Learning to Not Breathe

A lot of Paddlesurfers are returning to the sport of surfing after perhaps a long hiatus, or perhaps never surfed at all. Many of you will eventually get into bigger waves and experience the joy of bouncing around in whitewater or retreating from a crashing lip by hugging the bottom. One critical skill you must learn is how to hold your breath and conserve energy. We’ll cover conserving energy later, this article is about not breathing–on purpose.

You may recall swimming long distances under water when you were younger, but if it’s been a while since you tested your underwater abilities, do so before you get into waves of significant size. If you find it impossible to hold your breath while being active for thirty seconds, then some training is in order.

When you practiced holding your breath and swimming underwater as a tad, you were doing hypoxic training, and it’s the most effective way to increase your body’s efficiency when you can’t get oxygen. It’s simply exercising for short periods while holding your breath.

As you get older it gets harder to do this, as they say, the wind is the first thing to go. You’ll need to train more to do less. Sorry about that, but training hard beats sitting on a tour bus. Like a lot of deterioration associated with aging, working at it will slow the process dramatically and keep you at the high end of that ugly downward curve. Hmmm, I’m feeling kind of depressed just writing this.

A swimming pool is a great and convenient way to do hypoxic training, and you can combine it with improving your swimming, which is another critical surfing tool. Don’t do any underwater breath-holding exercise without a spotter. Shallow water blackouts occur in even healthy and experienced people. It only takes a short amount of time to drown–do this practice only with a capable buddy who is willing to pay attention–especially in the ocean. Here’s why: I’m a certified Rescue Diver (well, sort of, I never completed the CPR requirement) and a lot of the requirements for that certification have to do with finding and recovering stuff from the bottom. I’ll tell you for sure–that ain’t easy and it takes a long time sometimes. I never did find my spare weight belt that we were using for one exercise, and we looked for over an hour. You don’t want people looking for you if you’ve blacked out, you want them watching you when things go bad.

Pool regimen: Start by warming up with a fairly long swim. Five or six laps of the pool is about right. Then swim a lap freestyle, face down, without breathing. Take a lap at a leisurely pace to recover, then do it again. Five or six repetitions is a good start. Cool off for a while and fully recover your breath, then do another set.

Surf regimen: Swim until you feel warmed up, position yourself where you can feel the swell underwater (near a break is good if there are no surfers out). Dive to the bottom and stay down for two waves. Surface and breath for two or three waves, then dive for two waves. Repeat this five or six times.

Carrying a diving weight belt or a rock around underwater is a more extreme version of the same training. The amount of energy expended is similar but you’ll be using other muscles. It might be worthwhile to toss this in sometimes (but I don’t).

If you do these exercises regularly you’ll find your ability to manage being tossed around by waves is greatly improved. You may be able to extend the time you can hold your breath and make the exercises more difficult.

There are no guarantees in the water. Great watermen die in situations that seem almost trivial, and out-of-shape newbies survive in horrific circumstances. But preparation and understanding the possibilities should give you not only a better chance but a better time. If you come up sputtering and choking every time the whitewater roughs you up a little, you won’t have as much fun as the guy who goes through the washing machine and comes up calm.