The Ultimate Guide To Freediving, Legal Blood Doping, Wim Hof Breathing, Increasing Your Breathhold Time, Underwater Ear Equalizing, Spearfishing & Much More!

You talk to people that free dive and they, you know, they get all starry eyed and they're just like, oh, it's just amazing that you'd be down there. It's just when you're not a free diver, you're like, you're like, how can being underwater and drowning and suffocating be relaxing? Well, when you do it right, you don't feel like you're drowning. You don't feel it. You're, you're just, you know, you're completely relaxed. You're weightless. It's, it's an unusual, it's not like anything else I've certainly ever done. And, you know, you talk to people that do it and they'll, they all swear by it.

I have a master's degree in physiology, biomechanics and human nutrition. I've spent the past two decades competing in some of the most masochistic events on the planet. From Sealfit, Kokoro, Spartan Ogoji, and the world's toughest mudder, to 13 Ironman triathlons, brutal bow hunts, adventure races, spearfishing, plant foraging, free diving, bodybuilding, and beyond. I combine this intense time in the trenches with a blend of ancestral wisdom and modern science. Search the globe for the world's top experts in performance, fat loss recovery, gut hormones, brain beauty, and brawn to deliver you this podcast. Everything you need to know to live an adventurous, joyful, and fulfilling life. My name is Ben Greenfield. Enjoy the ride. Well, hello. I had a blast on today's episode with my buddy Ted Hardy, where we talk about free diving and breath holding and spearfishing and a whole lot more. Even if you absolutely detest water, there's some very interesting takeaways in this particular show. Hey, folks, about two years ago, I wrote an article called how breath holding, blood doping, shark chasing, free diving, and ketosis can activate your body's most primal reflex. And I wrote that after I began to get involved with free diving and spearfishing, which I did when I discovered this book. This again was a couple years ago by an author named James Nestor. The name of the book was Deep Free Diving Renegade science and what the oceans tell us about ourselves. It was a great book, and it got me so interested in this concept of free diving and spearfishing that I decided to hunt down one of the best people in the US to actually teach me how to do this. So I hired this guy named Ted Hardy, Ted Hardy from Immersion Free Diving in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to certify me in free diving so that I Could then learn how to spearfish and also how to increase my breath hold, get better at, at equalizing underwater, be able to dive more than 15ft, which I could never do in my life without getting ear pain. And I couldn't figure out how to equalize that depth. And so I hooked up with this guy named Ted hardy. He's, he's six feet tall. He's 230 pounds. He's like a big guy. It looks like a, like a boxer, not like a guy you'd expect to be diving at incredibly efficient oxygen capacity to depths deeper than most of us have ever gone. But he has cracked the code on this stuff. He opened up my eyes to a whole new world of free diving. I spent 96 hours of my life down in Florida getting trained by him in the classroom and in the pool and eventually in the ocean. And Ted, what's most interesting about him is a, he holds the record for hypoxic underwater swimming in the pool. He can do seven full lengths in the pool without a single breath. And he has anemia, which means his blood can't deliver oxygen as efficiently to his muscles and brain as most of the world's population. This means he has a relatively low blood hematocrit level. Yet he's still figured out how to crack the code on free diving. With a condition that would leave most folks huffing and puffing for air after they climb a flight of stairs. He was selected as the team captain for the US Freediving team at the Freediving World Championships. He's also a scuba instructor. He's just. His wealth of knowledge is absolutely staggering when it comes to everything to do with breath holding and free diving. Now, I interviewed him on the podcast a couple of years ago, and we delved into everything from like, using static apnea tables to how cold and cold water could actually inhibit your ability to be able to hold your breath. We've talked about his whole backstory, and today we're going to be diving into a lot more in terms of, like, the biology and the physiology of free diving, how to take bigger breaths, how to equalize properly. But if you want to hear Ted's whole backstory, because we're going to spend more time on the free diving component than the backstory component, then just go listen to my first podcast with Ted, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to link to that first podcast with Ted and I'm also going to link to everything that we talk about on today's show. If you just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com freediving podcast. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Freediving Podcast. Ted, welcome to the show, man.

I'm excited to be on the show and excited to chat with you guys.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, like, I, I feel like I talk to you on a frequent basis because it seems like every time I've got, like, the tiniest question about spearfishing gear or, or free diving or anything else, you're. You're just like an email away. So we, we tend to chat back and forth quite a bit, but I figured it was high time I actually got you back on the show because, well, I'm. I'm gonna be spearfishing next month down in Kona, and I know a lot of people are interested in this emerging kind of knowledge of how good some of this stuff is for you. And by the way, if you're listening in and you just have no clue why the hell you'd want to get in the water and dive more than 15ft and maybe grab a spear gun and go hunt after tasty fish, we're going to, we're going to fill you in on the show. So, actually, Tad, I think that'd be a perfect kind of jumping off point here or a perfect topic to dive into, pun intended, as we get going. What is it that happens to the body during free diving? Why is it that this is something that Olympic athletes are doing and people are now using to enhance their vagus nerve function? What's the deal with the biological benefits of this?

Well, I mean, freediving is, you know, I don't need to tell you, it's exploding right now, right? I mean, it's getting super, super popular. So more and more people are getting into freediving. We see, you know, almost all of the scuba agencies now are jumping on the freediving bandwagon because, I mean, freediving, it's awesome. So it does a lot of interesting things. Like, yoga is super popular, and if you go to almost any yoga class, one of the first things they're going to do is they're going alter how you breathe. And guess what? We, as freedivers do? We alter how we breathe. In fact, it's very similar to the breathing that we might do as a freediver is what you might do in yoga. So one of the first things my students notice is when I start teaching them the breathing we use for freediving, they go through the breathing pattern for like, three minutes, and everyone's like, wow, I feel great. I feel Totally relaxed. Right. Because it works. Right. So freediving is a way to access all of that stuff in the water. In the ocean, you get a chance to see the marine life. And unlike scuba, you get to be actually a part of it because you're not this loud mechanical thing that's swimming through the water. You're actually free diving, holding your breath and it's a lot of fun. If it's something you've never tried. Now it's easier than ever to get involved in the sport.

Yeah, that's actually one of the things I like the most is I'll fish from a boat or I'll fish from the shore with a fly fishing rod or a reel. And you know, you're kind of blind fishing. You're, you're throwing your hook in there. You may or may not get a legal fish or a non catch and release fish that you could actually go home and cook up. And then you put on your wetsuit and you put on your mask and you dive into the water with an actual spear gun. And all of a sudden you're down there in the coral. You have this amazing feeling of relaxation. All the worries of the world just slip away. And you're exercising, you're cold, you're holding your breath. So you're tapping into all the benefits that we're going to talk about when it comes to, you know, the mammalian dive reflex, which I'm going to ask you about, and the spleen compression that happens when you, when you dive deep. But even if you don't get a fish, you feel amazing at the end of a couple hours of spearfishing just because you're, you're looking at beautiful coral and seeing amazing nature and scenery and swimming with the fish that kind of swim up to you because you're not near in your foreign looking scuba diving gear. And then when you do see a fish, let's say you see a big grouper that you want to go after. It's not like you're on the edge of the shore like blindly throwing the hook in, hoping that that fish is the one that bites. You just go and hunt that fish, which is, which is amazing. You hunt it, you get it, you bring it up to the surface or you put it on your stringer and, and then you go home and have a fish cook. So yeah, I mean, like, it's for, for me it's, it's just way, way better than, than regular fishing. But, but let's get into the physiology here. Can you talk to me specifically? Let's start off with the mammalian dive reflex. What is that and why would we want to activate that?

So the mammalian dive reflex is, you know, it's genetically coded in every human being on the planet. Dolphins, seals and whales are mammals. We as human beings are mammals, right? So dolphin, seals and whales are full time residents of the water. We are part time residents of the water. So dolphin, seals and whales, one of the reasons they can dive so incredibly deep and do all these things that they can do is because they have something called the mammalian dive reflex. And it's absolutely something that we have too. So one of the things that I or other instructors will do in a freediving class is the reason that we can get anyone to hold their breath for two to three minutes is I know how to reach into the body. Press the button, turn the knobs, adjust the dials to your actual freediving physiology and make that dive reflex come out. Now, everyone has the dive reflex, but it's considered like it's graded, right? So my dive reflex is much stronger than yours because I dive all the time, yet you compare me to a world record free diver, their dive reflex is going to be much stronger than mine. Now, the reflex itself is composed of several components, right? And so I'll kind of go through those. One of them is bradycardia, which is just a fancy name for rapid onset of the lowering of the heart rate. So you'll see the heart rate drop upwards of 50% as soon as the body has a contraction. So the contraction is happening, you're holding your breath for a certain amount of time. Your body's going to say, hey, this is maybe, you know, maybe you should take a breath and it's going to trigger a contraction. So contractions feels like if you never had one, it's like a hiccup. If you hold your breath long enough, you'll have one. And it's actually the body trying to draw that, draw that, make you take a breath. But we as free divers are going to say, no, not quite yet. Now that contraction is going to be obviously trying to make you take a breath. So one of the things that the body does is now that it realizes that you're not going to breathe, it's going to say, hey, let's lower the demand of oxygen. So it actually drops that heart rate up to 50 beats to try to be more oxygen, conserve the oxygen. That's a very helpful part of the diet reflux. There are several other components. One of the things that happens is the blood vessels and the fingers and the Toes will constrict. Right. And the idea is it's trying to push all the blood to our core where we need it. Heart, lung, and brains. That's also why we get the pee reflex. Right. Free divers and scuba divers are probably familiar with the fact as soon as they get in the water, they feel like they have to pee. Now it's even stronger.

That's what's going on. Yeah, I mean, like, it happens even when you're just cold in general. So. So what's happening is your peripheral organs or your peripheral extremities are constricting. And when that happens, it actually. Does it cause like a vasodilation of the vessels leading into the areas responsible for urination or how exactly is that working?

Well, it's just, it's pushing all of the. All of a sudden, all the fluid, you know, from the blood vessels that are shrinking are coming into the core. And then at that point, they're going, hey, there's too much fluid in here. We got to get rid of that. And that's going to trigger that. That kind of trigger that urge to. Urge to pee. And it's definitely strong. Stronger with free divers than scuba divers. You still get it both ways. But the breath holding has access, does it as well. So for me, you know, if I do a deep dive, like, you know, let's say I'm teaching a class and I'm doing, you know, 100 plus foot dives, almost every time I come up, I'll have an urge to urge to go to the bathroom. Right. Just, you know, just a tiny bit. It's like almost every time.

Yeah.

But that depth trigger exacerbates me too.

Me too. Now, I've talked a lot on the show before about the vagus nerve and the importance of vagal nerve tone to have a healthy nervous system response, healthy feedback to the heart, healthy balance of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. A lot of people track heart rate variability right now, high heart rate variability is a good sign you recovered, that your nervous system is ready to train or ready for stress. And in many people with poor vagal nerve function, one of the main reasons their HRV is low is because of that poor vagal nerve function. Now, from what I understand, when we activate that mammalian dive reflex, we somehow trigger that vagus nerve to become more toned, because that's what's producing that bradycardia, that lowering of the heart rate that you talked about. Now, when it comes to things like heart rate variability or the vagus nerve have you looked into that or tracked that at all yourself.

That's, that's really something that I don't. I mean, I, I know all this, what you're saying is true, but it's not something that I have a lot of area of expertise on. I mean, certainly, you know, freedivers, we talk about that. I know those things happen when we're holding our breath, but it's not something I've done a lot of research.

It'd be fascinating to see like kind of a study of free divers and heart rate variability, because I'd, I'd guess theirs is profoundly higher than, than their, than, than, you know, the general population. I mean, people who do like Wim Hof breathing, which I want to ask you about here in a bit. And you know, breath holding, get that. But I think once you add in that, that cold water exposure, getting the face under, which you don't get in like a, like a cryotherapy chamber, right. You got to get into the water. You see that improvement in vagal nerve tone that I think is, is very impressive.

It would be interesting to see if I could get some of my competitive freediver friends, you know, during a competition where they're going to be going through this a lot as more and more of them have the ability to track, because it's a lot easier to track that now than it used to be. That would be something interesting. Reach out to those guys and see what happens. So if I can do that, I will let you interpret the results I'll be interested to see.

Yeah, it would be very interesting. We just get them an oura ring, which is the ring that will. Well, you know what, the oura ring tracks it during sleep. It wouldn't track it during the actual dive. We could see what's happening during a night of sleep afterwards. The other way to do it would be like the whoop wristband would do it. That, that's one that could track it in real time. So they could put on this wristband during their dives. And I'm pretty sure that's water resistant to a hundred meters or so. So that's about as deep as most of the folks are gonna are gonna be now. What about the spleen? There was a research study, it's a relatively new research study, but it looked at what happens when just dry land, not even in the water, you hold your breath. In this study, they did five maximal apneas, like five maximal breath holds without being in the water. And what they noted in these folks was an improvement in terms of red blood cell production and blood flow in and out of the spleen. So what's the connection between the spleen and breath holding and the spleen and diving?

Yeah, so that is another part of that mammalian dive reflex. Right. So you got bradycardia, you've got the blood shunting and then spleen and contraction. So, you know, I had first heard of that probably maybe 15 years ago. They had done some. Kirk, the head of performance freediving, had done some studies and kind of saw that. So the first thing they did was they put. They put Tanya Streeter in a hyperbaric chamber, which simulates going to depth. And they measured, I believe it was a 20% decrease in volume of the spleen. And they also measured an increase in the hematocrit. Right. So the spleen is a reservoir for red blood cells. It's like the hospital. So when that thing compresses, it's shooting more red blood cells in the system, increasing your oxygen carrying capacity. So then the researchers said, oh, it's not because of breath holding, it was just because of the pressure of being in the hyperbaric chamber that did it. So then later, they did an experiment with Mandy Cruikshank where she literally just laid down on the table and held her breath. And just holding her breath on dry land compresses the spleen. Right. So the idea is this is another reflex that's designed to increase our ability to hold our breath. Right. Because in essence, this is legal blood doping is what it is. Right. I mean, so this is increasing that hermatic level so that now the body can be better, can transport and store more oxygen. So one of the things I've always laugh about is when I talk about this in the program, in the intermediate course, I get into the splenic contractions and all this sort of stuff is I always envision one of these days you're going to turn on the Olympics and you're going to see this sprinter. He's going to have a little immersion logo on his uniform and he's going to be doing his warmups just like everyone else, except he's going to be holding his breath. Why? Because he's trying to trigger that spleenic contraction. He's going to win the gold medal. And then when they drug test them, they're going to be, oh, yeah, your hematocrit level is way too high. And they're going to test all this blood and there's going to be nothing in it. And then they're going to be like, we don't know what happened. Right. Because it's legal. It's legal, it's legal, it's legal. Blood doping. Now, what we don't know, and I would be interested to find out, maybe listeners or you or whatever, is we know that in elite athletes, just the aspect of holding your breath is going to induce a spleen and contraction. I can guarantee you if one of your listeners holds your breath, their spleen isn't going to contract. Right. Because the body is going to be going, what in the heck are you doing? You need to breathe. Whereas in an elite athlete, they're doing this all the time. So one of the things that happen is the more that you free dive, your body starts to work for you. It starts to do all these things to help you do better. One of the reasons I can do what I do is because my dive reflex is strong. Whereas if I've got a brand new student, their body's going, why aren't you breathing anymore? Right. So it's. That's what I mean by. It's a great response. The more that you do it, the stronger that dive reflex becomes and allows you to perform better as a freediver.

Yeah. Before I bought that book by James Nestor called Deep that I was talking about earlier, what had got me interested in the first place was, I believe, was an article James wrote. It was like, you know, New York Times or Wall Street Journal or one of these accessible websites that you can read news articles on. He wrote about how Olympic athletes were actually getting into free diving as a way to enhance performance, particularly because of the red blood cell production or the, you know, the, quote, blood doping, or the legal blood doping, unquote, that you were just alluding to. And just so you, the listener, understand what's going on here, you know, there's a long time. You know, my background is in exercise physiology, and physiologists long believed that the spleen was like this redundant organ that kind of shared the liver's function of destroying old red blood cells in the liver. And it actually has this secondary function because huge volumes of blood circulate through it. So it acts as, like, this reservoir of blood, and when you compress it, you get this big release of red blood cells. I mean, there are other things that could do that. Like, we know that getting into the sauna after a workout when you're already hot, that doesn't compress the spleen, but it does increase your red blood cell production and your erythropoietin production. And you could, and I do this. Sometimes I'll do breath holds in the sauna to kind of double up on that effect and get my spleen to jump into the game too. But it still doesn't really, really match what you get once you introduce the compression that occurs when you're actually in the water and diving to depth. So would you say there are any other benefits besides the spleen, the mammalian dive reflex, the vagus nerve, and just the freaking enjoyment that comes out of being in the water?

I mean, it's just overall well being. I mean, you talk to people that free dive and they, you know, they get all starry eyed and they're just like, oh, it's just amazing that you'd be down there. It's just, it's just completely, it's. When you're not a free diver, you're like, you're like, how can being underwater and drowning and suffocating be relaxing? Well, when you do it right, you don't feel like you're drowning, you don't feel it, you're, you're just, you know, you're completely relaxed, you're weightless. I mean, it is a, it's an unusual, it's not like anything else I've certainly ever done. And you talk to people that do it and they all swear by it.

Yeah. I guess the only other thing to consider here would be for people who like to exercise to lose weight or to burn calories. I mean, when you combine the cold with the rigors of diving down and coming back up, and diving down and coming back up, and then if you're spearfishing, you combine that with the resistance training aspect of having to pull the big elastic band on that, that roller. You know, basically what you're doing is exercise in a giant liquid cryotherapy chamber. And so you actually, I don't. Have you ever seen any studies or anything that looks like how many calories you would burn per hour doing something like freediving?

I heard or saw some study, but that was like seven, eight years ago. And it seemed very anecdotal, but it did. I think it was categorized in spearfishing, but it was in this report that I saw it was one of the highest ones. But I will tell you, it is exhausting. I mean, like, you know, I. Of all the workouts that I do when I teach a class, I come home and I'm exhausted. You know, three hours, you know, diving up and down that line. Exactly. Because you have the, not only of the, the work of doing all the dives, you've got the. Your body's trying to generate your body heat. You know, keep that up. So it is okay? It is, dude. It's a very challenging.

Dude, I just found the study. It is 11. I'm sorry, 1,120 calories per hour that you burn. Free diving. I mean, to put that into context, playing basketball is 400 calories an hour. Dancing is 200 calories an hour. The steeple chase is 700 calories. Hunting, hunting, which I love to do, like bow hunting, that's 175 calories per hour. Even boxing in the ring during a boxing match is 840 calories per hour. So free freediving is like, basically, I'm looking at this list. There's the only thing close to it is people who are racing, like running races and are doing their 5Ks in somewhere in the range of 14 to 16 minutes. Like that matches freedom. That's nuts.

Yeah.

Freediving, that's crazy.

So I'm actually, I wonder if, you know. So I understand that one, you know, the being in the water, your body generates a lot of energy to try to keep that, you know, to keep the temperature normal. That, that does a lot of work. But what I guess I don't understand, if you have any insight on, is the. Is how does the breath, Breath holding part of it. I mean, it certainly seems reasonable that it makes it more difficult, but I'm not sure how that translates into a calorie burn.

I don't think the breath hold would translate into a calorie burn aside from a shift in metabolic efficiency, like when oxygen is not present. And this is actually in relation to the ketogenic diet component of this, which is very interesting. When oxygen is not present, you can tend to kind of shift towards like, a little bit more glycolysis while you're in the water. And when you do that, you can increase what's called the glycogen sparing effect, meaning that once you're done with the dive, your body actually becomes very efficient at sparing carbohydrates, particularly via what's called beta oxidation, or burning of fats. And also the production of ketones to allow you, you know, ketones are the primary source of fuel for the diaphragm, for the liver, for the heart, and for the brain. And one could argue that those are used just as much as the muscles during free diving. And so not only would you increase your. Your fat burning capacity once you're done with the diving, but also this would. This would go to say, and there's anecdotal evidence from guys like Dominique d', Agostino, who was able to double his breath hold time from he did it from two to four minutes. He didn't do any training. All he did was shift himself into ketosis. I don't know if you remember, but when I went down to immersion freediving and took your course, I took those ketone supplements. I experimented with my breath hold with and without ketone supplements and I had like a 40 to 50 second increase in breath hold time. Not even like shifting to a high fat diet or like changing my diet dramatically, but just by using ketones. And so, you know, not only are you enhancing your body's own ability to use ketones, but one could argue, and again, I haven't seen any long term studies on this, that if you were to supplement with ketones or be on a ketogenic diet, you could actually increase your breath hold via that method as well.

Yeah, that's interesting. I'm curious if any other kind of elite divers are playing around with that.

I'm sure we'll get some divers listening in. So if you do dive and you listen in, you've experimented with ketosis, leave a comment over@bengreenfieldfitness.com freediving podcast in the absence of ketones though, what are some other ways that we can take bigger breaths or hold our breaths for a longer period of time? What are your ninja secrets for getting a longer breath hold time?

So it's a couple things. First off, one way is just take down if you want to increase your breath hold, whether you're freediver, spear fisherman, underwater basket weaver, whatever is you do underwater, you take down more fuel, Right? So simply taking a bigger breath. Now, the average person, if they take a breath, it's all from the chest, right? So you probably remember from the class me doing this thing where you do diaphragm, then chest, then shoulders than neck, right? So our rib cage, right. Is your lungs are basically trapped inside of the cage, the rib cage. And everyone says, oh, my lungs aren't that big. Well, it's not really your lungs that determine how big a breath you take, it's the flexibility of that rib cage. Right. So when I teach my students to take a breath, I teach it in a very specific manner. And it's designed to increase the size of that cage. Right. So if I could somehow mechanically grab your rib cage and pull it apart so it was double in size, your lungs could fill that up. It's not the lungs that's Limiting you. It's the cage. Right? So one, learning to take a bigger breath just by using the diaphragm, chest shoulders will make a huge difference, right? Typically about 20 to 30% is what my students will do. It's hard to demonstrate that over the podcast, but I do have a free course specifically on how to take a 23rd bigger breath. Right. So absolutely on that. So one thing is you want to hold your breath longer, take a bigger breath.

And by the way, for taking a bigger breath, is that that strategy that you talk where I know you have a whole course on this that I'll link to on the podcast, show notes. But in a NutShell, the quick 20 second overview, you're basically starting by breathing in from like your diaphragm and then you continue that breath going up to your chest and then you continue that breath up into the shoulders and then you kind of breathe and then you kind of look up towards the sky and just like you're sipping through a straw to like suck the rest of the breath in. Is that the technique you're referring to?

Yeah, yeah. Diaphragm, chest shoulders, right. Not just big, big, big breath. And so that definitely makes a huge difference. When I have students that have been free diving for, you know, Spear vision for 20, 30 years and they always look at me bug eyed afterwards. That's the biggest breath I've ever taken. Like. Yeah, yeah.

And you can do it, you can do it while you're, I mean, you taught me how to do this while you're, you're essentially, you know, prone in the water, looking down, floating in your wetsuit. All you do is you and you have a snorkel in, by the way, for those who don't know, you do wear a snorkel when you free dive. So you're able to breathe as you're looking down into the water at the fish or at the line, you're going to travel down if you're free diving and you can actually do that whole scenario if you think about it, while you're prone in the water and at the very end of the breath, you're on your stomach, but you just kind of shove your head forward and suck, suck, suck some more, right?

Yeah. And so that's how it works. So, you know, I always tell people it's, you know, competitive freediving is, you know, spearfishing. Recreational freediving is not the same as competitive freediving. So people tend to want to blow off competitive freedivers is this weird little subset. And my point is, like, look Competitive freedivers, we know how to dive really deep, we know how to stay down a really long time. You should be very interested in how we do that. And competitive freedivers, you know, they have very specific training methodologies they go through that allow them to do that. So it definitely makes sense. It doesn't mean you want to be better freediver, but if you want to improve your performance as a freediver, you should do all the things competitive freedivers do because it works.

What about the use of apnea, like static apnea tables? I'm going to link to some CO2 and O2 apnea tables in the show notes, but a lot of people don't know what those are. Can you explain what an apnea table is and what the difference would be between CO2 and O2 apnea?

Yeah. So I'll explain what a table, the tables are and I'm going to explain what, in my opinion is the most time effective and efficient way to do this. Now. So a table is. You hang out with freedivers, they talk about doing tables. Tables simply means it's you're doing a series of breath holds. Oftentimes it's eight breath holds in a row. And a table basically has two variables. It tells you how long you get to breathe up for and then it tells you how long you breathe for. Right. So let's look at a CO2 table. Well, the reason we do tables is freediving. We have to basically deal with two issues. We have to learn to tolerate low levels of oxygen, because as we hold our breath, our oxygen level drops when we consume that oxygen. CO2 is one of the waste products that's created. When we exhale, we're exhaling out that carbon dioxide. So as our oxygen level drops, CO2 level is rising. We have to tolerate high levels of CO2 and low levels of oxygen. So a carbon dioxide table might say something like this. You breathe up for two minutes and then you hold your breath for two minutes. And then the next one, you breathe up for a minute 45, and you hold your breath for two minutes and you breathe up for a minute 30, hold for two minute 15, hold for two minute, hold for two. And you're getting less and less time. And at the end, it might actually be you could only breathe up for 15 seconds, hold the breath for two minutes, repeat it again, 15 second, breathe up, hold for two. So what's happening is you're only holding your breath for two minutes every time, but because you're getting less and less time to breathe up your carbon dioxide level is getting your breath hold starts with more CO2. So therefore, at the end of the breath hold, you're going to have even more CO2. Right. So that is your typical CO2 table. That was the way I was taught to do it. That's, that's the way I did it. But I have definitely found, I think, a much better way. I certainly didn't create this. I first heard about it called the Wonka Table, and I believe it was from Freedive Paradise. But that might not be exactly correct.

But what'd you call Wonka Table?

Well, that was the guy. Richard Wonka is the guy that invented it, not Willie. Correct. Okay. And it's what I do and it's what I teach all my students to do. So there's an inherent problem with the traditional CO2 table, and it's as follows. If you remember, I said the very last two, I said you breathe up for 15 seconds and then you hold your breath for 2 minutes. And then you breathe up for 15 seconds again and you hold your breath for 2 minutes. Now, if you have 15 seconds to breathe between two 2 minute breath holds, there is only one possible way you can do that. And you're going to be breathing like this.

Yeah.

As fast as you can. You are going to be hyperventilating your head off. The table is designed so there's no other way for you to pass it than to hyperventilate. Now, Hyperventilation dumps your CO2, drops your CO2 level more than any possible way of breathing out there. And let's think back. What is the point of a CO2 table? It is supposed to teach you to tolerate high levels of CO2. Well, if that's what it's trying to do, why would it force you to breathe in such a way that dumps as much CO2 as humanly possible in that amount of time? In my opinion, those two things are counterintuitive. Right. They don't go together.

Right, Right.

Because you're lowering your CO2 as much as possible right before you hold your breath and you're trying to get high CO2. So here's the better way. Let's walk through this. Imagine I was gonna do two breath, let's say, let's call it two minutes. We're doing two minute breath hold. And beforehand I'm gonna take five breaths. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And then I'm gonna hold my breath for two minutes. But you know what? I'd like a little bit more CO2. I wanna start with more CO2. So instead of five breath, do you understand? If I took four breaths instead of five, I would start with a little bit more carbon dioxide because I had less time to get rid of it. Well, if I wanted more than four, I could do three, and I want more than that, I could do two. You want to get the most amount of CO2 possible. You're only allowed one breath between the two breath holds. There's no way possible if you're going to have more CO2 stored in your system than if you only take one breath in between the breaths. Okay, so here's how this works. Now, this sounds crazy, but I can. Even my entry level students can do this because here's all I'm asking. And this is the, this is the way that I teach them to do it. All you need is a stopwatch. You don't need an app. You don't need to log on anywhere. Right? It's very simple. Okay, you're gonna sit. You're gonna sit on the couch.

And what you're about to teach us is basically this, this Wonka table.

Yeah.

Okay.

One bread, CO2 table. Wonka table. You're gonna sit on the couch. Do this on dry land, not in the water, right? No risk of, you know, so you may do this on dry land. You're going to hold your breath and at some point it's going to be uncomfortable and you're going to feel a contraction. I don't care if that takes you 20 seconds. I don't care if you're maybe outraged in freediving experience. That might go for two minutes. Doesn't matter when, I don't care. But as soon as you feel that contraction, that first hiccup, that first contraction, it's now becoming difficult. And so you're going to start your stopwatch and you're going to only deal with that uncomfortableness for 15 seconds. 15 seconds, anyone can do that. At the end of the 15 seconds, you're going to take one breath and you're going to do it very specifically like this. You're going to do a slow inhale, using your teeth and tongue to make that sound as you exhale. So you're going to go.

That's the exhale.

And then big breath and hold again. At some point, I don't care if it's 15 seconds or two minutes, it's going to become difficult. What are you going to feel? Contraction. You feel that contraction. Start your stopwatch and you do 15 seconds, right? So the goal is. And by the way, this is going to trigger. When you do that exhalation, you are get a massive urge to go to the bathroom. So if you have not gone to the bathroom before you start this, you will not be able to finish this. So do yourself a favor, Go to the bathroom before you start. Then you'll be good to go, unless you're going to quit. Now, the goal is when I do these, let's say I do six, and if I'm feeling saucy, feeling good, maybe I'll do eight. But if I can do six, I'll still pat myself in the shoulder and say, that was a good job. Now, what's great about this is it's only 15 seconds. When you did took your class with me, I assure you, when you were doing statics in the pool, you went through way more than 15 seconds of uncomfortableness. Right. There were probably minutes. Minutes with an S on it of when you're like, good Lord, I want to breathe. So anyone can accomplish what I just laid out. And the idea is, if it's super easy for you, awesome. Do 20 seconds. Do 30. You know, you're just moving that number right. And just making it bigger based on your. Your ability level. Now, the other thing I like about the CO2 table is, you know, when I used to do your traditional, you know, training, some of those tables would take me an hour and 15 minutes.

Yeah.

You know, you can do this in like 10 minutes because basically you're just. You're skipping all the point where it's easy and you're just getting right to the point where it sucks.

Now, the last time I talked to you, you said that you were doing some of this stuff while you were exercising, like walking or light jogging. Is this something that you can do, say, if you're out on a walk, or is there too much risk of hypoxia and passing out?

This. No, you want to. This is. You're doing this laying on the couch.

Okay.

Yeah. Not doing anything else. Now, you can incorporate a breath holding into, in essence, any exercise. So, for instance, when I was, you know, really into competitive freediving and trying to train, one of the things that I noticed is I was stuck at about 200ft for maybe a year and a half because I couldn't equalize any deeper, because that kind of depth equalizing, it's very complicated. And eventually I worked through that, and then I started, you know, doing 65, 70 meters. And then my limit became my legs. Right. The lactic acid, because I'm doing dives for. Let's Say they last two, and that's two and a half minutes that I'm have no access to, you know, no other oxygen than what I took down. And then you're generating a lot of lactic acid. So one of the things that was my weakness was my legs would just couldn't do it anymore. They were done. So I would do lactic tolerance training where I'm doing, you know, almost any typical breath exercise you would do at the gym. Except I do super lightweight, and I hold my breath for 30 seconds, and it's as many as I can, as fast as I can for 30 seconds. Right. You know, trying to get that, you know, extreme lactic buildup. So I would do a lot of stuff, you know, with my quads. And, you know, it's brutal because you're. You're not breathing.

Yeah.

You get a lot of funny looks at the gym. I would definitely, you know, anytime you're doing breath holding stuff, there is a risk of blacking out. So I would always try to do these on seated equipment. Right.

Okay.

You know, so I'm sitting. Sitting down in some way. Right. Because most of the gyms, they're going to have places where you can do that. Right, right. You know, I've heard some. Some not nice stories from people on treadmills doing this. You can imagine that could go really bad. So, like, if you want to do cardio and do it, you know, recumbent bike is a better option.

Yeah, exactly.

I would, I would do things that the, you know, I do apnea walks and jogging, you know, incorporate, you know, a lot of that stuff. But I mean, basically my world is I don't have access to oxygen. So if I want to train as well, you know, why am I breathing while I'm training? Yeah, right. I'm trying to. Trying to get it as close to the world I operate in as possible.

Yeah. I'm a big fan of books like Patrick McCown's Oxygen Advantage or there's another one by Anders Olson. I forget the name of his book. It's the power of your breath, I think is the name of it. And these guys go into the value of training yourself. How to engage primarily in nasal breathing, even up to relatively intense periods of exercise, because that enhances oxygenation, humidifies the air, warms the air that you're breathing in, and kind of keeps you from activating those baroreceptors in your chest that can tend to cause, like, a sympathetic nervous system cortisol response. And so a lot of times what I'll do is I'll go on a walk and I'll have certain periods where I hold my breath for as long as possible. But the entire walk is breathing through my nose. And even the recoveries after my breath hold are through my nose. And I find that that alone, you know, just going on those long walks seems to do a really good job with my breath hold time, you know, even in the absence of a regular apnea breath hold practice. But I need to try these, these Wonka tables that you're talking about now. You know, maybe, maybe I'll make that part of a sauna session or something like that. But that's very interesting. I hadn't heard of these tables before.

Yeah, it's, I just, you know, it's effective. It's, it's time, it's time efficient. And, you know, I always, I always tell people in the class is whenever you see me, like, clap my hands and get really excited about something, say, oh, this is going to be awesome. Eventually you learn that when I do that, I'm about to do something, you're about to do something awful. These Wonka tables, they're awesome. They're awesome.

Now, what about when you're actually in the water? So let's say somebody is out there in the water. They either want to dive in deep or they're spearfishing and they want to go down after fish. Maybe it's, you know, let's say someone's used to being able to go 12 to 15ft deep and they want to now go like, you know, let's just say 15 to 30ft deep. Now when they're there on the, on the surface of the water looking down on their stomach, in addition to that, that breath that we were talking about, where you start from your diaphragm and kind of move your way up all the way up to your shoulders and suck in every last bit of oxygen. Is there any type of breath work that you can do in between dives or in between going down to fish that allows you to kind of prepare for that dive in a manner that would allow you to hold your breath for a longer period of time? Like, is there a frequency like how many seconds in, how many seconds out or anything like that?

Yeah. So I would say the most important thing is right when you, you know, every freediving instructor is going to teach you a different way. Right? Like, you know, some instructors, they'll teach it and argue that, oh, it should be this way and this way is better than that way, and I'll be Honest, I don't think it really any way is that much different than any other way. As long as you're doing one thing, any freediving instructor is going to teach you diaphragmatic breathing, right? So that's absolutely what we want to be doing. The other way to put it is you want to be conscious on how you breathe. The average person hasn't taken any training. Freediver spear fishermen, they're just breathing however they think they need to breathe. Right. And I'm going to tell you that, you know, diaphragmatic breathing is going to be a huge improvement over that. So the idea is, when I say diaphragmatic breathing, you want to. When you're breathing in and out, if you were to put your hand on your chest and your hand on your stomach, the only thing you should feel moving is your stomach goes out and your stomach goes in. Your chest should be absolutely motionless. When I have students try this in class, no one can do this at first because we all are chest breathers, right? We start as. I mean, every infant, you look at an infant on their back and watch how they breathe. Their belly goes up and down. They didn't have to take a yoga class or a freediving class to learn diaphragmatic breathing. That's just the way we are as we get older, for societal pressures, we. You're taught to never stick your stomach out. In fact, you're supposed to walk around your stomach sucked in all the time. So we kind of lose that natural ability of diaphragmatic breathing. But if you can teach yourself to do diaphragmatic breathing, the way you test is hand on your chest, hand on your stomach. You want to do slow inhalation, a couple seconds, take a good breath, and then just exhale. I like teeth and tongue to make this sound so that I'm regulating how much air comes out.

And you can still do that with a. With a snorkel in your mouth?

Snorkel, yeah, absolutely. Snorkels in the mouth, teeth, and tongue. I make that exact same sound. And you just exhale to what's comfortable. But, you know, if it's 5 seconds, 10 seconds, whatever. Main thing is, do it's comfortable. But what we're doing is we are on purpose slowing our breath. That's going to slow our heart rate down. Right. And so I can, when I'm out freediving, whatever I'm doing, I can 99% of the time breathe like that. Now can I sprint around like that? No, but. But if you're doing things Right. You shouldn't be doing that because the more you raise your heart rate, the more you lower your, your bottom time. Right. So I can, I'm breathing like that the entire time. I'm out there on the surface the whole time. Slow, relaxed, diaphragmatic breathing. Just like what you would do at a yoga class. You walk out of a yoga class and you're like, oh my God, I feel so relaxed. Why? Because you did diaphragmatic breathing for 50 minutes. That's why you feel good.

Do you have a certain period of time where you're doing the inhale and the exhale? Like is it, is it 5 seconds in, 10 seconds out or any type of rules like that?

It doesn't matter. I mean I typically do 2 and 2 second in, 10 second out, but.

2 in, 10 out.

Yeah, but what's more important than the numbers is that it's whatever's comfortable for you and that you are controlling your breathing instead of not thinking about it. Because if you're not thinking about it, you're going to be have a tendency to breathe more like that, which is going to increase the heart rate and just not be relaxing.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. Now what about when it comes to the idea of getting down to that depth of you want to get to. A lot of people will do. And this is what many of us are taught when we're in the pool, when we're kids or whatever. We figure this out on our own. This whole Valsalva maneuver where you just kind of plug your nose, go try and equalize that way. Why doesn't that work when you get, I mean for me, once I get to about 15ft or so, that doesn't work. So why doesn't that work and what should we be doing instead?

Yeah, so Valsalva is the, you know, it's the way most people are taught to equalize. I mean I, as a scuba instructor, that's the way I teach. You know, I teach people to equalize. And it's, it's very simple. The reason scuba instructors do it is one, they don't really understand the difference between Valsalva and Frenzel. And it's very simple to teach. If I've got a 12 year old kid in a scuba class and I'm like, hey little Johnny, can you, can you equalize your ears? Can you pinch your nose, Johnny? Uh huh. Now blow your nose real hard. And he's like, oh, my ears. Exactly right. It's called the pinch and blow method. Right? You pinch your nose and you Blow your nose and it equalizes your ears. Now, here's where things get confusing, especially because we get a lot of scuba divers take the class, right? If you use Valsalva as a scuba diver, you can scuba dive to 200ft using that. It'll work fine. So we run into issues. I've had scuba instructors take my class and get stuck at 15ft. I'm trying to explain to them, look, man, you need to be doing, you know, frenzel. And they're like, yeah, you know, I'm a scuba instructor. I can eat 5 meters just fine. And then they get stuck at 15ft and they're like, all right, well, what's this whole frenzel thing, right? So there's another method of equalization called frenzel, that as free divers, we have to be doing. Valsalva will typically stop working for a free diver around 50 or 30ft. I mean, 15 to 30ft.

Okay?

Now, you'll see, you'll see people go, I can valsalva down to 50ft. Yeah, but they dive. They don't dive down straight like a laser. They dive at a 45 degree angle. And then every time they equalize, they have to turn their head up until their heads at the surface, then they can equalize and they turn back down. What a terribly inefficient way to get down to depth. If you want to go down straight, like a laser, just boom, boom, boom, boom. Pinch your nose and equalize every time you gotta be doing frenzel. Now I'll answer your question. Why doesn't Valsalva work? And here's why. When you're doing Valsalva, like imagine a scuba diver, right? So a scuba diver, when they go down to depth, typically their head up, feet down, right? That's the way that they go down, right? So their head's facing the surface. So every time you take a breath off your regulator, as a scuba diver, your lungs are fully inflated. When your head is facing the surface, the air naturally wants to go to your ears because air rises, right? So when you're scuba diving, you're in this position where your head up, the air naturally wants to go that way. And so it's very simple to equalize your ears. Now, as a free diver, we turn around. Now our feet are facing the surface and our head is towards the bottom. So when we start diving down, the air wants to go to our fins, but we want it down here by our head. And what's happening to the supply of air as we go down, it's Shrinking, shrinking, shrinking, shrinking. Right? So that's why Valsalva doesn't work. Right. It's squeezing the air, it's squeezing an ever and ever shrinking supply of air and trying to push it the way it doesn't want to go. And that's why it typically doesn't work until around 15, 30ft. Right. If I remember in your class, you were, you know, in the beginning you were doing Valsalva and you were stuck right at that, that depth. Didn't matter how hard you pushed, didn't matter what you did, you just stuck. Right? So free divers need to be doing what's called the Frenzel method of equalization. Valsalva takes the air that's in your lungs, your throat is open, you're compressing your chest and lung and stomach, and you're pushing that air into your ears. Right? You can tell if you're doing Valsalva very simply. Put your hand on your stomach, pinch your nose, equalize five times in a row, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. If you feel your chest compressing every time you're doing that, you're doing Valsalva Frenzel, completely different animal. Frenzel takes the air that's in your mouth and shoves it directly into your ears and your throat is shut. So your lungs are not involved whatsoever. And you're doing this whole thing. They always say, use your tongue as a piston and push the air into the eustachian tubes. Right. And so Frenzel, you know, doesn't have that depth limitation.

And by the way, that, that's, that's F R, E N Z E L, Right?

Correct? Yep. Yeah. And so that's the, the, the method that freedivers have to do. And so, so, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's tricky to teach.

When I, when I interrupted you, you were beginning to say how frenzel would differ from Valsalva.

Well, yes, I mean, frenzel, it's just, it's just, it takes the air that's in your mouth as opposed to the air that's in your lungs. And you're using your tongue to push that air into the eustachian tube instead of compressing your chest and stomach and shoving that air into the years.

Okay, all right. So, so the way that you would actually learn the frenzel technique, and I know that you, you have courses on this online, you've got, you do one on one Skype sessions with people like you, you did it with me leading up to that freediving course that I did with you. But what's. What's kind of the basic overview of, of what the frenzel would sound like or look like or be accomplished.

It's very, very, very tricky to teach. I mean, I guess. I mean, you know, that, you know, that's why you. To spend an hour with every student, you know, on Skypes. And, you know, now, as you know, I don't do that anymore. I just. They get the online program and I love it. They just walk in the door and they can do friends, and it makes my life so much easier. I don't have to do another 500 hours of Skype sessions. But the simple explanation, and sometimes, sometimes it works. Sometimes literally, I just. They pick it up instantaneously, right? So if you want to try that, make the. Put your tongue in the position like you would make the T sound. If you think about that, the. The tip of your tongue is on the back of your teeth. The sides of your tongue are on the, on the molars, right? So. So frenzel is you put your tongue in that position. And if you can imagine what that does is that creates like a. It creates like a sandwich. The tongue is the bottom part of the sandwich. The bottom loaf of bread in the middle is the air that's trapped in between your tongue. And then the top slice of bread is the roof of your mouth, right? So what you're trying to do is you put your tongue in that position, you shut your throat, you pinch your nose, and you try to push your tongue up to the roof of the mouth. And so what that's going to do is it's going to compress that air that's stuck in there, and it's going to try to make it come out your nose. But your nose is pinched, so it can't go out that way. That's why you'll see the nostrils flare and then it will go into the ears, right? So you can try it with what I call the T block. Doing it like that. Another way you can do it is what's called the K block. When you make the K sound, the middle of your tongue is on the roof of the mouth. So again, the same kind of thing, you can start to make the K sound where the middle of your tongue is on the roof of your mouth. But instead of making the K sound, you don't. You don't let that air go forward, right? When the middle of your tongue hits the top of the roof of your mouth, the back of your tongue pushes up while you pinch the nose, and you can do it that way. So those are kind of two ways that people do that is the T block or the K block. And some people, you know, some people can just, you know, I tell them that and they're like, what's the big fuss? So, you know, some people pick it up quite easily. But what's difficult is if you're a. If you're a lifelong valsalver, then that explanation probably isn't going to cut it. Right. It's the people that have been doing it one way for a long time, it's difficult to transition them over.

Yeah. Especially when you're stressed out. Maybe you have a spear gun in your hand, you're going after a fish, you have to make it almost like second nature. That's what I'd found. Like, I thought I had it nailed when I did dry lane training. And then once I got in the water and had had all these other things going through my head, I just lost it. Right. So it takes a lot of practice to learn. But man, now that I know, Frenzel, like it's, it's, it's easy. Like you just, you go down and you just do it.

You'll never think about it. You never. Once it. Once the light bulb goes off, like beforehand, it seems like, good lord, there's like 13 steps I have to do with my tongue. Am I going to ever free dive? I can't even do it sitting on the couch. But then once the light bulb goes off, you never think about it again.

Yeah, the best tip I can give to people is go do it in a pool first. Like, learn. Even if it's just, you know, like your local YMCA pool or whatever, which might go down to 15ft, you can at least play around with it without having to worry about the ocean and, you know, distractions and the cold. You just go down and practice it in the pool. And especially for people who might be at the gym anyways, you know, doing a lap, swim session, lifting weights or whatever, that's simple enough to just hop in the pool and do it. I find that that works far better than like practicing it on dry land. Because once you're in the water, it's a little bit different, it feels different and it works differently. Now I also want to ask you, because this is obviously extremely popular, this whole idea of Wim Hof and Wim Hof breathwork, where you do like a whole bunch of power breaths after you've done 30 power breaths, you breathe off as much oxygen as possible and you Just hold your breath for as long as you can. I mean, it's essentially almost like hyperventilating followed by a breath hold. What is your take on that? For increasing breath hold time or doing like Wim Hof does, which is where you'll do that, and then you'll get in cold water and sometimes go underwater in cold water.

Okay, so I've heard about Wim Hof breathing. I've had other freediving instructors talk to me about it. And in essence, what it seemed like to me was you just hyperventilate your head off. And I did some Google and I saw him, you know, teaching people to do it. In essence, it's just. It's a lot of hyperventilation before a breath hold. So I don't know anything about cold. I'm assuming it's really good for that.

Yeah, well, I mean, the cold component, I think, is just that you're inducing vasodilation through that power breathing. So essentially you're actually shoving blood to your extremities that could. That could allow you to withstand the stressors of cold a little bit more. But I'm interested in comparing and contrasting that breath hold technique to your breath hold technique.

Yeah, for sure. So what I was getting at is as a cold person, maybe that's great for cold as a breath holding tool. There's. Any freediving instructor from any agency on any continent would tell you, you don't want to do that, because hyperventilating before a breath hold increases the risk for blackout. And this is now most of his stuff he's doing dry land, as I understand it. But this is extremely dangerous.

Well, I think Wim himself, and he's been a podcast guest a couple times, I think he's almost passed out, like, underwater, like under the ice, doing this.

Yeah. So, I mean, as a freediving instructor, and this is not me, you ask any freediving instructor, they will tell you absolutely, under no circumstances. I mean, even freediving instructors that hate each other will say, don't hyperventilate before breath hold, because it absolutely increases the risk of blackout. That's why every freediving agency teaches that. So let me explain why that's happening now. Hyperventilation, as I mentioned earlier, when I talk about the CO2 tables, it lowers. It drastically lowers your CO2. So it makes it so that when you start that breath hold, your CO2 is as low as possible. One of the biggest triggers for your urge to breathe is your carbon dioxide levels. Right. Your physiologist will say 80% of your urge to breathe comes from rising carbon dioxide, and 20% of it comes from low oxygen. So hyperventilation has a pretty obvious advantage. It's going to. Since you're. See, since you start with lower carbon dioxide, it's going to take longer for that CO2 level to get to where you have an urge to breathe or a contraction, right? So if you have a breath hold, where you just hold your breath normally and you wait till you have a contraction, let's call it two minutes, and then you go backwards in time and you hyperventilate a bunch and you hold your breath again. Now, you might not get that contraction until 2:30 because you started with less carbon dioxide. All right? So hyperventilating absolutely delays your urge to breathe. I will not deny that it does that, because it certainly does. So this is. This is why so many beginners like me, when I started, I would, you know, I could only, you know, I would. I remember freediving down to, you know, 20 foot of water, and I'd stay there for like 20, 25 seconds, and I felt like I was going to die. And then when my captain told me to hyperventilate, and then I went to that same spot, I could stay down there for like, 45, 50 seconds, right? Because it's delaying the onset of the urge to breathe. Now, here's the other thing that it does that people don't understand. And this is why every freediving instructor says, don't hyperventilate. Not only does it delay the urge to breathe, it also physically reduces the amount of oxygen available to your body. This is a bad combination.

The bore. Can you get into the Bohr effect?

So when we hold our breath, our blood is becoming more acidic, right? So as our blood is becoming more acidic, you know, that's changing the PH levels of our blood. So when we hyperventilate, what that does is it's increasing the strength of the bond between hemoglobin and oxygen. So if I'm holding my breath and I've got, you know, all these hemoglobin molecules running around through my bloodstream, the hemoglobin molecule has little oxygen molecules attached to it. That's how it transports the oxygen. And then it pops off the oxygen and gives it to the muscle tissue so I can use it. If the strength of the bond between hemoglobin and oxygen is too high, that oxygen molecule can't pop off and be used as fuel. So it's stuck to the hemoglobin. When we hyperventilate, it's altering The PH levels of our blood, and it doesn't allow that oxygen to be used because it's dropping the PH level before the breath hold. We want as the blood becomes more acidic, the strength between the hemoglobin and oxygen gets less. And then we can actually use that oxygen, but because it's shifting it so much the wrong way in the beginning. Now at the end of the breath hold, there's still oxygen stuck on the hemoglobin that we can't access. So that's why it's limiting the amount of oxygen available to your body. But it's confusing, especially for beginners, because they hyperventilate and they can instantly hold their breath longer. And then you get people saying, oh, yeah, well, you know, you just gotta hyperventilate and it lets you access all the oxygen. They say that because they're holding their breath longer. So it seems logical. But the fat. The fats aren't slow.

Yeah. So essentially, you have less oxygen available to the tissue, but also a lowered urge to breathe. And that's why when you're doing the Wim Hof breathing, you can hold your breath for a longer period of time. But, you know, it's also why you get the lightheadedness and the tingling and the potential for passing on. And I personally have found that when I jump into a cold pool or I have, like, cold bath protocols, I do, and I have some of my clients do this. Like one of our workouts we do is you get three minutes into ice or very cold bath, but you precede that with Wim Hof breathing. You slip into that bath while you're on your breath hold. You're not in deep water. You're in a tub. You're typically with someone, and you're in that tub for a little while, then you get out and you do another round of breathing to kind of warm yourself back up. And sometimes all people hit the bike for a few minutes, then get back in the water. But I'll never combine that with actually going underwater or deep water. And I'm pretty remiss to even do the Wim Hof breathing with the breath holds and be near water unless somebody else is there. Even if it's shallow water.

Yeah. I mean, it absolutely increases the risk for blackout. Right. You know, take a look at competitive freedivers. They do the exact opposite. Right. So basically, if you understand what I was getting at, is the more acidic your blood gets, the lower the strength of bond between hemoglobin and oxygen, meaning oxygen is more accessible well, this seems like a good thing, right? So if you look at like a competitive freediver, a world record holder, they're saying, carbon dioxide is my friend. I want as much carbon dioxide in my blood as possible so that I can more quickly make that shift. Shift to where the oxygen becomes more readily accessible. So if you watch a competitive freediver breathing up, they might be doing what I would call minimal breathing, where they're, they're breathing out. There's like they're sitting on the couch doing nothing.

Right.

That's the way they're breathing because they're, they want to keep every amount of carbon dioxide in their blood as possible so they can shift that way. Now, thanks to the wonderful world of the Internet, you know, people will be like, oh, Ted, well, why don't you, you know, why don't you teach the way these topics, freediving world records do it, right? Like you're, why are you teaching different clearly methods that aren't, that don't work. And I say, are you a world record freediver? Well, no. Well, then you shouldn't breathe like one. Because what they do, they understand, they're trying to get that extra little bit of advantage, and they certainly get an advantage from doing that. But what, what happens? Because they start with more carbon dioxide, the contractions come way earlier, the diet becomes way more terrible, way more difficult. Have all these other things. Things, Right. So, yeah, if you're a world record free diver and your goal is to dive deep as humanly possible, you don't care how terrible you feel because you're going to train that out of it. But the average Joe, I mean, Ben, do you want your, your 80 foot dives to feel harder than they were the way you did it, or hard.

Enough as it was?

Right, exactly. So, you know, people have access to information on the Internet and sometimes, you know, I would argue they don't understand how it's the most applicable. Yeah. So, you know, you want a middle ground, which is what I teach.

That was a, that was a gnarly adventure. When we get, we got in the ocean, remember, like a tornado. But we were, we had, we had sharks circling around us that you showed us how to like point our. I think you were, we weren't spearfishing. So you have a gun, but you had like some kind of a long pole or object in your hand. You showed us how you could point it at it and the shark would go away. And then we had. So I, I like burst one of my eardrums. Still trying to learn frenzel so I'm, like, bleeding. I didn't burst the eardrum, but I was bleeding up my nose. And I thought I'd, like, killed off half my brain. And then we finally get in the boat to go back. We're all shivering, we're starved. We've gone through that rite of passage in the water, and then this, like, tornado blows in off the Fort Lauderdale coast, and we're, like, racing it in a boat to get back.

I mean, this stuff was unusual trip.

Yeah, but it was fun. I don't want to scare people away, but it was. It was. It was actually pretty cool. It made my other dives feel easy.

Well, I was. I was just so ecstatic when you finally got friends. The first two days, you were stuck at 15ft, and I'm like, you know, I could tell, like, you were that close to being like, no, I'm not coming out the third day, and I'm like, oh, man, you. And then, like, the light bulb went off. Boom. Right? You got it.

Yeah. No, to nail 80ft, it felt good. I can't fish at 80ft, but it felt good to just be that deep in the water and know I'd been that deep. So. So how about how free divers exercise? Like, I remember you showed us, and I'd love for you to get into this, like, how you kind of exercise the diaphragm. You have, like, the number one stretch that you recommend for free divers. But are there any of the things that, like, in the freediving community that people have? Kind of, because you're very connected to that community. Ways that people exercise or ways that people stretch? Any typical, like, gym routines? Like, like, what's the training protocol look like when you're out of the water?

Well, it's. Well, you know, like, you look at most competitive freedivers, they're all going to be extremely fit, right? You know, they're athletes, so that's not their. They do whatever they do to get fit. But competitive freediving has this very weird thing, right? So certainly, because we're athletes, you want to have a high VO2 max, just like almost any. Any athlete would right now. High VO2 max comes with hard training, which does what's our metabolism, raises it, right? As a freediver, do we want a high metabolism? No, we want the lowest.

That was why you wouldn't even let us drink a damn cup of coffee before we got up there.

So there's that. You know, there's that weird thing, and I'll be honest, we don't. There's you know, I don't know the perfect answer, but the idea is, you know, so they might have, you know, if you're looking at training progression leading up to a competition, there's going to be some point where they're gonna be doing all your typical, you know, cardio however they want to do it, right. And then as they're getting closer and closer to the event, right. They're going to be doing more apnea, more breath holding work. And then, you know, towards the end, maybe the last two weeks, they don't want, they don't, they're turned into a sloth. The only thing they're gonna do is hold their breath on the couch, right. Or maybe do some, some workouts in the pool where, you know, they're trying to lower that metabolism. So it's a very, it is a very tricky thing to train at, at a high level because I don't know of any of the sport where that's important, where, you know, you have those two competing issues. And the other thing that's, that's, that's tricky about it is there's not, we don't know the answer, right? Like if you want to become the, if you're a US Speed skater and you're like, you know, top speed skater in high school, they just put you in some campus and there's a whole program and there's doctors and there's researchers and they just, they know how to make the best speed skater. They just put you through the program, right? We, as free divers, there's no money in the sport, so we don't have all of that. So we don't, not only we don't have that, we don't have that. And what we're trying to solve is incredibly complicated. Yeah, right. So it's, it's, it's, and it's, it's tricky.

So, so is there any type of gym routine or any type of like stretching routine or anything like that? Because like you showed me that one stretch and you know, I'm curious, like when people go to the gym, are, are they doing like high rep, low weight, low rep, high weight or any insight into that?

Most of the, in most circumstances, you know, you're not going to see big, bulky freedivers. Most circumstances, there are some that are actually pretty built to do very well. Gorang Black, he's, he's a big guy.

Right.

But most. Right. Kind of you jokingly talked about was like, you know, the, the thin, mild mannered freediver. Right. They're going to be you're going to see a lot in that way. If you're looking at this, the world record static guys that are doing the maximum breath holds, they are. They're very, extremely skinny. They're going to be not eating, they're going to be fasting, you know, to do everything they can to put themselves in starvation mode. But I mean, as far as, you know, typical gym training, I don't think there's anything super special or particular to what they're doing. Most of them are gonna, Most of them are just. They want their good cardio, but. And they're not trying to bulk up on muscle.

So. So it's almost like cycling where, you know, a cyclist is going for a very good power to weight ratio. And, and a lot of cyclists don't do a lot of strength training for that reason, at least traditional hypertrophic strength training. But you would, you would, you could make an argument that you want low amounts of muscle mass, but the muscle that you want would be like, lean, wiry muscle that doesn't take up a lot of space, but that's very efficient.

Metabolically and in the areas that you need it. Right. Like if you're doing, you know, if you're doing constant weight in the ocean, I mean, you, you're gonna need some power in the quads to get yourself back up from 2, 300, 400ft, whatever you're coming from. I would say the biggest thing, the thing that, you know, they will all do do is that idea of diaphragmatic stretching. Right. Which is really, really critical. And so I can do a very quick exercise, all your listeners can do to prove the power of that diaphragm.

Okay?

Okay. So all I'm going to ask them to do is just follow my instructions for just a bit. You're only going to have to hold your breath for 15, 20 seconds maximum. Right. So I alluded to this earlier. Your physiologist will tell you that the, you know, the 80% of the urge to breathe comes from high carbon dioxide levels and 20% comes from low oxygen levels. Right. So I always, you know, start with that story in the class and we're going to pretend that physiologist is sitting in the back and he's going to be doing the same exercise with us. All right, so here's the exercise we're all going to do together. So you want to be sitting down, you want to make sure there's space in front of you. So if you were to, you kind of bend down and put your head between your legs. You're not going to bonk onto anything. All right? So here's the deal. You're going to take a big breath.

Over the car.

All right? So, biggest breath you can. Now we're gonna exhale the air out. All of it. You're gonna bend over and push out every bit. Push, push, push, push. Every bit, every bit, every bit, every bit. Now, you're gonna hold your breath, sit up, and we're gonna hold our breath for 10, maybe 15 seconds. Seconds. Keep holding your breath if you can. If you've already breathed, that's fine. All right. Five, four, three, two, one. Take a breath.

Well, I got a pee. There comes the pee, right?

So if you guys did that, you'd probably say that was one of the worst feelings that you've ever felt, especially if you actually exhaled all the air out. If you didn't exhale all the air, do it again. I promise you, it'll be terrible. Now let's look at what just happened there. 80% of the urge, the physiologist will tell you 80% of the urge to breathe comes from CO2, and 20% comes from low oxygen. All right? So if I. And I've done this, I wrote an article in Spirit magazine just recently that's going to be coming out in a month, actually a couple weeks, about this exact same thing. And I used a pulse oximeter in the middle of that exercise. So pulse oximeter measures my oxygen level in my blood. And when I did that exercise, it started at 98%, and when I was done, it was 98%. So the oxygen level in my blood didn't alter at all, which means that the urge to breathe didn't come from oxygen. But that's. We expected that because 20% comes from oxygen, 80% comes from carbon dioxide. So it must be the carbon dioxide. Let's look at that. How is carbon dioxide created? It's created by consuming oxygen. How long do we hold our breath for? 15, 20 seconds. So that means we created 15 or 20 seconds worth of carbon dioxide. The exact same amount of carbon dioxide was created in that exercise than if you just held your breath for 15 seconds, normally, where you would get no urge to breathe. So this means the low oxygen levels didn't trigger the urge to breathe, and the high carbon dioxide didn't trigger the urge to breathe, because both of those are absolutely normal. So now the physiologist in the back of the room is scratching his head like, well, why did I feel like I wanted to die? Right? It's Because I always say 80% urge to breathe come from carbon dioxide, 20% comes from low oxygen. Plus, there's other factors. As a free diving instructor, I'll put in that there's other factors, and that's the diaphragm, your diaphragm. Now, unless you're a freediver whose trains are a competitive freediver, you have never exhaled all the air out and then sat there, right? So your diaphragm got stretched in a way that it has never been stretched before. So in essence, as you exhale all that air out your diaphragm, as your lungs shrink, your diaphragm gets sucked in to fill the void, right? So your diaphragm is getting sucked in up, up, up, up, up. And it's a muscle just like your hamstring. And it got stretched in a way that it is not. Never been stretched before, right? So what it did. If you stretch your hamstring too far, you're going to get a signal that says, back off, quit bending forward, bend backwards, right, to loosen that, because the hamstring can't take it. When your diaphragm gets stretched too far, guess what it does. It says, that's too far. So how would that diaphragm go back to normal if you took a breath? So it's triggering an urge to breathe to put your. Reset your diaphragm. So that urge to breathe in this particular example had nothing to do with your oxygen levels, had nothing to do with your CO2 levels, was completely triggered by the inflexibility of your diaphragm, right? So it's the inflexibility diaphragm that's causing that. That's also why is a free diver, if you have some of you that maybe have freediving experience, right? So like my students, you know, they're, they're freedivers already. And I say, look, every student in my class has some depth where they go to, and they feel fine. Maybe it's 15ft, maybe it's 30, 40ft. They get to the bottom, they feel no urge to breathe. They feel totally calm and relaxed. Every one of those students has a depth where you put 15 foot onto that, you know, 15 foot deeper. They get down there, they feel antsy, they feel uncomfortable, they're, I gotta get out of here. I can't handle this. I don't feel good. Well, why is that happening? It's because when they went down deeper, their lungs got compressed more, Their diaphragm got sucked into the point where it's that's too much. I'm not comfortable with that level of stretch. And that's why it triggers that urge to breathe. That's why every competitive freediver on the planet stretches their diaphragm. Right. Because it makes you more comfortable at depth, helps with equalization, does a lot of stuff. But it's that, it's that that's something that most people, you know, don't understand. And, you know, when I'm always talking to you, my typical student is a spear fisherman. And they tend to want to poo poo on all this. They're. I can bet it to. Freediving has nothing to do with spearfishing. I'm like, look, we dive really deep. We stay down a really long time. You should learn exactly how we do that and then do it for what you're doing.

Yeah, interesting. And by the way, returning back to the. The piece about stretching the diaphragm, I. I think that that one other thing people should consider would be, in many cases, there are like, fascial adhesions. There's immobility in a lot of the muscles surrounding the diaphragm. Paul Check talks about this in some of his videos about like foam rolling the diaphragm. There are like, I have my massage therapist actually do massage therapy, especially on either side of my rib cage, kind of. And you can do some of this yourself, like digging your fingers up underneath the rib cage while you're taking your breath. But, you know, it's shocking to me how many people will get their IT bands massage or their calves or their traps, but not do any work on the fascia that surrounds the abdomen and the diaphragm. So I think that that's a very important component. And the other thing that I wanted to bring up, returning back to the training was, you know, what I think is probably the best form of training that someone interested in freediving could do? I'll assume by your silence that you're just waiting. Waiting with bated breath, pun intended, would be what Laird Hamilton does at his training pool, where he'll have a bunch of people over. And they do this Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday in Malibu from like 8 to 11am They've got a whole bunch of people over. Everybody's got a buddy, there's people monitoring the whole program. But you're in the water with dumbbells, carrying the dumbbells back and forth under the water. You're swimming with the dumbbell, kind of like treading water with the dumbbell between your legs. You're doing jumps from the bottom of the pool while hoisting the dumbbell upwards, and you're basically doing an entire workout in the water. And what I like about that is Laird developed it for being able to survive the mental and physical rigors of being under the water for long periods of time when the. When the surf kind of tows you under or you're, you know, you're thrown off your board and in the waves. And also what I like about it is you get this amazing cardiovascular and breath flow workout, but you're not sore the next day, meaning that you're not inducing muscle mass or hypertrophy. It's exhausting. You're cold, you're tired, you're hungry afterwards, just like a freediving session. And I think I actually interviewed him, and in that interview with him, I linked to some articles with, like, samples of their workout and stuff like that. But, you know, I was kind of thinking as you were talking about the diaphragm stretch, I'm like, well, gosh, I. I think more freedivers should know about the kind of stuff Laird's doing in his pool, because, man, it. Not only is it a blast, but you're not sore, you're not building a bunch of muscle mass, but, I mean, you'reyou're training blood and lungs tremendously. So I'll link to that in the show notes as well, my podcast with him, but I think that could bethat could be a good way to go for some people.

Yeah, I'm prettyi'm pretty sure he went through the. The Big wave surf program that PFI does.

Yeah.

Where we. Where we go through all that sort of stuff.

Very cool, very cool. Well, I know we're getting towards the end of the show, but I wanted you to really just walk us through quickly here the different courses that you teach. Like, I know I mentioned that you have one on breath holding, and these are, like, just courses people can go take online. You've got one on the frenzel technique. What else do you have?

So the one I'm honestly the most excited about is I launched it from the date of this recording four or five days ago. Is Freediving safety dot com. All right, so the idea of this course is it's an online resource that teaches people safe freediving practices from a trusted and reliable source. And it's free. Right. So my whole thinking is this. For the past 10 years, you know, I've been teaching these classes, and you sat through my class. You mean, you know, I'm passionate about freediving. Safety. Right. And the reason is there's 50 to 75 fatalities per year in this sport of freediving. Mostly occurs while spearfishing. But we're getting growing, growing number of people doing stuff in the pool because they saw some YouTube video, some guy telling to do something in the pool. But they don't have safety. They don't understand. So, you know, for 10 years, I've been dealing with the spear bushing community. And what I always hear is, yeah, Ted, I love to take one of those courses. My boss man, he's such a pain in the. I can never get the time off or I can't afford the course. Right. So the way I look at it is if you want to get better at freediving, yeah, you're going to pay and take a course. It's like anything. If you want to learn how to be safe, if you want to learn to not kill yourself, I want you. There's no barrier to that. Right. So the idea is it's an online course. It's got basically an hour's worth of videos. You're going to learn the rules, safe freediving practices. You're going to learn the myth of, I don't push myself. I know my limits. I would know before I blackout, because the reality is, most circumstances you wouldn't. I have video footage of a spear fisherman with 30 years of experience. He's spearfishing at 50ft, which is total normal depth for him. He did seven dives to that exact same depth. And you see him coming up from a dive and 10ft from the surface. He has no idea what's wrong. He blacks out, he exhales all his air out, and you see him start to sink down. Now, the video recorder was a friend of mine and an instructor, Ren Chapman, you know, took care of, he was fine. But I always am trying to get across this point that when you're diving in the ocean, people say, I, I've never had a problem. I don't push myself. I'm not that worried about it. The mechanic, the physics of it is that on most dives in the ocean, if you were to have a blackout, you'd feel 100 fine the whole time. So saying that you don't push yourself, Right? So it's going to explain that. And then it also has video. I hired two camera guys with multiple camera angles on what to do if you have a loss of motor control, what to do if you have a blackout at the surface. Right. So I've, I've launched the courses for four or five days ago. I've already had 150 people in it. And, you know, people are the. It's been. It's been. The response has been. Been very good, and I'm very excited about it.

And that one's freediving. Safety.com safety.com okay, yeah, I'll link to that in the show notes. And then you've got all these other courses like how to make the mammalian dive reflex work for you and the spearfishing checklist. The. The guide on how to mitigate the risks of free diving, the guide on. On equalizing, the guide on taking a 30% bigger breath. I'll link to all of those so that you guys can just delve into all of Ted's knowledge. And that is all going to be over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com freediving podcast. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Freediving Podcast. You got me excited, Ted, because I'm headed down to Kona to do some bow hunting next month. I'm going to throw in a couple of days of going after tasty fish. So thank you for opening me up to this whole world of free diving and spearfishing.

Man.

You're my guru in this department.

I enjoyed working with you, and I'm excited to hear how the trip to Hawaii goes. And if you want any suggestions for who to hook up with when you're there, definitely let me know.

Sweet. All right, folks. Well, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Ted Hunter Hardy signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep, digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes, use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to.