what is the secret to a huge breathold?

What is the secret to a huge brethold? How can you inprove breathold for hockey? Do you need to practice?
Do backs need a better breathold than forwards?
If anyone has anything to add about bretholding for hockey we would love to here about it?
Cheers Belle

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Underwater Hockey Rules!

Clearly no one knows??????

Come on Edi...what is it? 1 corona, 2 corona's....6 corona's????

um... ....training?

I find its completely different holding my breath underwater than on the surface... probably because I have no choice!

I think there are three components to holding your breath well (please feel free to add more, as I don't claim to be an expert by any stretch!):

Posture: making sure your body posture is such that it maximises your lung capacity. Coming from my singing experience it will also help you if you know how your lungs work, where they start and end.

Relax: making sure you are mentally and physically relaxed which will influence posture, and consequently breathhold. This is sometimes particularly difficult in a game situation, where anxiety, anticipation and adrenalin kick in. Often nerves are the reason for poor breathhold in a game.

Familiarisation: being aware of how and when your body will react to having no air. This will most likely come through training. Being familiar with your body's reactions will reduce anxiety and stress, and most likely build confidence.

Perhaps a fourth point to consider is genetics.... some people are just closer to being a fish than others!

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Using Edi as an example, I would have to say Relaxation must be a bigger contributor than Posture.... And when you reach the levels of relaxation that Edi does, it doesn't matter what your body is doing, just hum away...! :shock:

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Off Half-Backs Rule

It clearly is a trainable skill. And most of it is mind of matter. But beyond that part, having a good snorkle that allows you to transfer the air properly, having it short so that you do not have too much dead-air, and slowing down your breathing, both in and out, using your diapragm will help.

When I try to increase my breath hold I usually lie in bed before i go to sleep and take deep breaths and keep breathing in and in until i cant do it anymore, hold it for as long as you can, then breathe out and repeat it for 10 mins or so. I dont know how it works, but I think it improved my breath hold.

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I\'ll think of one later...

I'll apologise now if this turns into a bit of an essay! And these are only my views and experiences, they may not work for everyone and I'm sure there's plenty of other methods out there, but hopefully some of it makes sense.

Having a big breathold whilst doing nothing and having one whilst exerting a lot of energy are 2 different things. Sure they both help each other in some way and both can be improved by training.

Most people find that after a spearfishing their breathold in the pool seems to have improved. This is probably due to the fact that your body and mind have spent a lot of time doing it whilst diving that they are attuned to what your body is capable of.

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. This is done through training, using both static breathold and dynamic breathold. Everyone's body has a trigger that tells it when it should breathe which has a very large safety margin built into it. Learning to ignore that trigger and what your body is actually capable is what it is all about.

The training for this is done using small steps. Static breathold, above or below water, should start with short bretholds and slowly increase. This one's all about relaxing and trying to lower your heart rate and find what you are cabaple of and what you are comfortable with. If you are really comfotable maybe you can go for the record. It's only 9:04 minutes!

Dynamic breathold is much the same. Start with nice slow 25m breatholds and do 10 of them taking as much time in between each so that when you start each one you feel the same as when you started the first one (ie no elevated HR or lactic build up). Build this distance up thru 37.5m, 50m, 75m, 100m. It's the same as any sport, you need to warm up properly before going too hard, or in this case too long.

Once you've got the long slow ones sorted you should increase some intensity so that you are simulating hockey. Shorten your rest in between breatholds so you are stressing your body and having to use all available O2 to feed your muscles. You should get to a stage where you can, for example, do 10 x 50m breatholds with as short as possible a break between each one.

Just make sure if you are doing any of this sort of thing don't do it alone, have someone keeping an eye on you, especially anything over 50m as when you're pushing the limits shallow water blackout isn't far away a lot of the time. It's about knowing how close you can safely come to it!

A combination of all this sort of thing should increase your breathold. There's some more interesting reading at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-diving#Training

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!

We should get Al Reid to contribute to this thread as his Medical thesis was a study on the affect of CO2 on the body. He conducted some tests to see whether or not you can condition your body to tolerate high levels of CO2.

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