Scuba Diving VS Freediving Which is Better?

Hello freediving family and scuba diving family. Hello diving family. Today I'm going to talk about freediving and scuba diving. How they relate, how they're different, and which one is better. Just to clarify, I love both freediving and scuba diving, neither is better and they both have their place. But one of the more common comments that goes across all my social media sounds like this. That's awesome, but why don't you just scuba dive? Because scuba diving and freediving are completely different activities. Each with their own limitations and benefits. They both take place on the water but trying to compare them is like comparing football and cricket because they both take place on a grass field. In this video I'll be referring to freediving and scuba diving in the context of exploration and fun diving. Because a lot of people freedive for competitive reasons and they enjoy the simple act of diving deep, or holding their breath for a long time, or swimming great distances underwater. So let's compare the two activities over a few points. There are so many places around the world where it's just better to scuba dive. Very simply because you get more time at the bottom. You get more time underwater to observe, interact, relax. Scuba diving is much more practical if your goal is to fully take in the environment or the reef or the underwater world in general. To take in the environment around you. The downside to this is that when you are scuba diving you're pretty slow in the water. So if there are fast moving animals in the water or you want to get somewhere really quickly usually you're too slow to keep up. If a diver is freediving then they're wearing a lot less gear and they're usually wearing long fins which makes them very fast and agile in the water. A freediver can also cover more ground because they can swim around on the surface and then dive down onto points of interest. So the dive site that they're exploring tends to be in general a bit bigger. I mean the reason why I personally started freediving was because I was scuba diving and I got a little bit bored with just observing. I loved the sensation of being underwater, of being weightless. But I needed something that was a little bit more engaging and a little bit more challenging. There is nothing in the ocean that makes noise quite like a scuba diver and all the aquatic life know it. When you're freediving fish and mammals are not so afraid of you or skittish as they would be if you were on scuba. They let you come closer to them and they come closer to you. You become just a big fish in the ocean and usually a point or a source of curiosity. But once again you're always limited by the actual time you can remain underwater for that interaction. But interacting with big mammals in the water is definitely better and easier when you're freediving. Whales, dolphins, sea lions will all be so much more playful with you and especially in the case of sea lions blowing bubbles is a sign of aggression. So that stream of bubbles coming out of your reg doesn't do much to keep the sea lions calm or happy. Freediving though isn't exclusively better for interacting with the aquatic world. For example when I was diving with thresher sharks in Malapascua in the Philippines it made much more sense to do that dive on scuba. Early in the morning the deep water sharks swim over a cleaning station and if I were diving up and down, up and down most likely I would have scared away those timid sharks. But on scuba I could just go down once, stay at a fixed point and observe them better. But before I go on I just want to dispel a few myths out there about freediving and scuba diving. If you are a scuba diver, taking a freediving course will not improve your air consumption while you're on scuba. The breathing techniques that are taught on any level of freediving course don't translate directly over to scuba diving and learning how to hold your breath longer will not reduce your body's demand for oxygen while you're down there. Learning to breathe for freediving will definitely give you more control of your breathing which you can then implement in your scuba diving but I think it would be better off if you just went and swam some laps. If you swim laps you'll learn to control your breathing over a long period of time while you're exercising. Or just scuba dive more often because the more you dive the more comfortable you're going to be down there and so the slower and the shallower your breathing is going to be. It's all about comfort. Just because you can freedive does not mean that you can scuba dive and just because you can scuba dive does not mean you can freedive. They are 100% non-transferable skills. Non-transferable skills. Even the equalization is different from scuba to freediving and personally I find that I have the most problems on my freediving courses with students who have previously done a lot of scuba diving and I'm sure scuba diving instructors have a really hard time dealing with freedivers. You don't have to be super fit or young to freedive. The first man to dive deeper than 100 meters was 65 years old when he did it. Both of these activities can be done by people with a range of fitness levels and the fitness requirements to freedive are the same as the fitness requirements to scuba dive. Alright so those myths are busted. So also the way that people learn to freedive and the way that people learn to scuba dive are very very different. Scuba diving is learned primarily by developing knowledge and then by developing skills. Freediving is the same except that freediving students develop their knowledge, they develop their skills but then they also develop their ability or their body's ability. Their body's abilities and limits are extended as they train, continue to dive and adapt their body more and more to freediving. Now I know that the body adapts to elements of scuba diving as well but I just don't think it's quite the same. And it does seem at least to me that it is experience and greater skills that allow a scuba diver to attempt more and more advanced or technical dives and not so much their body's actual ability. So those are just some of my thoughts about the relevance and the differences between the two. I'd love to hear what you guys think in the comments. But basically if you are a scuba diver take a freediving course and if you are a freediver take a scuba diving course. Honestly you're missing out if you don't. Both of them are just different ways to interact with the underwater world. Not better, not worse, they're just different activities suited for different situations. If you did enjoy the video make sure you hit the like button and if you are new here then subscribe. I make tutorials aimed at improving your freediving. And whether you're holding your breath or whether you're breathing I will see you in the water somewhere. I'm Adam Stern, I hold my breath and dive really deep. Make sure you check this video out because I think you'll like it. Otherwise, this is the most recent video that I've posted to my channel.