The Extreme Sport You've Probably Never Heard Of, And How You Can Use It's Renegade Techniques To Become Superhuman.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And as you know, if you've been a podcast listener for a little while or read the articles@BenGreenfieldFitness.com, you know that one of the things that I really focus on with myself and with some of the athletes that, that I work with is breath control. Whether that be something like box breathing, meaning like a four count in a four count hold, four count out followed by a four count hold. Whether it be something like the use of a power lung to resist your breathing, or one of these training masks that you wear to resist your breathing, or even like underwater hypoxic sets where you're swimming underwater back and forth while holding your breath to do things like increase production of growth hormone or DHEA hea, or kind of get your heart rate up without necessarily putting an excessive strain on your muscles. Well, in today's podcast, we are, pun intended, gonna take the deep, deep dive into breath work. Because I have on the call with me the author of a book that I've just recently finished reading that blew my freaking mind when it comes to what the human body is, is capable of as far as things like breath control and breath holding, and also what we can learn from some of the seemingly supernatural things that fish like whales and sharks and seals do. So my guest today is journalist James Nestor. And James just wrote this book called Deep Free Diving Renegade Science and what the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves. And in the book, he basically travels around the world interviewing this gang of extreme freediving athletes and all of these researchers who are way on the cutting edge when it comes to figuring out what we can learn from what's going on in the ocean and our own performance and our own bodies. And this book really was, I gotta say, like, you know, I read, as I think I've told some of you guys before, anywhere from three to five books every single week, and it's pretty few and far between that I actually choose ones to feature on the podcast. And this was definitely one of the books that I just found amazing in terms of the remarkable feats that humans and other animals are capable of performing when it comes to breath holding. And also some of the things we'll talk about today, like echolocation and alternate forms of communication and all sorts of cool stuff. So, James, thank you so much for coming on the call today, man.

Thanks a lot, Ben. Great to be here.

So let's start off here. Why'd you write a book about freediving?

Well, I had no real intention on writing a book about freediving. In fact, up until around two years ago, I had never really heard of freediving, didn't do it, didn't know anyone who had. And then I was sent by Outside magazine to cover something called the World Freediving Championships in Kalamata, Greece. And it absolutely blew my mind. I saw these guys take a seat, single breath of air, and dive down without any weights, without any fins, down to around 350ft and back again on dives that lasted about four minutes. And I just thought, wow, if we're able to do that, what else are we able to do? What else don't I know about? And that's what sort of sparked the book idea and was a platform for the rest of the chapters in the book.

So these guys are. When you're talking about freediving, as far as freediving as an actual sport, I know that you talk about more than just free diving in the book, but as far as free diving, for people who aren't familiar with what that is, what exactly does free diving involve?

Freediving is taking a single breath of air and using only your body as a mechanism to dive deep in the ocean. No scuba? No. A lot of these guys don't even wear fins. Some people free dive nude. It's just a complete, completely stripped down version, as it were, of getting in touch with the ocean and exploring the ocean. And you might think, well, you know, well, I can do that. You know, I've gone snorkeling before. I can go down 12ft, you know, 15ft. But just with a little bit of practice, I learned that anyone in reasonable health can dive down to 100ft. Anyone in reasonable health can hold his or her breath around 4 minutes, 5 minutes. The world record breath hold now is 12 minutes and 30 seconds. So we're meant to do this, we're meant to dive deep. And once you sort of figure that out, the whole lotion really opens up.

In one part of the book, you go into what actually happens as far as, like, the physiology as you dive to greater and greater depths, like what the heart does and what the lungs do. I thought that that was really fascinating. Can you kind of, kind of give an overview, like, kind of, you Know, the way that you lay it out is you kind of go foot by foot as far as what happens as you're getting closer and closer to that 300 foot mark. Can you, can you go into that a little bit for people listening in?

Sure. Well, the second water touches your face, something amazing happens. Your heart rate will lower about 25% of its normal resting rate. Your brain waves will soften and blood will start flooding from your extremities into your core. Now, these reflexes will compound and increase more and more the deeper you go, until at around 300ft, 350ft, depths that are normally reached by competitive divers, your body completely transforms. It's like you almost become something else. All of these reflexes are called the mammalian dive reflexes, or what scientists call the master switch of life. And scientists have been studying this stuff for about 50 or 60 years. And it turns out that humans not only have these reflexes, but whales have them and dolphins have them and seals have them. And all of these animals use these reflexes to dive to incredible depths in the ocean. If they didn't have these reflexes, they wouldn't be able to dive so deep. They'd be crushed under the pressure. Turns out humans have them too. And we're just now kind of discovering our potential in the water. We're just now really honing these reflexes and seeing how far we can go.

Now, wasn't it thought, like at some point that if you went that far down, like if you went below, I don't remember if it was like 100ft or 200ft or something like that, that you just d. That it was physiologically impossible to get that low?

Yeah, what they pretty interesting bit of history. In the 17th and 18th centuries, sailors from all over the world, from who were sailing in Japan, the South Pacific, Persian Gulf, all over the place, came back to Europe and said, hey, we just saw these sponge divers and pearl divers dive down to around 150ft and stay down there for 15 minutes, 15 minutes at a time. Nobody believed them. And Even in the 1950s, scientists said the deepest a human could dive in the water and survive was 100ft. Any deeper and our lungs would suffer a fatal collapse. Well, since then, divers have dived down to 700ft on a single breath of air. And again, we've been able to hold our breath for about 12 minutes and 30 seconds, just two and a half minutes shy of these fabricated reports. And these guys haven't been doing this for that long. Competitive diving has only been around for about 15 years or so. So we're just now really seeing our potential and our ability to dive. And it goes against so much of what medical textbooks and scientists have said is possible. And that's when it got really thrilling to me. It's. Nobody knows our potential in water yet.

Yeah. And I think, like, in some ways, when you're talking about this master switch of life, like, I know for me, I haven't gone that deep. I've talked to some people who have, even at 30 or 40ft, come back up and just felt absolutely amazing. And one of the things that you talk about in the book, about how the body can actually do this without dying is this concept of shunting blood into vital organs and away from the peripheries. I think it's called peripheral vasoconstriction, where your body kind of shunts blood around and you actually get more blood, I guess, passing through cell walls, almost like. Is it like a hyperoxygenation that occurs in the vital organs?

Well, what happens is water and plasma starts. The organ walls start allowing for water and plasma to penetrate through them so they won't be crushed under the pressure. And the lungs, human lungs. It's amazing what happens in water. Just at 3,33ft, your lungs will be half the size they will be at the surface. At 66ft, they'll be a third of their size. At 99ft, they'll be a quarter, and so on and so on and so on. So the only way our lungs cannot collapse under pressures below 100ft is by having the alveoli, these little sacs that process the exchange of gas in our lungs. They engorge with blood, they saturate with blood to stop the lungs from collapsing. Now, this is the same exact thing that happens with sperm whales who can dive to around 10,000ft, and with seals who can dive down to around 3,000ft. Humans have this same reaction. And, you know, the deeper you go, this is just the alveoli engorging with blood. And the peripheral vasoconstriction are just a few of these master switches that occur. The heart rate will automatically lower the lower and lower you go in the water. Some free divers have recorded heart rates as low as 14 beats per minute at depths at around 200ft. And some divers have even recorded heart rates of seven beats per minute. According to our understanding of human physiology, that's impossible. But these guys do it all the time, and they're really rewriting the textbooks on what's possible for us to do in the water.

Now, as far as like a crossover for people who are wanting to improve their performance on dry land, I think this is really interesting. I think this may have been my initial impetus to hunt down and read your book was I heard that some Olympic athletes who weren't necessarily like water athletes, like swimmers, but just Olympic athletes in other sports were looking into freediving as a way to enhance their dry land competition. I think it was like the New York Times or something like that that a story on this. Are there actual benefits that happen to you when you're on dry land, when you're going down to depths like this?

Oh, there's really so many. I mean, we're talking about the extremes. People diving down to 700ft and holding the breath for 12 minutes. You don't need to do anything close to that to really experience that master switch of life. You literally need to dunk your head in water and it starts happening. As far as breath hold and breath holding for different activities and different sports performance, a number of athletes, from skiers to joggers to weightlifters have been taking freediving courses because it not only helps them breathe properly, it helps them focus. When you free dive, you have. You cannot be stressed out. You cannot have any sort of lack of focus. When you're down 300ft and you need to get back up 300ft on that single breath of air, you need to be like, absolutely in the zone. There's no. You have no other alternative to slip out and say, oh, I don't feel like doing this. Oh, I'm going to quit. You can't quit. So even learning how to dive down to 30ft, 40ft, even 20ft, and holding your breath underwater focuses your mind in a certain way that allows you to cope with more stressful situations. The article that I have a feeling you read was in the Wall Street Journal and it was talking about how Red Bull was now bringing some of their athletes out to Kona in Hawaii and having them do free diving training. And they were just saying that it does incredible things, especially for the jitters right before you start a big race to breathe properly, to focus yourself, and to know you're going to get through it.

Yeah, I just found that article. I'm going to link to it. By the way, for those of you listening in, I'll put a link to all the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com freedive. Yeah, it's called Olympians in Search of a Breathtaking Experience. It's on the Wall Street Journal. Amazing. So they're just learning to hold their breath for more than five minutes. So like you say, you don't have to go to extremes of 10 or 12 minutes to do this. But that was a really interesting article. Now you yourself, as you wrote this book, I thought it was kind of interesting how you talked about your own journey because you basically learned how to do some of these things yourself, right?

Yeah, I kind of had to. I had no interest in competitive free diving. It just didn't really appeal to me. Some of these guys are really on the fringes. They're doing some pretty dangerous stuff. But I was able to be introduced at that competition to some free divers who were using freediving to do some really incredible research with oceanic animals. Not only exploring their own connection to the ocean, but also exploring their connection with these other animals. And, you know, I remember the first couple chapters that I was doing for magazine stories. I did one for Men's Journal. I just ended up sitting on the deck of the boat watching these guys diving, these, you know, three minute dives, diving with sharks, diving with dolphins. I just thought, damn, if I'm going to write about these guys and really understand what they're doing, I need to get in there. And so, lucky enough for me, they were some of the best. Some of these guys were world renowned freedivers. So I learned really from the best and started freediving myself again. Not competitively, not down hundreds and hundreds of feet, but anyone will be amazed how quickly this stuff, how quickly you adapt to it. And that's one thing I wanted to mention about the Red Bull athletes. Anyone in reasonable health can go down 200ft, hold your breath five minutes. We just don't think we can. So this is much more of a mental switch you have to click in your brain than a physical one. I'm sure a lot of your listeners are very fit people. Well, they're probably capable of going very, very deep. They just don't know it yet.

Yeah, I mean, like, like I've been. Well, you know, I go do the Ironman in Kona every year, or at least have for five years. And I go there obviously in good shape, right, because I'm going to do a freaking Ironman. But I swim out to, there's this coffee boat out there and they have this contest where if you swim down, I think it's about 16, 17ft, you grab a handful of sand, you come back up, they give you a pair of goggles. And every time I've done that, it has been extremely uncomfortable as Though I feel like my entire head is about to explode.

And.

And I try and do that equalizing. Right, that you would normally do, for example, if you're on an airplane or, you know, that we're kind of taught to do, you know, like, kind of plug your nose and push out your ears. And it doesn't seem to work that well the deeper that you go. In the book, you talk about some new form of equalization that free divers use. Can you go into this special technique that you had to learn?

Absolutely. And any freediving course that's halfway decent is going to start with equalization, because that's the thing that people just can't get, and that's how people can get hurt and blow out their eardrums if they just keep pushing and they feel any pain. When you're free diving, you shouldn't be feeling any pain, only pleasure. And the second you feel pain, get up to the surface. So there's the traditional way of equalizing called the Valsalva method, which I'm sure many of you.

That was the one I was talking about. Yeah, the Valsalva.

So that's just pushing air, blowing, like puffing up your cheeks and pushing air into your sinus cavities, forcing air in there. That's what I use for, you know, my whole life on airplanes, even in the water, scuba diving, I learned from freedivers that just doesn't work, especially at depth, when there isn't enough air in your lungs to shuffle around your sinus cavity. So there's this new method used by jet pilots and by every other freediver called the Frenzel method, which it's very, extremely complicated, so I won't bore you with it, but it's essentially bringing air up from your stomach, keeping it in your head area in your sinus cavities, and shuffling it back and forth. It takes about a half an hour to get it, but once you do, you can equalize your ears within a second. And that's how often good free divers will be equalizing their ears to get to depth every second. Bam, bam, bam, bam.

Yeah. I found. I read your book, and I noticed that. Well, in the book, you talk about this guy who actually will teach you how to do this technique, like on Skype, like you can get on him. What was that guy's name that you learned the French technique from?

Ted Hardy. And this is just a good. His H A R T Y at immersion freediving. Great guy. He's the only guy who does this on stage. Skype. It's pretty cheap. Half an hour, start to finish, you're done, you've got it, and you'll never equalize any other way. It's just such a more efficient way of equalizing. So, yeah, that's the way to do it.

And his name is Ted Hardy. Does he have a website, do you know?

Yeah, it's Immersion Freediving, and he does have a website. I could send you that. You can put it on the link as well.

I'll look it up and put it in the show notes. Because actually, yesterday I just flew back from Tel Aviv and before I left, I downloaded a Frenzel technique PDF to my Kindle and was just practicing it a little bit on the plane. And, yeah, it's almost like swallowing air and then forcing the air back up your mouth and into your head again. And it actually does seem to work way better than the Valsalva. But now that I've done it on an airplane, I actually have to go find a pool to go down deep and try it in the pool. But it's very, very cool how there's this alternate technique that apparently lets you go much, much deeper than normal. And it's called the Frenzel. Right? F, R E N, Z, E, L. That's right.

And next time you go down to 17ft to get those goggles, if you're using that method, you'll go down in about 10 seconds, grab those goggles, and come back. It just makes everything so easy. That's a great first step to free diving, learning that method.

Awesome.

Hey, quick break here. This is Jessa Greenfield, Ben's boss. I mean, wife. I'm not sure if you know this, but Ben, being the complete nerd that he is, keeps track of everything he's ever recommended and found to work really well and puts it all over at greenfield fitness systems.com from books to lab tests to supplements, he has it all there. So whether you want to build muscle, burn fat, fix your gut, sleep, better balance hormones, learn about smart drugs, whatever, it's all there. Check it out@GreenfieldFitnessystems.com okay, now back to the podcast.

So how about when you're not in the water? I noticed that as you went through the book and talked about you learning how to free dive and how to get more comfortable at depths and also how to increase your breath hold capacity, you were doing some interesting things, like actual drills that weren't in the water. Can you talk a little bit about those and about ways that people can can train their breath when they're not in the water.

Sure. A great way of doing this is just by doing yoga and by doing breathing patterns while doing yoga. I learned from Hanley Prinsloo, a top free diver and a top freediving instructor, who's even instructed a rugby team in South Africa just to help them both mentally and physically prepare for that match. So you just see how far free diving can go into other sports. But she taught me about the three chambers in the lungs, how there's a throat chamber, there's a chest chamber, and a stomach chamber, and how we're so accustomed to breathing just at the very top of our lungs, and we're only using about a third of our capacity. So the first thing she does is lays her students down on a yoga mat and just teaches them to use the full capacity of their lungs. And once you do that, there are a number of different interval trainings you can do for breath holding. Basically holding your breath for a minute, then breathing up for two minutes, holding your breath for a minute and a half, breathing up for two minutes, so on and so forth, and increasing the time that you're holding your breath and decreasing the time you are breathing up. And you can find. You can just search freediving interval training. And people have developed little apps and all kinds of things to use to do that.

It sounds just like any other form of interval training. I mean, the same as you would do with run walk training, right?

That's exactly it. And so included in this interval training is walking breath holds, which is supposed to simulate a dive in which you breathe up for a couple of minutes and then you hold your breath and walk, say, 100ft slowly and then walk back that 100ft very slowly. And that's supposed to be roughly equivalent to holding your breath during a dive.

I actually started to try this just when I. Because I like to walk just to clear my head. And a lot of times when I'm in big cities, you know, I'm walking around to get from point A to point B. And, you know, typically, for example, when I'm in my car driving, I keep this thing called a power lung in my car. And when I'm stuck in traffic, every time I pass a mile marker, I have this rule that I have to do 10 sets of three seconds in and three seconds out of breath training. And now what. What I've been trying to do is about every half mile or so, when I'm out in a long walk, I'll just hold my breath for as long as I can. And I know it's not structured interval training, but it actually is pretty amazing how you can train your breath just while you're out walking around.

Yeah, yeah, you can do a lot of this stuff just if you're bored, on an airplane, in a hotel, whatever. I should make one very important note that obviously I'm saying everyone who's interested in freediving should take a course. Number one for two, don't go in your bathtub right now and try to hold your breath for five minutes. Like, bad idea. There's a right way of freediving training and there's a wrong way. The wrong way is doing this stuff alone. It's doing this stuff to hold your breath while you're driving on the i5 or whatever down to LA. You can go unconscious if you hold your breath for too long. So just there's so many safety precautions, but hopefully all of your listeners are very reasonable people and safe people and pragmatic people and they're going to do that. So with that out of the way, with the interval training, with walking, for instance, you're supposed to do it on a grassy surface. So if you get really light headed, like the worst that can happen, you fall down on the grass, no problem. At the same time you can do shorter. That's if you're really pushing it. If you're just acquainting your body with breath holding, you can do exactly what you've done. Walk around while you walk around city streets. And that's something that I did a lot of. And what's amazing is how quickly your body adapts. I know I mentioned that earlier, but you can, before you know it, from one day you're holding your breath two minutes, two weeks later you're holding your breath three and a half minutes to four minutes. This stuff happens very quickly. And not only do you notice these changes while you're freediving, obviously, but you notice them in other sports. I surf all the time, I work out all the time, and when I'm breathing properly I just have so much more energy and can really calm myself down in some stressful situations as well.

Now there's some really other interesting things that you talk about in the book because the whole book isn't just about free diving. Like you talk about some alternate forms of communication that sea animals use. For example, one of the things that you mentioned is electroreceptive sensing that fish use. Can you explain what exactly that is? Because I thought it was fascinating.

Sure. Well, at the beginning I was very interested in the human body's potential in water. And we've talked about that, our ability to dive deep. But I figured, like, wow, if. If we're able to do that, and I didn't know about it, like, what else is there that I don't know about? Like, what else is on the frontiers of science that people are exploring right now that's just been forgotten? And one of those things, and one of these connections to oceanic animals is electroreceptive sense as well as magnetoreceptive sense. Sharks are able to migrate thousands of miles across the ocean from one island to. To the other and back again. Well, how do they do that? How can you see where you're going when you're 1,000ft deep, when you're in cold water and in currents? And something else that's amazing that scientists discovered is not only are they migrating thousands of miles, but they do so in perfectly straight lines across the ocean. What researchers have discovered somewhat recently is that they're probably using a magnetoreceptive sense of specifically, they're able to home in on the Earth's magnetic field and use it as an internal gps. And it turns out that humans can do this too. We have had this ability. We've just like free diving, like swimming hundreds of feet underwater. We've just forgotten how to use it. And there's a bunch of emerging science that I go into in the book explaining what it is and how to use it.

Was this the part where they were blindfolding humans and they were finding their way around by using electromagnetism?

Yeah, exactly. That's what happened. They did a ton of studies, a thousand experiments in the 70s and 80s, and found that humans have an innate sense of direction. And it's not predicated on visual stimulus or hearing or anything. It's literally a sixth sense of direction. It's the same direction that migrating birds use, that butterflies use, that ants use, that sharks use, and whales and dolphins. Well, it turns out humans are able to use this, too. And we probably been using it for tens of thousands, even millions of years, but we've forgotten it lately because we have GPS on our phones, and we live in a gridded society of landmarks and streets.

There's even some talk. And before I read your book, I actually wasn't aware that humans had electromagnetic capabilities when it came to navigation. Most people know that the human body is an electric machine. Our cells run on electrochemical gradients. But. But as far as the magnetism component of that goes and the ability to use it to navigate, I hadn't thought about that much until I read your book. And one of the things that I did know though, is that they're talking about how birds and bees, for example, are having harder times navigating or birds flying south for the winter bee population die off, stuff like that. And one of the reasons that I've read that this may be happening is an actual change in the Earth's electromagnetism due to emerging technologies like cell phones and WI fi routers and satellites and all these things that are affecting. Affecting life on Earth from a magnetic standpoint. Have you come across any of that stuff?

It's absolutely true. I mean, they found without any doubt that WI fi screws up bees sense of direction. We know this is is happening right now, and it's probably really screwed up our sense of direction. But just like I was saying, we really don't need to rely on it too much. But the entire animal kingdom is almost every animal has some sense of magno receptive sense, some capability. It's interesting. If you put a teeny little magnet, I'm not talking about like a refrigerator magnet or anything like that, just a teeny piece of magnetite on the head of a bird or a turtle, they lose all sense of direction. They just start either swimming or flying in circles. So you see how sensitive this sense is. And you know, with all the electrical wires and WI fi in the world, I'm amazed that they're still able to fly around the way they do.

Yeah, it's crazy. It's why two of the things that I recommend to people, especially people who like flying airplanes a lot, are earthing or grounding, where you're actually standing outside in your bare feet, or using something like a grounding mat or an earthing mat. And then also just unplugging your WI fi router or turning the signal off and hardwiring into it just to make sure that you're taking care of your body's own magnetism. So it was interesting in your book to read about how there are some animals on the face of the planet or under the ocean that actually rely on this 24, 7 for their actual survival.

For sure. And if you think about us as humans, we're the first generation, we're the test cases for all of this technology. You know, in 20 years, I won't get into conspiracy theories here, but in 20 years we could find out that it's really screwing us up in some serious ways. We found that out with early cell phones, right? You know, they gave you cancer in your head. So we really don't know. And it's Best. I completely agree with you. It's best to err on the side being safe. And trust me, people, it doesn't hurt just to turn your email off for a number of hours. It will only help you.

So another form of communication that you talk about is echolocation. I thought that was pretty cool. And this was another, I believe, series of studies that they did with blind subjects. Can you talk about this echolocation form of communication?

Sure. This is pretty amazing stuff. They found out that sperm whales and dolphins and other oceanic animals use a sense of sonar called echolocation. What they do is they emit a vocalization, a click, and they wait to hear where that click, the echo of that click, where it comes back, how long it takes. And they use all that information to essentially see without their eyes, but to see with sounds. A sperm whale, for instance, can see a human from a mile deep in the ocean with this echolocation. It turns out that humans are also able to use echolocation. I met this amazing guy named Brian Bushway in Los Angeles. He lost his sight at 14. He was very active. He used to skateboard, ski, play guitar. All of a sudden, within two weeks, his optic nerves shriveled up. So he's not legally blind. He's completely blind. Well, now, 10 years later, Bushway is riding his bike through city streets. He's camping alone in the wilderness for weeks at a time. He can tell the difference between a tennis ball and a Rubik's cube on a table across of you all. By using this echolocation the dolphins and whales and bats use. He has essentially rewired his brain to see with sounds, with the frequencies of sounds, just the way you and I see the frequencies of light with our eyes. And they found. I'll just one more little tidbit here because this stuff is so fascinating, but when researchers put him in and other human echolocators and an fmri, they found the visual cortex of his brain lit up. So there was really no difference from what he was seeing, again with sounds, as to what you and I see with our eyes.

And you actually visited him and you yourself learned how to, like, echolocate.

Yeah, this guy's my hero. Because the blind community told him, you know, when he first went blind at 14, he said, the blind community basically gives you a cane and a dog, shows you where the post office is and where a restaurant is, and that's it. And they make you really rely on other people. They said to him, they made him feel really helpless, like he wasn't able to do anything anymore. And luckily he met another guy who would learn how to echolocate. And they formed this little group. And I mean, these guys are so badass. They travel around the world teaching other blind kids how to live completely independent lives through using this human echolocation. And he gave me a little course, about a half hour course. And again, it's just like free diving. It's just like magneto reception. You just tune into this when you close your eyes and just allow your body to do what it's supposed to do. You can do really amazing things. And within a half an hour, I was able to easily see the dimensions of the room around me to tell the difference between a glass surface and a plaster surface. All of these things really came to life in a new way just by listening. And again, it was one of those things that just amazed me of like, how much we're capable of and just don't know it until we really test our bodies a little bit.

That's what I was thinking. It's like, how many things can the human body do that because we are lazy or over reliant on technology, or we've simply lost the ability to be able to pass down skills like this. Just from a culture, storytelling and learning standpoint, how many things can we do that we don't even know about? It's nuts that you can walk around by just like clicking and making sounds and figuring out where you're at and what it is that's around you based off of the way that is coming back to your ears. It's crazy.

Absolutely. And they found, again, you know, many ancient cultures or cultures that have been around for a very long time have used these senses. We're just Western culture. We've developed technology so we don't need to use these senses. But they've been part of our ancestry, they're part of our DNA, all of these amazing abilities, and it doesn't take much to tap into them and remind ourselves of what we're capable of.

Now, let's say that people just want to start by learning how to free dive, or at least by learning the basics of freediving. I mean, you yourself went through a ton of different courses in the book because you got pretty immersed in the whole thing. But if people just wanted to learn how to do this themselves, what would be some of the best places for people to go? Like, there's this place in Kona that you talked about, but is there like a website or a resource or one place that you think is Best.

A course I took with Performance Freediving International was just awesome because it was completely pragmatic. Some courses can get a little hippy, dippy, a little mystical. I think what people really need to know is safety first and the mechanics, the body mechanics of how to free dive and that's what they teach. Again, you can include that on your page. Performance Freediving International holds they're now holding courses all over the place because freediving is starting to completely explode here in the US just as it's done in Europe for the past 20 years. But Florida's a big spot. They come to the west coast to San Diego, San Francisco, Monterey. It's all listed on their site. Ted Hardy is another guy. Immersion freediving. He does great stuff. He's the US Freediving team's coach, so he's very good.

How long does it take? I mean, did you devote three or four days to show up to a place? Is this something that's like a multi hour day course or. If somebody wants to learn this, what do they need to put aside as far as time?

Well, within two hours of my first course, I was holding my breath four minutes underwater and so was everyone else. So and, but I'm not special. I'm not like trying to be like showing off, you know, there were people, there were other people holding their breath, six minutes, seven minutes. It just goes to show that this stuff comes very, very quickly. It's usually a two day course. Some people offer a one day course. I'd suggest going longer rather than shorter because you want to be able to learn the mechanics of breath holding, the breathing patterns and all that. And then you want to apply this at depth. So I would go for at least a two day course. It's a really fun time too. It doesn't feel like work. It's just you're exploring this new thing and watching your body do what it naturally wants to do and it's just absolutely exhilarating.

Yeah, it looks like a bunch of them are in Florida, like Key Largo, St. Petersburg, Tampa, and then a bunch in Kona actually. So I know we have a lot of triathletes listening in. It doesn't look like they have any, sorry people around the time of the Ironman in Kona. But I guess if you wanted to go down to Kona and maybe throw in a little bit of triathlon training, you could throw in a freediving course too.

Sure. I would definitely do a little research. Some people have different philosophies on how they're doing their training. Just like any trainer in the world, I think what you want, the best route to go is just pragmatic and direct is the way to do it. And performance freediving is a really good school to start with.

Okay, cool. Well, I'm gonna put links to all this stuff in the show notes, so if you're listening in and you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com freedive I will not only put a link over to James and his book, which I think you should read, you would enjoy this book. It's not hard to read. I read it on an airplane ride. I mean, it's. It's pretty easy to get through, but it's amazing as far as what the ocean tells us about ourselves and also this renegade extreme sport. So I thought it was pretty cool. It is on my bucket list right now to learn how to free dive in 2015. So I'm sure if you're a podcast listener, you're going to hear more about this at some point. But James, thanks for coming on, man. This is fascinating.

Thank you very much. Have fun in the water.

All right, folks, this is Ben Greenfield and James Nestor, author of Deep Freediving, Renegade Science and what the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves. Signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com freedive have a great week.

Visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice.

Sam.