bottomtime/holding breath, how to train??

Your bottom time also depends on your fitness.
So you may want to think about trying to improve your fitness as well as doing the exercises these guys have suggested.

Ive tryed about all the excercises you guys suggested to me. It worked out pretty well.
Im still improving every month.

The 82,5 meter on the surface and the 12,5 meter underwater as slow as possible really works out great for me. I learned to relax more when im laying still during a trainingmatch.

My strong point with underwaterhockey is swimming big distances in a very short amount of time. No i'm more relaxed its easyier to swim much further and longer.

An other excersise that I use is 25 meter underwater and 25 meter back on the surface. You have 1 min to swim this 2 lanes. You repeat it about 8 to 10 times. The first 6 lanes are sometimes pretty heavy, after that your body is getting used to it, it becomes easyier. In january I want to do it in about 40 seconds.

One of the biggest improvements is buying other fins. Ive switches from Mares Avanti Excel to Quattro's. Lower heartrate and bigger distances.

if anyone has more suggestions, please let me know. During the tuesday trainingsessions our team used the skilltraining that you guys give

yeeeeeeah.... contractions?

if you are training for hockey and you're getting contractions can i suggest that might be cross training that could be better spent working on aerobic fitness, rather than doing something that will make your body forcefully and painfully alert you to the fact that you need breath.

after all, in this sport 10 seconds on the bottom in a hard game is a long time and 25 seconds is a LONG LONG time. someone who can hold their breath for only 1.5 mins max is easily capable when fit to sit on the bottom for 25 seconds when static in a game or 15 seconds when working hard... personally i think training to hold your breath longer is pointless.

i met a turkish freediver a few months ago. great guy, he won the jump bleu comp in bari with a world record of some sort.

friend of mine used to train with him and is good mates with him, told me that often if you ask the guy a question, he won't respond, but then 10 mins later will turn around and answer you. his mates all agree the amount of training and time he has spent with nix oxygen has affected him dramatically.

careful with that training!

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it's more polite on the grating than on the subs bench

Please, if you have any medical reason to believe that holding your breath is damaging in some way, let us know. Otherwise, kindly don't perpetuate myths that have no basis (other than 'I heard of this freediver that's apparently real slow').

It's hard enough dealing with this sort of comment from the general public, but when it comes from somebody that should know better and has a respected opinion, it causes extreme harm. I have my own perspective on where freediving training helps hockey and where it doesn't (and in fact hurts it in some ways), but I think its more important to deal with this first.

Bottom time has nothing to do with fitness, it has to do with training for bottom time. It's more a mental aspect than anything else.

When I was a younger and fitter version of myself I could rarely stay down 10 seconds in a game, but I could repeat all day. Most of my drops were 5-6 seconds. It wasn't until I started thinking about playing in a deeper pool that I worked on staying down longer. Now I am older and much less fit and can stay down longer. But I know players far more fit than me that blow my bottom time out of the water. It seems they train for both.

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Oh yeah, and now they're broke.

i never said holding breath could be harmful, but i do think there is definitely a line... for example, i know for a fact that clinical tests have shown on billions of people throughout history that going without oxygen for too long causes permanent death, just as jumping off tall things also kills people... how tall can you make the thing before dying? before breaking bones? is it even a good idea to push the boundaries in this way, if dropping off a 2m block is all you need for plyometric training?

i think that freediving training could be good for hockey because it helps train efficiency for the lungs, blood etc etc. in fact i've done a bit of reading where i have been able and have found a couple of interesting exercises which i've tried, none of which i've particularly found useful for hockey but which obviously could be useful for someone. all good.

HOWEVER my personal opinion which i am perfectly within my rights to express is that there is a line to draw, and i think you agree.

i personally think that line is drawn just before anything to do with contractions. i think the body can be stressed perfectly well enough without the need for that. but... what the heck is a contraction anyway? not everyone gets them...? are they different for everybody?

so... i'm all for education, and i'll admit i don't know a lot about it. could you then explain exactly what happens when someone gets a contraction?




(i've met the guy i referred to and he is not slow, but his friends agree that his sport has made him that way... his friends are freedivers and most of them very good ones. i know a lot of odd people so he didn't seem odd to me)

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you shouldn't need to push yourself to contractions to train for uwh - most of the time you'll only be down for about 15 - 20 seconds, much less in a higher paced game.

you just need to be able to do that consistently over and over for 30 minutes - it's not like you have to go down for minutes at a time

Liam,

Oxygen deprivation and holding ones breath are not the same thing. Clinical trials show that even when O2SAT levels in the blood drop below 40% during a breathhold, there is no oxygen deprivation/debt in the brain or vital organs. There are various reasons for this, some of which I'll go into below. Suffice to say, the comparison with jumping off tall things is just not valid.

What freedivers aim for and what hockey players don't is the mammilian dive reflex. This is a combination of adaptions that kick in during a breath hold. They are the same for humans as they are for seals and dolphins, its the design of the rest of the system and the extent of the dive reflex that differs. The first to happen is bradycardia, or the slowing of ones heart rate. In non-depth disciplines (statics, dynamics) this is usually around 20-40%, while in depth disciplines, single figure heart rates have been observed. This starts happening in trained divers within thirty seconds.

Next, blood shift (vascular constriction) occurs. For me, this happens at 1:40, give or take ten seconds, if I'm doing zero-warmup dives (ie. get in, take breath, head down). If I do a warmup hold, vascular constriction will have already occurred or comes on nearly instantly. During dynamics with fins, this comes on ~40m with fins or ~35m without fins. For me and many others, the first contraction happens when blood shift starts. When I do warmup dives, my contractions don't come on until about three minutes in.

Which leads us nicely to contractions. This is a buildup of CO2 stimulating the diaphragm to contract. There are many theories on why this occurs and as you state, different people experience them at different times or not at all. To compare two of the top NZ athletes, Dave Mullins and Ant Williams, Dave gets contractions very early, at similar stages to me, yet holds the world record in dynamics with fins at 244m. He also just dived to a depth of 110m, making him the second deepest man in the history of constant weight freediving (beaten by 2m). Ant on the other hand can hold his breath for well over seven minutes with no contractions or very few. So using the logic that you can go as long as you don't have contractions (yes, I know that's not quite what you said, but I'm using creative licence a bit), Dave would be able to do 40-60m dynamics, yet Ant could do his PB of 223m. Of the various theories, the most likely is that the contractions help squeeze the blood out of the spleen (another part of the dive reflex). The end result is that unless you know your body and know how you feel on your dives, contractions don't mean jack. That's why its so important to have safeties watching any apnea trainings. Coming from somebody that's been pulled off the bottom during a training dive.

That's not half of what's known about the dive reflex, but its already a bit heavy for most, so I'll leave it there. The thing to take away though is that you're not actually hypoxic in your vital organs until blood stops pumping, not from when you start holding your breath. Repeated blackouts may cause problems, but frankly so does getting drunk. If brain damage happened during normal apnea, guys like Herbert Nitsch (airline pilot) who can hold his breath for over nine minutes would fail his cognition test that he has to take annually for his job.

Well its a nice discussion but i think we all agree its an mental issue. Im about 10 seconds underwater, during a breakout maybe about 15/20 seconds.

Tonight I have a friendly match against dordrecht 2 (all skilled hockeyers with some old selection players). My first match ever, 30 minutes of high intensive fast play, hope its going well, ill report later on the weekend

good explanation!

i have seen the big blue so i'm familiar with the mammalian dive reflex.

i'll go with your statement that its unproven that oxygen levels in the organs drops.

for me that points to two things, one, that the human body is indeed amazing that it can concentrate blood where its needed in such situations... and two, that holding your breath longer then 1 or 2 minutes, anything that approaches the threshold of mammalian dive reflex or blood shift, would be pretty counter-productive for hockey in that we need our blood in our muscles.

so, i'm guessing practical use of free diving techniques for uwh would have to be limited to the mental side of things... ?

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