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| Deep “Orca” Breaths:
The Key to Success The ability to take a quick, deep breath is a cornerstone skill to all the breath-hold drills presented here. While you sit reading this article, with each breath you are likely exchanging in the neighborhood of a mere 15 percent of total lung volume that’s typical of most humans. That’s less than a liter of your four-to-five-liter average capacity. Compared to the 90 percent exchange common among most marine mammals, it’s easy to see that we Homo sapiens are gross underachievers in this arena. Learning to boost that percentage closer to that of our fin-footed mammalian cousins, however--what I call orca breathing--is fairly simple and can quickly reap huge results. If you’ve ever heard orca whales breathe, you have a sense of how much air they move in and out of their lungs. There is this sudden huge whoosh of exhalation, followed immediately by a giant, equally sudden but less obvious in-rush of breath. Then they dive. The whole air exchange--again some 90 percent of their total volume--takes barely a second. Not bad for an animal with lungs about the size of your cockpit! With just a little practice, the benefits of orca breathing can be yours. Start slowly at first, by practicing to increase your exchange of air. If you’ve done any yoga breathing, you’re probably already familiar with this. (Most competitive free divers, by the way, are proponents of meditation and deep-breathing techniques.) The main difference is learning to do it quickly. First, take a couple of slow deep breaths. See how much air you can exhale, as if you were trying to blow out all 969 candles on Methuselah’s birthday cake. You might try bending over and even pressing on your stomach to squeeze out as many cc’s (cubic centimeters) as you can of that final liter in your lungs. Then breathe in slowly--the trick is to fill your lungs from the bottom up--by pushing your belly out first, then filling your chest, then finally doing what free divers refer to as “packing” your upper chest and neck area. When you have taken as big a breath as you can, raise your chin and extend your neck, and try “sipping” in a few more cc’s of oxygen through pursed lips, as if sipping up the last few drops of a milkshake through a straw. Take as many sips as you can, until you can’t fit any more air into your lungs. Then hold for a few seconds and focus on what it feels like to have your lungs so full of air. Repeat this exercise several times until you have a good sense of what a deep lungful of air feels like. But be careful--taking more than three deep breaths in succession can cause you to hyperventilate and pass out, which would be especially dangerous in the water. While practicing, remember to take a few normal breaths between each deep breath. Now it’s time for orca breathing. Unfortunately, in the context of rolling, we don’t have time for a full, slow, yoga breath. So imagine rolling up enough to get your head above water but missing your roll and quickly taking a big gulp of air in the second or two that you have before plunging back underwater. Think about trying to exhale on your way up, and take a big gulp as you stall, so that you don’t breathe in water on your way down. Start slower at first, maybe taking two seconds or so on both the exhale and the inhale. Eventually practice speeding it up to one second or so total. At the end of the “in” breath, hold for a few seconds, then try packing and sipping to see how much more air you can get in. With practice, you’ll soon find yourself consistently able to gulp from 60 to 90 percent of your lung volume, so that you have little space left for sipping in much more air. Now it’s time to move on to the next step. |
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