise for training for, for that movie.

Interesting. Was there anything that they did special for that particular movie that you're aware of as far as like training Tom for the free diving scene or anything you noticed that was accurate or inaccurate in that particular part of Mission Impossible?

Yeah, they did a lot of training. So Kirk went up there and worked with him for quite a bit. In fact, he was doing six minute statics. So six minute breath holds he got up to during the training. So definitely kind of Kirk put him through some so Freediving boot camp to get him prepped for what he needed to do in that role.

So one of the ways that you taught us how to get up to, we didn't do like a six minute static apnea, but we messed around a little bit with these apnea tables, oxygen apnea tables, and CO2 apnea tables. And he told a pretty amusing story of what you do when you're like watching movies or watching TV on the couch. Can you explain how you use apnea when you're just like sitting around watching tv?

Sure. So, I mean, one of the ways, I mean, it seems it's pretty obvious. The question I always get is, well, how can you practice? How do you get better at holding your breath? Well, in essence, the simple answer is hold your breath more. There are these idea of these tables. There's O2 tables and there's CO2 tables. As a free diver, we have to learn to tolerate low levels of oxygen. Then as we're holding our breath when that oxygen is getting consumed, one of the waste products that's created is CO2. So the CO2 level is rising. So as a free diver, I have to tolerate low levels of oxygen and high levels of CO2. So there are these breath holding tables that are designed by doing repetitive breath holds. They're designed to make you have lower and lower oxygen labels. Or you do CO2 tables where they're designed to put your body in a higher, higher level of CO2. The idea is through repetitive training, you can tolerate lower version of oxygen and higher amounts of CO2. One of the things that I can do as an instructor, which you saw in class and certainly you can share with your reader and listeners, I'm certainly not this super athletic, amazingly fit guy. Yet during class I can do repetitive hundred foot dives over and over again with very short surface interval because I've specifically trained my body to tolerate quite high levels of CO2, whereas if you had that level of CO2 in your body, you would think, wow, this sucks. I can't hold my breath anymore. Whereas I get that same level of CO2 and my body's just kind of used to it. So what I do is I use these tables. So if I'm watching tv, I mean, yeah, I know there's a lot of things I need to do to get in shape. I go to the gym and all these other things. But I like these tables because I can sit on the couch, watch some really stupid television, and in fact, practice doing these breath holds while I'm, in essence doing nothing sitting on the couch. So my girlfriend Kathy is very supportive of what I do, but she does not like when I'm doing breath hold stuff on the couch because I start having contractions and they can be kind of extremely uncomfortable. And she is not a big fan of having to watch that as I sit next to her on the couch.

So when you're doing these apnea tables and you have those contractions, what exactly are the contractions that you feel? Because I got these both when I was doing the apnea on dry land, but also the apnea in the water. What exactly is the contraction that you feel?

Yeah, so if you're curious what a contraction feels like, just sit on the couch and hold your breath. At some point, you are going to feel a contraction. So what a contraction is, is it's your diaphragm. In essence, it's a little bit like a hiccup, but think more uncomfortable. But in essence, what's happening is you're holding your breath. 80% of your urge to breathe comes from that rise in carbon dioxide. So as I was saying earlier, as you're holding your breath, your carbon dioxide level is constantly rising. At some point, it gets to the point where the alarm goes off and your body says, you know what, that's too much CO2. Why don't you take a breath? And your body, your diaphragm will literally try to pull the air in your lungs because it's actually trying to make you take a breath. But you, as a free diver, shake your head and go, uh, not yet, maybe a little bit, but not quite yet. The contraction goes away. Then 10, 15 seconds later, it says, hey, look, I was serious, serious. Take a breath and feel another contraction. Then after, it'll go away. Then 10 seconds later, it comes back and this time it's stronger. You're going to feel more of a tug, more of a contraction. And as you keep holding your breath, the contractions come quicker. There's less time between these contractions and they become quite strong. Whereas in the beginning, you might just feel a slight little pull from the diaphragm. That happens to me. I just kind of laugh. I'm like, that tickles. That doesn't bother me at all. Now, after a couple of minutes of dealing with that, I'm not laughing at the contractions because they get quite uncomfortable. In fact, the diaphragm, chest and shoulders altogether are trying to make me take a breath.

Interesting. So when you're doing these apnea tables and you're sitting on the couch, it's the same thing. Your diaphragm is just going into these contractions. It's trying to get you to take a breath, and you're essentially trying to force yourself to not take a breath, even though your entire body is screaming for you, too.

Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that's nice about if I'm sitting on the couch doing this kind of work is I'm not in the water. I'm not. I only have one thing to think about is what I'm doing. And so the name of the game is, when I start. We talk about this a little bit in the intermediate class, and certainly as I start working with more competitive type diversity, the name of the game is I wish I could teach you how to hold your breath a long time and not have contractions. Right. But I'm not that good. You're going to have contractions, you're going to have that uncomfortableness. So the name of the game is how can you become more comfortable with it? When I'm doing these breath holds on the couch, I am trying to minimize the amount that that contraction is happening. I can't stop it. But instead of a really strong contraction where my shoulders and everything really start trying to make me take a breath, if I can really try to minimize that muscle movement, because that extra muscle movement is burning oxygen, and then it just feels worse. So if I can practice minimizing the contraction, keeping them calmer, one that just makes the breath hold feel easier, and it's using less oxygen because I've got less muscle activity.

So when you're doing these type of seated apnea tables, like when you're sitting on the couch watching a movie. And by the way, for those of you listening in, I will link to examples of static apnea tables that you can use over on the show Notes for this episode, you just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com freediver that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Freediver all one word. And I'll link to those and some of the other things that Ted and I talk about. But, Ted, when you're doing these static apnea tables, is there danger of blacking out on land? I've thought about that before since I returned from your course. When I'm doing some of these apnea holds, I even downloaded an app to walk me through it. Do you find that people black out when they're sitting on the couch watching movies next to their girlfriend?

So, I mean, anytime you're gonna be holding your breath, certainly there's gonna be a risk of that. Now, as you start doing these breath holds during tables, what you'll probably find is you will complete one table, and you're like, hey, I could complete that one. So now let me do the next one. It's a little bit harder. And then you're going to complete that one. And you're like, yeah, I can do that one. Let me do the next one. It's a little bit harder. And as you're increasing that difficulty level. Yeah, you are. In fact, I mean, you know, you, Ben, me, Ted, there's just, you know, each one of us only has, you know, there's only so long we can hold our breath for it. At some point, we're going to reach the point that we would black out. So as you're progressing through those tables. Yeah, you know, you could run into that. What? I would say a couple things. I would say, you know, in general, you know, your average listener who just wants to, you know, sit and hold his breath probably, you know, wouldn't have the ability to hold their breath till they blacked out because the body's response would, you know, be, hey, what the heck are you doing? Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. So they're going to get really strong urges to breathe. That would override that. But the thing is, through training is you're learning to override that, which in essence is making you get closer and closer to the point where you would possibly have a hypoxic event, which would be a loss of motor control or blackout. Now, that being said, I've actually seen people have a blackout while doing these tables. Now, that being said, I don't want anyone to blackout. And I'm not saying blackout is good for us, but what I will say is if you were to blackout on dry land while you're for instance, holding your breath on the couch, what's going to happen is as soon as you blackout, your body is going to make you take a breath. So what we talk about in the program is it's not blackout that causes us the problem. The thing that kills the spear fishermen, the swimmers and all this stuff is they blackout in the water and then there's no one there. So yeah, when the body makes them take a breath, it's all water because they sink down to the bottom of the ocean bottom pool and that's what kills them every time. So it's not in essence the blackout that causes the major problem, it's the inhalation of the water. So if you're doing this on dry land, you know, sitting on the couch, certainly much less risk because I mean, even if you were to blackout, you're gonna take a breath afterwards.

So you've actually goti'm glad you brought this up because we've, we've got guys like Wim Hof, the Iceman, who combines like underwater cold water swimming and breath holding. And there's a guy named Brian McKenzie who runs like the Performance breathing. They're like workshops in performance breathing. And then Laird Hamilton has YouTube videos now of him doing underwater breath hold workouts like carrying dumbbells and kettlebells across the bottom of the pool. So a lot of people now are kind of experimenting with breath holding and not just breath holding on the couch while watching a movie, but breath holding underwater. I heard about one fellow who recently blacked out and nearly died doing this. I believe that this was somebody who Tim Ferriss was referring to. And I'm curious, when these type of blackouts occur, when people are actually training breath holding in the water, what's going on physiologically that causes the actual blackout? First of all, if you can explain what's going on, why someone blacks out, and then also how something like that could be avoided.

Sure. So anytime you're doing, you know, these, these training regimens where they're doing underwater, you know, work underwater, like you're talking about some guy lifting weights underwater, whatever. I mean, absolutely, any type of breath holding in the water definitely has some serious risks associated with it. So I mean, let's take a look at static apnea. So person's just face down holding their breath, they're not moving, let's say they're in a freediving competition, for instance, and they're trying to hold their breath for as long as possible to get as many points as possible. But obviously they, they want to come, they don't want to black out. So let's, let's imagine there was someone that was just holding their breath. They were face down in the pool. And this person just kept holding their breath, in fact, until they blacked out. So what's happening is as you're holding your breath, your body is doing a lot of making a lot of very intelligent decisions to manage the supply and demand issues of oxygen that in fact, you're putting it through. What's happening is you're holding your breath. The body starts, well, let's say when I hold my breath, because when I hold my breath, my body is going on. My body does a lot of work to help me because of this mammalian diet reflex. As I start holding my breath around, let's say two or three minute mark, I'm going to start feeling, feeling my first kind of contractions. That's the diaphragm trying to pull the air in. And so once it realizes that, hey, this guy's not going to take a breath, My body says, you know what? I know Teddy. In fact, he does this all the time. He's not going to take a breath for quite a while. So I'm going to try to get him to breathe, but he's probably not going to. So let's start reducing the demand for oxygen. Let's do things like let's drop that heart rate, right? So that's when we see someone's upwards 50% dropping of the heart rate. So my heart rate will drop to help deal with the supply demand of oxygen. Another thing that will happen is the blood vessels in my fingers and toe, something's called blood shunting. The blood vessels in my fingers and toes constrict. And what that does is that pushes more blood to my core because my body says, hey, Ted's sitting here holding his breath in the pool. Do I really need to pump oxygen all the way down to his pinky toes and his pinky fingers? No. Let's constrict those blood vessels and put more blood to the core, where we really got to take care of heart, lung, and brain. Another part of that mammalian dive reflex is the spleen. The spleen will contract. The spleen is a reservoir for red blood cells. And we've definitely seen through studies that an elite freediver, just the aspect of holding their breath, will compress that spleen. And why that's exciting is because it's a reservoir for red blood cells, it will actually push more red blood cells in our body. So if you were to look at get blood work done of a competitive after a dive, it would look like they were blood doping because that hematocrit percentage would actually go up. But in essence, to get back to your original question, all these things are happening to help me hold my breath longer. But at some point there's just not enough oxygen to maintain consciousness. In fact, what the body does is the body's trying to make me breathe. It's giving me really strong signals to take a breath. But if I won't, one of the things the body says is, you know what, I can't really be bothered to fuel consciousness. That's just the demand for oxygen that we can't deal with. We're going to institute a blackout. When it institutes blackout, what the body's now doing is it says, I can't afford to keep this guy conscious, but I've just got to keep the blood flow to the heart, lung and brain. So I'm going to institute blackout. So when that happens, the number one rule in freediving is protect the airway. And luckily our body knows that. So when it institutes a blackout, the laryngospasm, the throat will shut off, which is trying to stop water from going into the lungs. So then that person, at that point, the person will black out. You would see, you would always tell that the person blacked out by a release of air, right? Because that's what's going to happen is your release of air out of the mouth. And then at that point, what's going to happen is depending on what sort of procedures you have in place. You know, if you're a swimmer who's doing over unders by yourself and you black out on that point, you're just going to sink down to the bottom of the pool. And you know, after a minute or two, you're going to take terminal gas. And if that's on the bottom of the pool, that's going to be a fatality. Now, if it's someone that's using proper techniques and training that we teach in the program, so there's someone trained in freediving rescue, if that were to happen at that point, they would institute one of the rescue techniques that we teach. And you remember clearly in the class where they would be blowing across the eyes and that's going to stimulate a breathing response. Because what happens is the reason we teach this idea of if there's a blacked out freediver to blow across the eyes is the body. Once you black out in the water, it is intentionally not taking a breath because the body knows, hey, if I take a breath right now, there's a good chance it's going to be a lung full of water, and that's going to be the end of me. So let's maybe not take a breath. And so when we teach, the program is we teach them to put them on their back, take their mask off, and blow across the eyes. And what that does is that sends a direct signal to the brain that says, hey, we're in air. It's safe to take a breath. And that's why, typically, when you blow across the eyes like that, you're going to get an immediate breath.

Interesting. Okay, so what it comes down to then would be if you're going to experiment with long breath holds or underwater workouts, you wouldn't want to be by yourself, and you would also want to learn proper safety techniques to where, if you did blackout, someone could get you out of the water, breathe across your eyes, wake you up, and ensure that no water was actually getting into your lungs.

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Unfortunately, this sport, like many sports, has lots of risks associated with it. And because freediving is getting more popular for all those things that you just described, you know, people see this, you know, some guy on the Internet, you know, doing these underwater breath holding works, and then they start to do those sort of things, yet they don't understand the risks. And that's why, you know, we probably lose 50 to 100 people a year in the US and it's, it's growing, right? As the sport is growing, the fatality rates are growing.

Right.

I mean, just the other day I saw across my Facebook feed as spearfish in Hawaii died recently, we had two seals that died in the pool. There's a lot of people that die in the pool because they see all this interesting freediving stuff. So they go, I'm gonna practice. Right? And so they're holding their breath underwater, yet they don't have any understanding of what safe freediving looks like. Right. Lifeguards, they don't understand freediving. They have no training. They don't know what to do if someone blacks out. They don't know how to recognize what it is. So in general, not in general specifically, safe freediving looks like this. Anytime you're holding your breath in the water, you want to have someone that's trained in freediving rescue techniques watching you. And that's someone who's taken a freediving course. That's not the lifeguard. They don't know anything about freediving that's not someone who's an EMT because they don't know anything about freediving rescues. I've taught EMTs, they're like, I wouldn't know what to done. It's not a scuba instructor, it's not a swim coach, it's someone that has this very specific type of training that you're really only going to get through a licensed freediving class.

Now you've also experimented a bit with breath holding combined with jogging and dry land exercise. Can you explain why you did that and what you found from that experiment?

Yeah, so I've got a treadmill in the house. And so this was kind of when I was getting geared up for some competitive freediving training I was doing. What I would do is I would get on the treadmill and I would start at a really low speed and I would slowly ramp up the speed. I'm also using the heart rate monitor so I can see what's going on with my heart rate. So imagine if I start at 3mph and I'm slowly increasing it up to 7 or 8 in the beginning of that exercise. In fact, easy, right? My heart rate's not super elevated because I'm walking, I'm running very slow. So in essence, while the exercise is easy, what I was doing is. And I've got the heart rate graph I can send you if you read it. See, it's actually pretty cool looking, but I would do 30 minutes of breathing, 30 minutes of not breathing as I'm slowly jogging, right? And so what you'll see is if you look at the heart rate graph. So I do that probably 10 times and I'm slowly increasing the speed and at some point I start running so fast I can't maintain the 30 seconds of breathing and 30 seconds of not. But what you will see if you look at the heart rate graph is you'll see these, you'll see 10 massive drops. My heart rate, I mean, just the line just drops straight down to the bottom. So it's cool. Even in the act of me running on the treadmill, as soon as I stop breathing, my body says, yep, I know Ted, he's in that. When he stops breathing, we need to start, he's going to hold his breath for a while. So let's plummet that heart rate even though I'm running on the treadmill. So I do exercises like that to just get used to the breath hold part of it. And then towards the end of the exercise I'm trying to do high red zone training. So, in fact, once I get up to, you know, I'm in the red zone at that point, you know, I can run at that speed for a bit, but not super long. But in order to maintain in the red zone for maybe 10 or 15 minutes, once I get to that speed where I can't maintain anymore, then I just start slowly bringing the speed down on the treadmill, yet increasing the incline. So at the end, you know, I might only be going walking two miles an hour because the incline is as steep as it'll go. I'm still maintaining in that red zone for 10, 15 minutes.

So you're essentially dropping your heart rate by holding your breath during exercise.

Yeah, absolutely.

Interesting. You'll find a lot of people will now use deep nasal breathing to get themselves into a little bit less of a fight and flight state during exercise. And this concept of holding your breath is really interesting. Since you told me a little bit about this, I've actually been practicing a few of these breath holds when I'm doing, for example, squats or push ups, a little bit of isometric work, some of my yoga that I do in a sauna. And it's really interesting. You have to mentally get over that little feeling of panic mode. I don't know if you experience this, but your body wants to panic a little bit. And then once you overcome that, you kind of achieve that same almost deep meditative state you can get when you're doing something like nasal breathing.

Yeah. And definitely what you're experiencing is it's not natural. I mean, for the average person, they stop breathing and their body's gonna. The body's gonna go crazy. Right. Because all their life, they breathe in, they breathe out. They breathe in, they breathe out. As soon as that stops, the body's going, what in the heck are you doing? So what you're experiencing is you didn't have a big freediving background, but through the course, you start to learn all these techniques. And all these techniques are directly tapping in your mammalian dive reflex. And even though you don't have any experience in the sport, you can feel all these benefits that I'm talking about. Right? You can start to feel. Yeah, I can actually, once I follow the formula, then I can hold my breath for so much longer. There's actually a relaxing side of it. So it's just. It just takes a bit to get all that sorted out. Now that you're kind of out of the program and experimenting, you can still experience some of that.

Yeah, it's a lot of fun to play around with some of this breath work, because prior to this point, I was only doing like nasal breathing and rhythmic breathing. And now I can actually use a little bit of this breath holding as well, which I actually always thought would be a bad thing. You know, increase in intra abdominal pressure and, you know, herniations and all the potential things that could happen when you hold your breath. But as long as you control the amount of force that you're producing, you know, don't do it during say like 1 RM deadlift, for example. It actually is pretty cool. What happens now as far as other types of training that free divers do do, like specific kinds of weight training or specific forms of cardiovascular training. Are there things that you see free divers doing as far as the type of exercise modes or workouts that they do on dry land to better prepare themselves to either activate their mammalian dive reflex or hold their breath for a longer period of time or withstand any of the other rigors of freediving?

Oh, yeah, there's tons of things that we do. So let's see one you mentioned. How can they increase their dive reflex? Well, the good news is just the aspect of freediving. Every time you go free diving, your dive reflex gets stronger. Every time you hold your breath, your dive reflex gets stronger. But what you'll see is competitive freedivers. And you saw this in class. There is a ritual that we went through right when we went out on the rig in the ocean. The first thing we did was we did these pull downs. These pull downs, we're going to depth, but we're doing it in a very calm manner. So it keeps our heart rate low, yet we're getting adjusted, we're getting to depth, which increases the dive reflex. More competitive freedivers, they have this very ritualistic way of doing everything. And it's just designed so that when the body has done the same thing every time the same way, that dive reflex starts to kick in even stronger and stronger. So there's the idea of just repetitive breath holding work and doing things that are ritual, certainly, which gives us an advantage.

Now, as far as those pull downs go, do you want to explain to people via audio what those are or do you think that that would be dangerous to inform people over audio without them being in the course?

Yeah, any stuff me like telling them to go pull themselves underwater and hang out down there.

Understood. And what I can tell you, listening in, is that we definitely had rituals, from breath holding rituals to mammalian dive reflex activation rituals that Ted brought us through his course. And I definitely don't expect Somebody to come onto this show and reveal all the secrets of their free diving course. But ritual was definitely a big part of it. Now, what about specific exercises or specific forms of workouts? Ted, can you give some examples of the type of workouts that form freedivers do?

Sure. I mean, I can certainly, you know, share things that I've done. So one of the things, you know, just like any sport that's competitive in nature, you know, when I'm going out and performing, you know, years ago, when I was, you know, I was, you know, freediving around the 200 foot range, what would happen is when I would be coming up from 200ft, you know, my legs would just give out, right? The lactic burn would just become so strong. In fact, the last 20ft, I felt like I just couldn't kick my legs anymore. So what's happening is because These dives are 200 foot dives, let's see, that's roughly a two minute dive. So that's two minutes of me not breathing, so I don't get renewed oxygen. But coming up from 200ft, that puts a serious strain on the legs. So I was limited back then due to just what my legs could tolerate. The lack of burn would come too much. The lack of strong enough, they couldn't tolerate the lactic acid. What I would do is, okay, so now I know that's my weakness. So anytime you identify the weakness is pretty simple. Just train it out of the system. So what I would do would go to the gym and I would do a lot of exercises that were getting my quads, and the quads were the muscles that were giving out on me. When I was coming up from dives. I would do, in essence, apnea weight training. So let's say I'm on that. I'm not sure what you call it, but I'm seated and I've got a big sled that I'm pushing up, that's hitting the quads. So what I would do is put up a small amount of weight, not heavy at all. And then I would do, I would hold my breath and do as many reps as I can for 30 seconds. And so what I'm wanting to do is just really, really, you know, get that lactic burn on the legs. So I was doing a lot of workouts like that quite heavily for a while because I knew that was my weakness. And then, not surprisingly, I went back, you know, next year to the competition. And then, you know, I was diving in the 70, 80 meter range, which is, you know, 250, 270. And my legs weren't a problem, even though I was diving much deeper. But it was just because I trained, you know, kind of trained that out.

So that. That's breath holds while weightlifting.

Yeah.

Okay, got it. What about pool work? What about a pool workout that someone could do, say like a lap swim or a triathlete? That would be something similar to what like a free diver would do.

Well, we do a wide variety of exercises in the pool. In essence, we're holding our breath and swimming laps underwater. You know, the issue with that is, you know, anytime I'm doing that, I have someone trained in freediving rescue doing that with me. The average listener's not.

Yeah.

So let's maybe not talk about that.

Okay. Well, just to clarify though, you did mention something I think we should hone in on, and that is how many times can you swim back and forth in a 25 yard pool? Because it was an ungodly number that you told us about during the actual freediving course.

Yeah, so my longest, dynamic apnea. So dynamic apnea is yet another discipline that we, as competitive freedivers compete in. And it's very simply, you know, how far can you go on one breath distance? So my longest is, and I did this in the World Championships in 2011 was 177 meters. Right. So that's, let's see, six, seven, seven.

Yeah, that's. That's slightly over seven laps in a 25 yard pool underwater, back and forth. And that's literally doing like. Are you using like a breaststroke motion underwater?

No, for that discipline, I was using a monofin. So, you know, your readers or listeners may have seen, have seen competitive freedivers with these big. They look like whale tails. Right. So that's what, you know, they're monofins. So that is for that event, I was using a monofin. So I was using a big monofin. So we have my hands kind of in front of me, and then it's kind of a dolphin kick with the monofin to get the distance right.

And one of the things that you told us was this type of pool work should definitely be done with a partner. Not a lifeguard looking at you from the pool, but an actual partner who's there in the water with you, who's well versed in saving, blowing on the eyes, getting you out of the pool. All those things that we learned during the free dive course. But some of the workouts that you showed us during one day in the classroom, that I believe some of the Professional free divers would doing were these back and forth like 100 meter sprint repeats all while holding your breath. And then these folks would go to the deep end, kick vertically, touch bottom, go back up, do that 10 times over and over and over again, and then do ventilation in between each effort. But it really interesting. They're almost like these hybrid strength training pool workouts that some of these freedivers are doing that I found intriguing. I haven't yet, yet hunted down a partner here in Spokane, Washington to do some of these workouts with me, but it was pretty crazy. And then also, yeah, you showed us some of these gym training workouts where folks are doing leg extensions and leg curls and leg presses, but basically doing essentially some of these static apnea tables in between or holding their breath during these efforts. So just this, I think it's really interesting, this hybrid form of training and breath work that not a lot of people are tapping into. So quite intriguing.

Yeah, the, the freediving training is this, it is interesting. I mean it's, and you know, looking, you know, looking at what competitor freedivers go through and as a, you know, competitive freediver myself, I mean the training, it's brutal. It's, it's, it's, it's really not fun. Right. I mean, you know, you're doing these repeated breath holds and you know, you're, they're just, it's just uncomfortable. But it's the way any training works. Any hard training, that last set you're doing isn't particularly comfortable, but that's what you need to do to get the results. In essence, what we're trying to do is we are trying to put our body through these extremes of what's going to happen when we're doing our breath holding work so that our body gets more used to it. In fact, what I would tell you is most of the training is way more uncomfortable and harder than any of the things that I would actually do during the, during a dive. In fact, that's the way any training works. You train in the extreme. And so then when I'm actually doing other stuff, I'm like, oh wow, this is so much easier than that awful stuff I was doing in the pool. But, you know, that's the way training works.

Yeah. Now how about gear like, you know, biohacks or special pieces of equipment like you'll have some people training with these elevation training masks. Other people will use like these inspiratory and expiratory resistive devices like a power lung that you breathe in and out of I'm curious what your take is on those. And also if there are specific tools that you'd recommend free divers or people looking to increase their breath hold actually should use.

As far as tools, I would say no. I'll just, I'll bring this up because I get asked about this a lot. Like, for instance, there's thing called power lung. There's a thing called expand alun. And this is. It's a, you know, basically you put it in your mouth, you breathe through it, and it's, it's. It's harder to breathe. Right. So it's, in fact, it's resistance training for breathing. And so there's one in particular called the expand the lung. And you know, obviously they're going to say that that thing expands your lung volume. So I get asked about that a lot. So let me go through the. That type of breathing resistance device. I'm not a fan of those. Because resistance training, as all your listeners will know, builds muscle. Right. So what this device does is it puts muscles on our rib cage. So as you remember from class, what restricts how big a breath you can take is not the size of your lungs. It's actually the cage that the lungs are surrounded in. We've actually documented through several studies that we can increase our lung volume. And the way that we do that is through stretching. If I can make the ribcage more flexible, then that allows me to take a bigger breath. That's why I don't like devices like that because all that does is put muscle on that area. As a free diver, I don't need fast in and out movement. Maybe like a cyclist or a triathlon might. I just want to take the biggest breath I can. So we increase that through stretching, which you remember in the class, those stretches in order to allow you to take a bigger breath.

Right. The stretches where we'd like, not only stretch out the lungs and the rib cage, but then you also had stretches that we'd do where you would have us exhale all of the oxygen from our lungs and then go into kind of a contorted kneeling position simply to enable our bodies to withstand the mental and physical rigors of the diaphragmatic spasms. Those were pretty tough exercises as well.

Yeah. So that's the diaphragm stretches. So those are a part of every competitor freedivers training regimen. If you've ever seen. A lot of people have seen pictures of competitive freedivers, and they're like, what the heck is that guy doing? He's sitting Cross legged and his stomach's all sucked in. So that's in fact what exercises I had doing with Ben when he took the program where this idea of diaphragm stretches. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to increase the flexibility of the diaphragm because that is a really big limiting factor to what sort of depth you can dive to. And kind of a short explanation of that is as follows. The lungs, as we dive underwater, obviously our lungs are shrinking, right? They're compressing. And what's happening is the diaphragm is in essence connected to the lungs. So as the lungs compress, the diaphragm gets kind of stretched, as, you know, stretched up towards the lungs as the lungs are compressing. And so for the average person, your average listener, they've never pushed out every ounce of air they have in their lungs. Why would you ever do that? Right? So what's happening is the average diver, when they start diving down to depth 60, 70, 80ft, because their lungs are compressing, their diaphragm is getting sucked in, and it gets stretched past the point where it's comfortable, and it triggers an urge to breathe. Now, that urge to breathe has nothing to do with the oxygen levels being low. It has nothing to do with the CO2 levels being high. It has to do with the fact that that diaphragm is stretched so far beyond what's comfortable for it, it triggers an urge to breathe. Because as soon as you take a breath, the diaphragm then goes back to what's normal.

Got it.

So that's why this idea of stretching the diaphragm is so key among competitive freedivers. And if you talk to any competitive freediver, I challenge you to find one that doesn't say they do those diaphragm stretches all the time.

Now, when you're feeling this urge to breathe, this spasm, some people will say that that spasm could be alleviated if you say, didn't have as much CO2 circulating in your bloodstream. And I know there's this concept of blowing off CO2. I believe it's called, like scrubbing CO2 that some freedivers do. What do you think of that practice? Practice of trying to eliminate as much CO2 as possible?

Well, there's. Yeah, there's pros and I mean. All right, so CO2 is the largest drive of our urge to breathe, right? So if you ask your traditional physiologist, he'll tell you that 80% of the urge to breathe comes from high CO2 levels, and then 20% comes from low oxygen levels. So CO2 is, in essence, what's driving the urge to breathe. So it would seem to make sense that if CO2 is causing that urge to breathe, well, man, what I should do before I hold my breath is just get rid of as much CO2 as possible. So then it takes longer for that CO2 level to rise to a point when it becomes a problem. So one technique that accomplishes that is something called hyperventilation, which is exactly what I used to do before I took a freediving class where before I'm diving, I'm taking really big breaths in and out. And what that does is it dumps off your CO2. So now, because there's so little CO2, it takes a long time for that CO2 level to rise until you get that urge to breathe. So at this point, your listeners probably seem like, well, that sounds like a pretty great deal. I guess I need to hyperventilate. So the problem with that is. And by the way, before I took a freediving class, that's exactly what I did. I hyperventilated. Now, there's a major safety issue with that. So when you hyperventilate, yeah, it does blow off the CO2. And what that does for you is it delays your urge to breathe. But the big thing that it does that's a safety issue, which is why we don't do it, is it actually physically reduces the amount of oxygen available to your body, because when you hyperventilate like that, you're getting rid of all the CO2. Now, if you look at your blood during a breath hold, what you would find is, in fact, your blood becomes more acidic as we hold our breath, because CO2 is acidic. So as we're holding our breath, we get more and more CO2. So the acidity level of our blood is rising. Now, then there's this crazy thing called the Bohr effect. You remember me talking about it in class, the hemoglobin dissociation curve. And that thing illustrates is that if there's not enough CO2 or if our blood isn't acidic enough, it affects the strength of the bond between hemoglobin and oxygen. What can happen is, if you blow off too much CO2, your blood's not acidic enough. When your blood is not acidic enough, the strength of the bond between hemoglobin and oxygen is too strong. And now what happens is all your hemoglobin molecules have a couple of oxygen molecules attached to it that your body can't activate, it, can't use, because the strength of the bond is too strong. So in essence, that's why hyperventilation one, it does delay your urge to breathe. I won't deny that it does that, but it physically reduces the amount of oxygen available to your body. And so it all has to tie into this hemoglobinization curve and has to tie into the CO2 levels. If you look at competitive freedivers, well, they're all aware of the Bohr effect, they're all aware of what I'm talking about. So they're going to say, hey, I don't want to get rid of CO2, I want as much of it as possible, because the more CO2 I have in my system, the more acidic my blood is. The more acidic my blood is, the weaker the bond between the hemoglobin and oxygen is going to be. So what they'll do is they have completely different breathing techniques from techniques that I taught you. If you were to look at William Trubridge, the way he breathes up, so if you were to watch him breathing up, it would be pretty much as if you were sitting on the couch watching tv. I mean, he would be breathing in just minimal, barely in, barely out. And the reason he does that is he wants as much CO2 in his body as possible. So the more CO2 he has, the more acidic his blood is, which lowers the strength of the bond between hemoglobin and oxygen. So listeners might say, okay, well, clearly that's the way we should all breathe is this minimal thing that all the top competitive freedivers do. But absolutely, that's not what you should do, because, in fact, that's not what I taught you to do. The reason that he does that is because he wants to get every possible advantage. The downside is CO2 is what triggers the urge to breathe. So he starts the dive already with the high level of CO2. So that tactic, in fact, makes every dive feel more uncomfortable. Urge to breathe is going to come sooner, urge to breathe is going to be stronger. But he does get that advantage of having that extra bit of oxygen. So it's something that, yeah, elite freedivers are going to do things very differently than I might teach a student to do, because you can remember what those 80 foot dives in the class felt like. And would you like me to instruct you in a way to breathe that would make that diet feel worse?

Right. Okay, that makes sense. So what you'd want to do then, if you didn't want the Extreme discomfort of the urge to breathe, you would actually want to blow off CO2. You'd want to breathe out a little bit more than you breathe in. And you'd want to do that so that as you blow off CO2, you reduce the body's urge to want to breathe. That can occur and make things uncomfortable when you're underwater. But for some of these more elite free divers, some of these folks who just are simply focused on maximizing breath hold and aren't as concerned about the discomfort, they are actually not trying to blow off so much CO2 because they know that they, they need a certain amount of CO2, a certain amount of acidosis in order for oxygen to be able to dissociate from hemoglobin and go into tissue where they're gonna need it when they're underwater for those ungodly amounts of time.

Yeah, absolutely. So if you look at the two extremes, you know, top competitive freedivers are gonna do what I call minimal breathing, just in and out as if they're on the couch. Then you've got the other extreme, which is hardcore hyperventilation. Before you go. We absolutely don't want to do that because that absolutely increases our risk of blacking out because it's delaying. That is, you can stay down there longer, but it's also physically reducing the amount of oxygen. So that's really why it's super dangerous. So what we pick is somewhere in the middle. And if you know the two second explanation of how I breathe or how you should breathe while you're freediving is in general, you want to be exhaling out for a lot more than you're inhaling. So if you listen to me, take a breath right now, you hear it in and then. You can hear I'm spending less time inhaling, more time exhaling. That's going to, generally speaking, what we want to be doing, and that's going.

To allow you to blow off a little bit of extra CO2.

Yes, it's good. Yes. That blow off makes me uncomfortable because blowing off is what hyperventilation is, which is what we don't want to do. But in essence, it's going to be that nice happening.

Yeah. It's really interesting to compare your breathing advice with somebody like, say this Wim Hof, who's another very, very popular breath holding guy who does a lot of the cold water swimming. He's the guy I mentioned earlier, known as the Iceman, where his recommendation is to basically breathe out very, very relaxed and not really focus too much on the exhale and then do nice big inhales. With the purpose of retaining CO2, I guess of getting into this more acidotic state where you're going to be slightly uncomfortable, but you might get more oxygen dissociation. So it sounds like his method would be a little bit more uncomfortable for folks, potentially get them a little bit longer break breath hold, but definitely not be a happy place to be necessarily. And if you were free diving, potentially a stressful place to be.

Yeah, I mean, so I've actually had, I had one of his students take the course.

Oh, really?

Yeah, so he was, it was interesting. That was really the kind of first I had heard about him. But definitely sounds like he's doing some pretty interesting stuff.

Yeah, yeah, he is. It's interesting. I'll. I'll send you a link to the podcast that I did with him because he actually goes into some of his, his, some of his breathwork techniques. Now I know we're coming up against time, but as far as the freediving course that you do down there in Fort Lauderdale, the immersion freediving course, I know a lot of people are going to be interested in that. And just to clarify, you have a beginner, an intermediate and an advanced level of that course, Correct?

Correct.

Okay. So for folks listening who have never done this before, if they were going to say sign up for a beginner course, what can they expect from something like that?

Sure, I've got a three day course and basically that course is for people that are water people that just don't have any experience free diving. You weren't a free diver, but you certainly spent a lot of time in the water through all your swimming. Basically, as long as you're comfortable in the water. I get a lot of people that may be scuba divers. Yeah, as long as you're comfortable in the water, the course makes sense as far as how the course is organized. It's a three day course. It's all day Friday and they're long day, 10, 12 hour days. So it's all day Friday we do classroom from like 8 until 2, then we go to the pool in the afternoon and that's where we actually start putting all the skills to the test or actually doing breath holds in the pool. And then Saturday we go to the pool again and then we go in the ocean diving in the afternoon on Saturday and then on Sunday we finish around two or three o' clock and we actually go diving a second time. So the average student in that program does a two and a half to three and a half minute breath hold in the pool and the average student does a 60 foot dive. Typically, the thing that will limit students from not getting 60ft is the ability to properly equalize correctly using a very specific technique called frenzel. And so one of the things that I do, which is pretty unique, is when students sign up for my course, they get several videos that will kind of walk through how to do frenzel. It will also allow them to figure out if they're doing it the incorrect way or the correct way. And then if they're doing it incorrectly, then I'll schedule a Skype session with them and able to via the Skype session before class starts.

Gotcha. Cool. Yeah. And the combination of classroom time and pool time and ocean time, I, I found extremely helpful. And I wound up taking the intermediate course just because as a triathlete and open water swimmer, I felt pretty comfortable in the water and pretty ready to dive in, pun intended, at that level. But yeah. I highly recommend ted's course to any of you who are interested in getting into this stuff a little bit more intensively. And I'll put a link to that as well as everything else that we talked about in the shownotes to today's episode. And you can get those over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

And.

At BenGreenfieldFitness.com freediver I'll link to the book called Deep that got me interested in all this stuff in the first place, to ted's course, to my previous podcast with Wim hof, to the static apnea tables that we talked about, the static apnea table app that I personally use, and a lot more. So you can check all that out over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com free diver and in the meantime, Ted, thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing all this stuff with us, man.

Oh, you're welcome. I absolutely enjoyed it. And it was, it was really cool to get you in the program because I enjoy people that have, you know, most of my students don't have that extreme, you know, background in physiology and all that sort of stuff. So it was, it was cool to have you in the program.

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm looking forward to the potential of a spearfishing adventure in 2016, which, which I know you and I are already talking about. And for those of you listening in, stay tuned because I'm sure that I'll be putting out an article on that whole sport as well. So in the meantime, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Ted Hardy, signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. Go to BenGreenfield Fitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

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