How to Maximise your Lung Capacity Take a Full Breath or Final Breath for Freediving

Hey freediving family! In the last video I spoke about diet for freediving, I spoke about foods and supplements that will improve your freediving performance. In this video we are going to step by step go through how to take a final breath or how to take in a bigger breath, a full breath for freediving. At the end of the video I'm also going to talk a little bit about packing and give you some of my thoughts on that too. The support for this video comes from DiveSpear and Sport. They're a great dive centre and dive shop in Sydney. They have a really great online store as well, so if you are after some gear have a look at the link in the description below and head to their website. If you are enjoying these videos think about maybe using them for your next piece of dive equipment. It probably goes without saying that the more air that you have in your lungs, the more oxygen you're going to have access to in your body and the longer you're going to be able to hold your breath. Over the years freedivers have developed breathing techniques that we believe allows us to inhale to our maximum capacity while still maintaining our physical and mental relaxation and those techniques are what we're going to talk about today. So your lungs, they're incredibly flexible and they will keep expanding and expanding and expanding until they hit a wall. Now that wall that stops them is almost always the outward flexibility of your thoracic cavity, the cavity that encases, that surrounds your lungs. We're talking about muscles, bones, cartilage, all the bits and pieces that encase your lungs. There are groups of muscles around your thoracic cavity that you have a natural control of and what we're going to do today is learn how to isolate those muscles and to improve your control and therefore the movement of those muscles so you can inhale more. We're going to learn how to control these individual areas separately at first and then we're going to piece it all together to make one big giant breath. The first section that we're going to increase control of is our abdominal section or our stomach section. This is also referred to as diaphragmatic breathing. All you have to do is inhale and as you inhale you push your abdominal wall outward. As our abdominal wall comes out, we allow our diaphragm, which is our main respiratory muscle, to drop down even further. Now when we're just breathing tidily, like our at rest relaxed breathing, our diaphragm will move up and down about one odd centimetre. But when we breathe diaphragmatically and push our stomach out, our diaphragm can move up and down between seven and ten centimetres so there's a fair bit of room for air to go in. Before we start doing any breathing exercises, we're going to just sit or lay down in a relaxed comfortable position and then all we're going to do is we're going to push our stomach out, no breathing at all, just push your stomach out and relax and let it go back in. Push your stomach out, relax, let it go back in. Let it go back into its natural neutral position. Now I'm going to take my shirt off so you can see everything moving. Keep in mind I had surgery a few weeks ago and they shaved my stomach but not my chest so I have a weird line in my body. Now what we're going to do is we're going to inhale slowly and as we do that we're push our stomachs out and it's going to look like this. The slower you do this the more control that you have. Now when you are doing this you're also going to want to make sure that your chest does not move. This is about muscle isolation. We want to be able to control the muscles in the stomach, in the abdominal, without moving your chest. This is my little balcony outside of my house where I like to hang out and guys if you are finding this video helpful make sure you leave a like on the video because silly things like likes, they really help me out. They help the video get seen when people search it on YouTube. Okay so now what we're going to do is we are going to breathe continuously into our stomach as deep as we can for two minutes. This is going to warm up these muscle groups especially because you may not be accustomed to using your abdominal wall, your abdominal muscles in this specific way so it's going to make it feel more comfortable the more that we do it. Now you can put one hand on your stomach and one hand on your chest as you do this just to make sure that your chest isn't moving and that you're only moving your stomach. Okay the next section is our chest section. We're all comfortable breathing with our chest but this may be a little bit different. It's a little bit more specific. Our lungs will keep expanding until they hit a wall and the wall is the outward flexibility of your thoracic cavity, the cavity that encases your lungs. So if you're breathing with your chest like this or concave like this you're not giving your lungs as much space to expand into as if you would open up for example and this is what we're going to do. We're going to open our chest up as if someone were drawing us forward from the middle of our chest or from our solar plexus, drawing us forward like this. We want our thoracic spine, our upper spine to move in like this a little bit but also if you don't have the flexibility to move your spine like that don't stress, don't worry about it all. This is all just within the realms of what you can do comfortably. So we're going to ignore the stomach and just breathe into the chest. The slower you do it the more control you have. You can slow the flow of air going into your lungs or into your mouth by pursing your lips which is what I'm doing or you can push your tongue up against the roof of the mouth to also slow the flow of air going down so you can have more control. As we inhale we slowly bring our chest forward. Now it does look like I'm pushing my shoulders back but I'm not. I'm actually just bringing my chest forward and then my shoulders remain more or less in the same place. They do shift back a little bit but I'm not pulling my shoulders back. There's no need to pull the shoulders back, just bring the chest forward and keep the shoulders neutral. The key with this is not to inhale so deeply and so much that you're fighting for it at the end. You only inhale to the point of comfort. You inhale as deeply as you can while remaining relaxed. So once again we're going to now just breathe for two minutes, just your chest section. At the end of those two minutes the muscles should be a lot more warm, loose, relaxed and we should get a larger range of movement from them. Okay let's now combine the two sections to take a full breath. We're going to start with the stomach. You're going to fill up the stomach section and then when the stomach section is full you're going to relax the stomach, let it fall back to its neutral position and then roll on in one smooth motion to your chest. Now we're going to do this for two minutes. We're going to build coordination with the two sections together. Now when you are exhaling don't worry about controlling which section you exhale from. Don't worry about trying to exhale from the stomach or the chest. Just let it all go and relax. We're only controlling the inhale first with the stomach then with the chest. Guys it started raining out here so I'm going to move this inside. All right so picking up from where we just left off it started raining outside so I've moved inside to my less glamorous location. So we are going to now breathe continuously, stomach and chest filling up entirely, filling up the stomach, filling up the chest for two minutes. Now it is normal for those breaths to feel too full or over full. That's normal. Just keep in mind this is most likely due to your flexibility level in these muscle groups and the more you breathe like this the easier it's going to be to take in more and more air and still remain comfortable. Now that's basically a full breath, the stomach and the chest. That's the size of the breath that you're going to want to take before every breath hold, before every dive. There is another section that we can add to that as well but if you were feeling like that was really full I don't recommend you move on to the third section. If you're feeling like yeah like you don't want to take in more air just keep working with the two sections to get more comfortable with it to increase flexibility. But if that felt fine, if you want to add some more air into your lungs then we'll move on to the third section which is the intercostal section. Our intercostal muscles can be pressed outward to make room for more air. It is the trickiest section to master but you will also find that you have a pretty innate ability to do it. So you're going to take your index finger and your thumb like this and you're going to put your thumb around the back, not too far around the back, around the back of your rib cage so that when you press your ribs together your fingers will meet in your solar plexus. Not down here in your stomach, up here in your solar plexus. Now what you're going to do then is without pushing your stomach out, without lifting your chest up, you're going to breathe so that your fingers separate just like this. That's me pressing my intercostal muscles outward or like splaying them out to the side. Take your time with this one. Everybody will have a different size section or a different level of control or coordination or flexibility with all these muscle groups. Some of us have small stomach sections, some of us have small chest sections, some of us will have big or small intercostal sections. So whether your fingers move apart just a tiny bit or a lot, either is fine. We just work with what we have and that's it. Now just like the others we're going to breathe for two minutes just intercostals. Try not to skip this, this is really important for developing control because soon we're going to string it all together. One, two, three. So you can put your hands just on your intercostals like that or you can do the same thing where you push them in so that your fingers meet in the middle. I'm just going to put my hands like this. It is very important that you try to isolate these groups individually. So if you did feel your chest moving or you felt like you were compensating with your stomach or something along those lines, try to just scale it back and just breathe with the intercostals. Now you should have a pretty good control of that by now. So what we're going to do is we're going to string it all together. This is going to be your new full breath. This is as full as it gets. You're going to start with the stomach, then the intercostals and then the chest. It's going to look like this. Nice and full. Alright, so we're going to do that now for two minutes. The same like we did with everything else. Two minutes of full breath. We want to inhale as much air as we can while remaining relaxed. The limit of your inhalation is the point where you lose relaxation. So if you're not relaxed, that's where you cut off. Okay, so two minutes. It is normal that when you get to your chest section that you'll feel like you won't have as much room as you did before. You feel like you barely have any room. Because what we're actually doing when we breathe into our intercostals is we are filling up some of our chest section as well. I mean the truth is, and something that's important to know, is that it's not like when we breathe into our stomach, we're breathing into our stomach section or the bottom half of our lungs. Our lungs are just one big cavity. So all we're doing is using different muscle groups to outwardly expand your lungs and take in more air. But we're not directing airflow anywhere in particular. And just because you feel like you've lost a little bit in the chest section, I promise you, you've more than made up for it with what you take in to your intercostals. So it works out that together there is more air. So that's your full breath or your final breath before every breath hold, before every dive. Fill up the stomach, fill up the intercostals, fill up the chest, as much air as you can take in while remaining relaxed. On top of all that, there is a method in which you can take even more air into your lungs and it's called packing. This is when you use your tongue as a piston to force more air into your lungs. Now with this technique, you can take a full breath to the point where you cannot expand anymore and then force more air into your lungs. It looks like this. We are not going to learn how to do that today. The reason being is that I only teach packing to divers that are able to dive to at least 50 or 60 meters. The truth is, is that packing, while it is a technique that most competitive freedivers use, it is a technique which will improve your performance. It is also extremely dangerous. It is lung overexpansion. Now after years of training, after years of diving deep, working on your flexibility, your body may get to the point where it's ready to handle that extra pressure inside it. But right now in the beginning, definitely not. Packing is to be avoided at all costs. The truth is as well, is if you start packing too early or when you haven't fully developed your breathing control, you're going to be shooting yourself in the leg because you're never going to actually develop full control of your respiratory muscles. And what will happen is you will use packing as like a crutch. You know, it'll be like a technique that helps you dive further, but you will have sacrificed your foundation skills. While packing is a technique that most competitive freedivers do use, unless you are diving to at least 50 or 60 meters, I recommend that you just avoid it completely because it's going to take away from the actual skills that you want to learn and that you will be learning. I've also personally seen people give themselves collapsed lungs from packing. They've given themselves subcutaneous pneumothoraxes. So there's a lot of issues and dangers that come along with lung overexpansion. So unless you are truly ready for it and unless you have been taught by an instructor and when you are at the appropriate level, it's just to be avoided. Most of the time, the reason why freedivers pack is not actually for the extra air, the extra oxygen. It's to have the extra gas in their lungs so that they can equalize deeper. So because if you have extra air in the lungs, you'll still be able to bring it up at deeper and deeper depths so you can equalize deeper. So packing is for deep equalization, not for extended breath holds primarily. Anyway guys, I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, make sure you leave a like and share the video around. Make sure your dive buddies see the video. Make sure your dive community sees it. I'm constantly making videos aimed at improving your diving. So if you are looking at getting better, picking up some new knowledge, subscribe and I'll see you in the water somewhere. I'm Adam Stern. I hold my breath and dive really deep. Don't forget to subscribe and join the freediving family. Also, check out this video because I think you might like it. Otherwise, this is the most recent video that I've posted to my channel.