this is an interesting thread!

"There are a combination of things that contribute to a good breathold. One is a high level of fitness and VO2 max. This means that your body is making the most out of the O2 that is available to it.

Another is knowing your body and it's limitations. "

i think thats a very accurate summary. as far as i go, i hope training takes care of the first point and the other point is mental. it's about comfort and knowing how hard you can push.

i personally don't have a very big breathold, in fact it's minute compared to a lot of other players i know. but i did an interesting exercise a couple of years ago which i'll relate here.

i trialled a high-altitude simulation system that a lot of the super12 rugby guys here were using and getting good results with... and our rowers etc too. basically it involved a 3 week course of 1 hour per day every weekday, sitting with an instructor who would run you through the course.

each hour they would hook me up to a little finger monitor to show the oxygen saturation level in the blood, and there was a compressor that mixed levels of oxygen. you'd basically breathe through a mask a mix of air with less oxygen in it until your saturation level reached a target, and when the target was hit you take a big breath of normal air, wait for your saturation level to be normal again and then repeat the process.

normal saturation level is 99-100%. at the start we were going down to 90%, then gradually over the first 2 weeks working down to eventually 70% or so. apparently if an ambulance medic finds you with a 70% level on the street they'd hook you up to oxygen for a couple hours... dunno how true that is, but much below 70% and apparently you risk loss of brain cells. anyway, you have to be relaxed and seated, no running around for it.

that was the theory anyway, basically trying to operate with low levels of oxygen as much as possible over the course of the hour to train the red blood cells to use all 4 oxygen docking ports rather than the lazy 3 or even 2 that they can get by on. the continual return to full oxygen saturation was for safety reasons as they didn't want people accidentally going too far down the scale and doing themselves damage. (they did refresher courses of 1 week every 3 months to train the new blood cells as the old ones disappeared)

so, after 2 weeks i was having no problems getting down to the threshold of 70%(ok after a couple of days i could do it but we followed the course to be safe at first)... felt a bit weird, like your tounge feels a bit big in your mouth and you feel slightly stoned or dizzy and slight darkbits round the edges of your vision like at the end of a big breathold underwater. but at that stage my instructor, seeing i had a fair control and was comfortable, asked me to just see if i could hold the level constant, which i could do pretty easily, just by watching the monitor and taking slightly shallower or deeper breaths to nudge the reading up or down. so thats what we did for the remaining week, i'd just go down to 70% and stay there for the hour, with a couple breaks for concentration as it was quite hard focusing for that amount of time. she thought in theory i should have gotten bigger benefits than the guys going up and down constantly.... i dunno, she didn't know anyone who had tried it before.

generally, as an uwh player my recovery time was very fast, so from a low oxygen saturation level when i took a breath of normal air i'd have to wait 5-6 seconds for the blood to get from my lungs to my finger monitor and then it would shoot straight to 100% in about 2 seconds or less. this wasn't unusual, lots of fit athletes they had doing the course could get a similar result as i understood it.

at the end of it all, for the comp i was as fit as i normally was. got the same kinda results in our fitness tests as usual... didn't notice any added fitness to speak of. so concluded that it's highly likely that our pool training and games must finetune our oxygen efficiency levels pretty well in the first place.

but it was interesting doing the course. incidentally, i tried a couple of long breatholds with the saturation monitor on, and after 2 mins it wouldnt even fall below 99%. (2mins is my MAX max!) really would have liked to try it while exercising but she wouldn't let me... but i'd guess that with exercise that saturation level would surely come down significantly.

apologies for the essay!