Underwater Wakulla- March 31, 2011
Hold your breath! By DR. JOERG HESS
Thursday, March 31, 2011 at 4:00 am (Updated: February 3, 11:28 am)
Stress! You have too many things to take care of, and not enough hours in the day to do it all in.
Take a deep breath, exhale slowly – now you’re ready to take on the world!
Sound familiar?
Breathing is more than the intake of life-essential oxygen. Breathing affects our mood, improves
how we feel. Breathe rapidly, and you excite yourself, you get hyped up. Breathe slowly and
deliberately, and you calm down.
Gregg Stanton
Joerg Hess teaching students.
Take a breath, slowly and deliberately, exhale slowly and deliberately, stay exhaled for a bit, then
inhale again. Repeat this a couple of times. Feel better? This is how you breathe when you watch
a boring movie at three in the morning, relaxed, ready to fall asleep. In turn, this type of breathing
slows the heart rhythm, calms the nerves, and makes you relax. Sounds easy? It should be. Yoga
uses this concept, too.
Experienced free divers apply this type of breathing to ready themselves. They use a single breath to descend under water, either in
pursuit of spearing a fish, or simply for the exhilaration of the experience.
There is a group of free divers that even play with great white sharks – no cage. Try that while staying relaxed, and breathing slowly
between dives – I couldn’t.
But that is extreme, and not recommended as a weekend endeavor. What you can do, however, is breathe as described above, while
sitting in your favourite lounge chair, and then hold your breath for 30 seconds. Inhale before holding your breath, but not too deep.
Towards the end, you will feel a strong urge to breathe, your heart starts pounding faster, and you may even start to sweat.
With experience and practice, you can extend your breath-hold period to a minute or more. Breathing calmly and deliberately between
breath-holds allows you to recuperate quickly.
A low-volume mask, long fins, and a snug-fit wetsuit give maximum underwater maneuverability, while holding your breath.
This is very different from SCUBA diving, much more dynamic, much more exposed to the environment, a more intense experience.
Using technology makes you become more like a fish, but it is the single breath that technology cannot enhance – that is up to the
person, and it makes it a very personal, pure sport.
“Underwater Rugby” is a stylized form of beating the life out of each other while staying under on a single breath.
It is a lot of fun, and trains the breath-holding ability. Numerous breath-hold diving records are set, and broken, on a regular basis:
Deepest dive on a single breath, longest breath hold time, least amount of breathing during a certain period of time. The movie “The
Big Blue” (Le grand bleu) with Jean Reno gives a humorous view into the breath-hold diving community based on some historic facts.
However, human records will never come anywhere close to those set by seals or whales, nor will we ever become as gracious as
these aquatic mammals. It’s still an amazing experience, and it can start in your arm chair. We are looking into starting a local free
diving group, which can be trained in a swimming pool, as long as it is supervised - for safety reasons.
Give it a try!