Waiting to Inhale: Breath-Holding Drills for Kayakers
by Roger Schumann
Illustration by Kevan Atteberry

Whatever your skill level, the following drills can help you learn to be more relaxed and comfortable, and ultimately more successful, when you find yourself upside-down in the drink.

Upside-down in the chilly water, I crank my blade up to the surface, sweep it out to the side and  hip snap to drive my upper body through the surface. Then I raise my head, stall and plunge back underwater--but not before filling my lungs with a big gulp of fresh air. Again I crank my blade to the surface, sweep, hip snap, raise my head, gulp air and--splash back seaward. It is my third failed roll and a carbon copy of the first two ragged attempts. I continue the process a fourth and a fifth time. I’m running out of breath as well as feeling the onset of an ice-cream headache. On my sixth attempt, I pause, focus and slow everything down: I sweep cleanly and hip snap, and this time I keep my head down, ear pasted to shoulder, and rise up easily, modeling the best “instructor’s demonstration technique” I can muster. “So that’s what the ‘cass-a-roll’ drill looks like.” I gush, with all the enthusiasm of Tom Sawyer whitewashing a fence. “Now you try it!” My class of four floats around me in their kayaks, alternately nodding their heads in understanding and shaking them in disbelief: You want us to do what?! I can see I’ve piqued their interest, but no one is quite convinced to pick up a paintbrush just yet.

The cass-a-roll drill, along with the other breath-holding exercises presented here, was designed to help students learn to relax after capsizing, whether they’re going to try a roll, as in this drill, or simply wet exit. Its purpose is to increase your tolerance for missing your roll, especially in a “combat roll” situation, when you’ve accidentally tipped over in rough seas. It’s a great confidence booster, and it really helps you learn to overcome the panic that often sets in after an unexpected capsize.

As I’ve discovered from years of teaching, most paddlers tend to bail out after only a roll attempt or two. In small part, this is due to running out of air, but mostly it’s psychological: people simply panic. A missed roll washes away confidence. So the cass-a-roll drill is designed to help build confidence by practicing missing rolls on purpose, as many times as possible, before finally rolling up. If you usually wet exit after only one or two tries, you can train yourself fairly quickly to push it to three or four. Once you get up to four, it’s not that hard to build up to six or eight, or even more.

After a bit more cajoling, I soon have everyone in class cass-a-rolling and practicing other confidence-building drills. Whatever your skill level--whether you’re just learning to roll, your roll is basically bombproof or you’re a non-roller just hoping to become more comfortable after a capsize--the following drills can help you learn to be more relaxed and comfortable, and ultimately more successful, when you find yourself upside-down in the drink.

These drills are partly about training yourself to take deeper, bigger breaths and partly about teaching yourself to relax so you don’t burn that breath of air so quickly. I’ve modified several of them from practice drills used by competitive free divers, those freaks of nature who, through dedicated practice of breath-control techniques, are able to remain underwater for several minutes at a time (some of them diving to depths of 100 to 200 feet or more) with only a mask. My own meager training last year enabled me to double my breath-hold time after only a week of practicing the on-land drills, then nearly double that again until I began to plateau a week or so later. I was easily able to enjoy one- to two-minute bottom times and could push it to three minutes with some effort. I routinely dived to 30 or 40 feet and eventually reached a maximum depth of over 60 feet. I quickly saw the relevance for kayakers to train to relax and hang out underwater.