Hands Free Equalisation How to Equalise without pinching your nose VTO and BTV Equalisation

Hello, freediving family. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to equalize without pinching your nose? When I first started freediving, I couldn't do it. I couldn't do no hands equalization. But I learned how to do it. And today, I'm gonna show you how to do it too. Don't forget to subscribe and click the notifications bell for more content. No hands equalization is not the same as frenzel equalization. Which is when we pinch our nose and use our tongue and throat muscles to equalize our ears. But the mechanics are very similar. So we're going to start by breaking down the movements, the mechanics of no hands equalization. How is it that we're even equalizing without pinching our nose? Usually, to equalize our middle ear, all we have to do is create enough pressure in the nasal cavity to push open the eustachian tubes and let air pass through into the middle ear. This is why usually, we have to pinch our nose when we equalize. Because we trap the pressure in our nasal cavity and it builds up, forcing our eustachian tubes to pop open. What we are doing with no hands equalization is we are actively opening our eustachian tubes. We have an active control over the muscles around them. So that all we need to do is give a little push with our throat and our tongue muscles to push the air that's in our mouth and in our nasal cavity through the eustachian tube into the middle ear. We don't have to build pressure up to blow apart the eustachian tubes because they're already open. So how do we open the eustachian tubes? We do it with the soft palate. The muscles in our soft palate, that thing that wiggles in your mouth when you snore, they connect to muscles that surround the eustachian tubes. And when you move the soft palate in a very specific way, you pull apart the eustachian tubes and allow air to pass through them into the middle ear. When we do no hands equalization, all we're doing is lifting our soft palate in a very specific way while we pump with the throat and tongue muscles to then push the air into our middle ear. Simple. It's simple when you know how to do it. But learning how to do it is very much like learning how to raise an eyebrow, or like this, or learning how to wiggle your ears. It's muscle isolation that takes time to develop. That's why we're going to go through a sequence of exercises that are going to allow you to develop the coordination and control over your muscles for no hands equalization. Just before we get stuck into it, I want to let you know that I have just launched a Patreon page. Patreon is a platform, it's the place where you can go to support your favorite content creators, people whose videos or efforts have helped you. Basically, you can become a patron of this YouTube channel and help me to continue creating these videos. On top of that, I am officially creating the most in-depth, the most complete, comprehensive freediving manual ever created for those who support me on my Patreon page. It won't be available anywhere else, just there. I will always make these tutorials and keep making my vlogs for YouTube, but whereas the tutorials here are more like helpful tips, the videos on my Patreon page will be a full-blown manual, step-by-step going through everything that I would teach from a beginner course all the way up to what I would teach on a freediving instructor course and what I would teach to other freediving athletes and competitors. I already have videos of what I would teach on a beginner course and videos on mouth fill equalization ready to go uploaded to my Patreon page and every week I'll be adding new videos, fleshing the manual out. So if you have found these videos, if you found this YouTube channel helpful, please consider supporting it through Patreon. If I have ever taken the time to answer your questions to help you out, please consider doing the same thing and supporting my Patreon page. If you're the kind of person that would buy me a cup of coffee or buy me a beer to say thanks, then please consider kicking a couple dollars to my Patreon. It will allow me to keep creating these videos here. Okay, back to no hands equalization. We're going to first need to learn how to control and develop a bit more strength with our throat and tongue muscles before we dive into how specifically to move your soft palate to open up your tubes. You can lift your throat muscles up and you can drop them downward. I'm going to turn my head to the side so you can see my Adam's apple moving a bit easier, but this is me lifting my throat up, and this is me dropping my throat muscles and my tongue, the back of my tongue, downward. I'll go up, down, up, down, up, down. From the top, past like neutral, and then back to the bottom, up, down, up, down. Super awkward. See how my Adam's apple is moving? This is easier for men to do in the mirror, but women you'll find that you can still watch your throat moving. It's just that you don't have as large an indicator like an Adam's apple sticking out that moves up and down, but you'll still see the throat moving just the same. This is our first exercise, controlling the muscles that are actually going to be pushing the air from your mouth up into your middle ear. It's completely normal if doing these exercises makes you gag, because this is going to start hitting your gag reflex in a weird way. You'll see. Next, we're going to do the same thing, but with the mouth open and the tongue stuck out. Before, we just left our mouth in a neutral position. So number one, tongue and mouth in a neutral position. Number two, mouth open and the tongue stuck out. And then you're going to lift the throat up, pull the throat down. Lift the throat up, pull the throat down. This is what it looks like. It's disgusting. Number three, we're going to do the exact same thing, but with the tongue folded over backwards like this. This is a really good one for gagging. This position, though, is really important. I think the most important, because it does start to position your soft palate into the position that it needs to be to open up your tubes. So it's a stepping stone exercise. It's really important. Now, as we're going through this video, just do the exercises with me, but don't worry about writing them down or anything like that, because at the end, I'm going to put together a daily program of exercises you should do and how long to do them for. So you can follow it every day, and then within no time, you will have developed the ability to know hands equalize. Now for the soft palate. The soft palate directs the flow of air when you're breathing in or out of your nose or in and out of your mouth. When we're breathing with our nose, the soft palate closes down against the back of the tongue, and so the airflow is directed out of the nasal cavity. When we breathe with our mouths, the soft palate sits in a kind of neutral position, but because the opening to the mouth is bigger and more immediate than the opening to the nasal cavity or to the nose, the air just rushes out of your mouth. So it is the soft palate, the back of the soft palate, that directs the airflow when you're breathing. It's mostly the back of the soft palate that's moving up and down, but with no hands equalization, what we want to learn how to control is more the middle or the center of the soft palate. I want you to yawn now. Try it again. Did you feel any crackling sounds in your ears? Did you feel any pops or any of the noises of equalization when you yawned? If you didn't, keep yawning until you can start to feel it. When we yawn, there is a moment where the center, the middle of our soft palate rises up, and that is the moment, that is the movement that we want to learn how to control and then to exaggerate and do it stronger, because that is the movement that voluntarily opens up your eustachian tubes. I want you to spend a few moments now just yawning. Just stop for a sec, and let's just yawn for a few moments, keeping our attention on our soft palate, on the soft part of the roof of our mouth. Let's get a feel for what's moving and how it's moving. The next step is to place your index finger on the roof of your mouth, where it's soft, not on the hard palate, on the soft palate. Doing this will give you a really good impression of what's moving and how it's moving. It will most likely make you gag too. Finger on the top and yawning again. Just take your time, do it slow. Ideally, we don't want to gag when we do this. The next step is to try and raise the center of your soft palate, just like you would when you were yawning, but without the yawn. Try to raise it and then relax and let it drop. Don't worry about trying to make any equalization sounds or anything along those lines. We're just trying to develop strength and mostly coordination. When you do this, keep your mouth relaxed. You can do it with the mouth closed or with the mouth slightly open, either is fine. Now let's try to hold the soft palate up. We're going to lift the soft palate into the position that you would have it in and we're going to hold it for five seconds. Then we're going to relax, let it drop. Lift it up, hold for five seconds, relax, let it drop. We are step by step developing the coordination for no hands equalization here. If you hear some noises that feel similar or sound similar to equalizing, that's good, but don't feel like you have to have heard them step by step. By now we should be starting to develop a pretty good awareness of our soft palate and the specific movement that we're after. Keeping in mind when we do this, the jaw does not move at all. Doing this to tug on your eustachian tubes and kind of hear a popping or an equalization sound is not going to make your ears equalize. You're just stretching out your tubes. The jaw never moves. This is me doing no hands equalization. Simple, no movement in the jaw. So those are the mechanics. The throat muscles go up and down, the center of the soft palate raises. Now let's start piecing it together to create an actual equalization. This next exercise is going to increase blood flow to our heads while at the same time rushing huge bits of air past our eustachian tubes. The more blood flow you have around your head, the more elasticity you're going to have in your eustachian tubes, which is going to make this easier to learn. We're going to do a breathing exercise from yoga. That's right, we're going to do the yoga. It's called Kapalabhati and I'm 100% certain I am not going to teach it correctly and that makes me a little bit happy. We're going to do this sitting up straight or just standing straight. I think it is better to sit though because you can become a little bit dizzy or lightheaded doing this. We're going to inhale and exhale only with our noses. We're going to do strong exhales, pushing with our stomachs, then relaxing and allowing yourself to automatically breathe again. Don't control your inhale, try not to suck anything in. Just relax and let it happen on its own. Now we're going to speed it up so that we're doing one breath every second. We're going to do this for 30 seconds and then rest for 30 seconds. We're going to do it five times. You may get dizzy. Right now we all should have some increased blood flow to the head, which has then warmed up and made our eustachian tubes a little bit more flexible for this moment. It makes them easier to open. And this is the perfect time to start humming. We are going to continuously hum the letter A. We're going to take in a deep breath and hum. And as we do, we're going to play around pushing our soft palate up, changing the position slightly, working with it, just like that position that we found when we were yawning. What we're after here is to hear our humming ringing in our ears like an internal noise, an internal vibration. That means that your soft palate is in the correct position and air is flowing into your middle ear. So now let's hum and push our soft palate up so that we hear our humming vibrating as an internal noise in our ears. First, we're going to hum the letter A and then we're going to try the exact same thing but humming the letter N. Now play around with that for a few minutes and then when you're feeling good, we're going to change from continuous humming to humming in short bursts. Now you can stick with humming the letter A or humming the letter N, whichever one you feel more comfortable with, but your hums will turn into something more like this. Bursts. After playing with that for a few minutes, I hope you've had some success with it and you've started to hear your humming reverberating, vibrating around in your ears. Alright, so we know how to pump our throat. We know the position of our soft palate. We've been humming for a little bit. Let's actually do some equalization. Let's actually put this all together. What we're going to do is we're going to lift our soft palate up and as we do, we're going to pump upwards with our throat. I just equalized. Now, very important when you do this, try not to hold the soft palate position up in place. You lift it up as you push with the throat and then just relax it. We're not trying to hold it in place like we were doing during the previous exercise where we like held it up for five seconds. Just up, relax, up, relax. Now, that is basically it. That is a no hands equalization. If it worked for you, fantastic. If it didn't, then you're probably like 99% of people who are not going to be able to do that after a short tutorial, which is fine, completely normal. This does take a fair bit of time to develop. If you did hear some crackling in your ears or just some strange equalization noises, that is serious progress. That is you on the way to being able to do this properly. But the truth is for most of us, it will take us a few weeks of going through these exercises every single day. But it's so worth it because once you've gotten your head around this, you'll always be able to do it. So your diving becomes so much smoother, more intuitive. After practicing this for a few days or maybe a week or two, that's when you should start going to the water and giving it a go. In the beginning, you'll probably find that you're only able to do it going down head first or going down at angles, not steep angles either, very sort of shallow angles. It'll make it easier to equalize. Then just like with anything as time goes on, your coordination, your strength with this particular movement gets stronger and you'll be able to do it vertically. You'll be able to do it deeper as well because it is normal that you'll only be able to do this maybe for a few meters in the beginning and then you'll have to switch to a normal frenzel. But eventually, you'll be able to do it for forever. For as deep as you can dive, you'll be able to no hands equalize as long as you just keep practicing it. There are some people who can no hands equalize naturally and those are usually the most hated people in freediving. When I started freediving, I couldn't do this naturally, but I learned how. I learned how by doing exercises similar to this. I feel like over the years, I've fine-tuned these exercises to make them more efficient. Something that really helped me out though was after doing these exercises for a few weeks, I went and started doing laps of breaststroke and with each stroke, as I would put my head underwater, I would try doing a no hands equalization. And if you swim a few kilometers, you're going to put your head underwater a few hundred times and that's a lot of attempts. And after the second time I went and did this at the pool, I started to get it. I started to get my no hands equalization and then over the years, it's gotten stronger. Keep in mind, this is just muscle isolation and all we need to develop it is repetition. So this is our daily program for no hands equalization. It'll take you roughly 20 minutes and if you do it for a few weeks, the rest of your diving life will be so much better. We're going to start by lifting and then dropping our throats with our tongue in a neutral, relaxed position and we're going to do this for two minutes. When we do this, try to keep everything else relaxed. Next, for two minutes, we're going to do it with the tongue stuck out. And then finally, for two minutes, we're going to do it with the tongue folded back over itself. Next, for two minutes, we're going to press our soft palate up into the position that opens our eustachian tubes, hold it for five seconds, then relax for five seconds. Back up, hold for five seconds, relax for five seconds. Five seconds holding, five seconds relaxed. Doing that for two minutes. Next, we're going to warm up our eustachian tubes. We're going to get some blood pumping around the head. We're going to do Kapalabhati for five minutes. 30 seconds of breathing, 30 seconds of relaxation. Sit down, let's not get dizzy and fall over here. Next, we're going to spend two minutes humming the letter A. Try some long, continuous hums, and then try some bursting hums. So some ah, and then some ah, ah, ah, ah. Two minutes humming the letter A, and then two minutes humming the letter N. Same thing. Some long, continuous hums, and then some bursting hums. Then spend a few minutes piecing it all together. Lifting up the soft palate in that specific way, pumping with the throat, seeing if we can get the ease to start crackling, seeing if we can start to develop that strength. And that is our daily routine. It should take us around 20 minutes. I hope you found this video helpful. If you did, please consider contributing to or supporting my Patreon page. It will allow me to keep making these videos. If you do have any questions, just write them down in the comments below, and I'll answer them all. But otherwise, subscribe for more videos, and I will see you in the water somewhere. I'm Adam Stern. I hold my breath and dive really deep. 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