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Training with a Freediving Wetsuit vs No Wetsuit

17
Jan
1
January 17, 2021 dean / / / / / / 1

There are pros and cons to training with a wetsuit. Wearing a wetsuit for your maximum performances is for sure going to give you a better dive, but does that mean we should train with one all of the time? Let’s look at the pros and cons of wearing a wetsuit.

Advantages of a Wetsuit

One of the main reasons we wear a wetsuit is to keep us warm during our sessions. This is hugely important for us freedivers because we’re staying quite static for longer periods of time while trying to relax, and so we’re more exposed to the warmth zapping nature of water compared to air. When you also add the effects of peripheral vasoconstriction, which when occurring does also keep us warm, but once the blood flows back into our extremities makes us feel a lot colder again, and so we need that extra warmth to deal with this.

Kick & Glide

The second most important advantage is better streamlining and glide, especially smooth skinned wetsuits. This smooth, even, slippery layer provides us with less water resistance and allows us to glide through the water more efficiently. This reduces both effort and dive time.

A wetsuit also gives us extra buoyancy which is quite handy in the pool as it allows us to use more weight. Using more weight during dynamic swims gives us a lot more momentum which reduces our stroke or kick count by quite a lot. Extra buoyancy can also help with maintaining correct posture and alignment, which is great for those with heavy legs that tend to sink.

There are indeed quite a lot of advantages to wearing a wetsuit, and if we are just looking from a perspective where we want to maximise performances, there’s really no option than to wear a wetsuit. But let’s discuss some disadvantages so that we can choose when we should wear a wetty.

Disadvantages of a Wetsuit

For all the benefits a wetsuit gives us, we simply don’t want to be training with one all of the time. The main issue is that we drastically decrease our water sensitivity, this in the long term will hinder our technique development because it’s so much harder to feel where we’re actually catching water, or put in a simpler way, what parts of our body are doing the most work in pulling us forward. For the same reason, we also hinder our sensitivity to the parts of our body that might be causing drag, making it harder for us to intuitively adjust our position to become more streamline.

When using a wetsuit we also usually weight ourself to be neutrally buoyant below the surface, but this gives us zero consequence when performing bad technique. This means that even if we perform a terrible arm stroke or flutter kick, all of the negative or inefficient movements will be negated by the weight and wetsuit, and so we will only see the propulsion we create no matter how small, instead of the drag we might also be making.

Finally, wearing a wetsuit, depending on how thick it is, is going to make it harder to move, and so hindering our freedom of movement. Not so much of a performance issue when comparing all of the positive aspects of a wetsuit, but it’s an issue if we’re trying to develop foundational technique with being slightly restricted from the wetsuit. This is going to make our job a lot harder to find the correct movements.

If we combine the fact that we have very limited feedback from the water, along with zero consequence from performing bad technique while also being difficult to find the correct movements, we start to see why it’s not such a good idea to constantly be training with a wetsuit.

How to Maximise Progression

If we’re training in open water, we probably need to wear a wetsuit, unless you’re diving in Barracuda lake with a surface temp is 32 °C. And if you’re performing long swims for sub max or maximal performances, wearing a wetsuit is also a go. If you’re also conducting training where the goal is breath hold over technique and you need to stay comfortable, then staying warm is more important.

But if you’re looking to develop technique and want to see some faster progression, then take the wetsuit off. And also try to swim with as less weight as possible. It’s of course going to be harder, but that’s the whole point of training. Train hard, dive easy.

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How I Adapted to Deep Diving – Part 2

21
Dec
0
December 21, 2020 dean / / / / / /

Before heading back to Egypt for my second stint I needed to figure out how to change and improve pretty much everything. There were so many things I needed to improve, such as my physical conditioning, how I recovered after a dive, my diet, psychological approach to the deep dives and training, many many things. But the key hurdle I needed to figure out was how to stop squeezing, and this was by far the biggest hurdle to overcome. I really can’t confirm it was one definitive change that made the difference, more an accumulation of changes done at the right times, so I’ll try my best to recount how it went.

The Bottom Turn

The first few aspects I set about changing were simple basics, such as how I performed my bottom turn. On my 82m dive where I experience my worst squeeze the year prior, I distinctively remember feeling a pang of discomfort in my chest as I turned around haphazardly. So I figured this was a simple place to start and pretty easy to implement. The bottom turn is a key transition phase of a dive, so even if this weren’t to overcome lung injury, it will still have a big impact on the relaxation of a dive overall. If you get the basics right then a deep dive is going to feel substantially easier. I like to say that overall there aren’t many advanced techniques, mainly a sequence of basic skills executed well, much like a deep dive.

Freefall

Another small change was ensuring that I kept my freefall close to the line, brushing lightly every now and then to remind me where it is while closing my eyes intermittently.

By doing this it meant that I didn’t need to make so many large adjustments, only small ones. It also meant that I felt more relaxed as I had confidence I wouldn’t lose the line. Losing the line during your freefall is not, in my opinion, a reason for squeezing, it can happen and is mostly an easy issue to resolve But I think the problem arrises from the sudden jerk of tension when realising the line isn’t where it’s supposed to be, or rather you’re not. But by ironing out any issues you have with freefall drastically takes this factor out of the equation and allows you to sink deeper into relaxation.

Breathing Reflexes/ Contractions

Slow progression of depth was another factor which I indeed changed in comparison to how I dove before. But I suppose one of the biggest changes was setting about how I experience contractions, or more accurately, breathing reflexes. Breathing reflexes at depth can be quite aggressive on the lungs. I’m fortunately not one of those divers that has to deal with breathing reflexes on the descent, but definitely on the ascent, especially on longer dives such as FIM.

When we have these reflexes, we experience an increase of negative pressure in the lungs, compounding the negative pressure that’s already there from being at depth. What I realised in myself was that I’d developed tension in the shoulders and stomach, this created my reflexes to become concentrated in the upper chest, which I suspected was leading to trachea squeezes, it also restricted the amount that my diaphragm lifter into the thoracic cage.

My idea was adjust these reflexes by directing them lower down in the intercostal muscles and simply allowing them to happen, as opposed to creating tension to and fight against. And to relax the stomach as much as possible, this allows the diaphragm to rise higher into the thoracic cage which lowers residual volume. Bringing about these changes in the breathing reflexes was a slow process, I could make the change on a less stressful dive, but on a deep dive everything becomes more autonomous, thus more chance of reverting back to the how I normally did things. So I worked on slow shallow dives, beginning the ascent just when I started feeling the urge to breathe and having to deal with only a few reflexes. Then slowly extending the dive time to deal with reflexes at the bottom before ascending, this took months to reprogram. Then finally adding deep dives into the equation.

Stretching & Flexibility

Chest and Diaphragm flexibility are of course hugely important for deep diving. The more flexible our diaphragm is, the higher it will lift up into our thoracic cage. This both allows for better equalisation, and aids us in being able to relax easier. Improving our chest flexibility is also going to build on our compressive potential which also allow us to deal with the pressures of depth, but also to enable us to take deeper breaths at the surface. Building on these areas takes persistence and dedication over a long period of time. Not through infrequent intense sessions, otherwise we run the risk of injuring ourselves very easily, especially with stomach lifts and lung packing.

One of the methods that is taught to overcome squeezing is to make sure you stretch, and this is of course true, but certainly not just before a deep dive. Before a dive session we simply want to awaken the muscles and utilise the flexibility that we already have, not to try and discover new flexibility just before we’re about to put a heavy strain on the lungs. This is another big change that I’ve put into my own diving, I stretch diligently and frequently, but only on dedicated dry training sessions or the evening before a dive. In the morning of a dive, it’s just a simple warm up to increase blood flow to the muscles, nothing more than that. So to clarify, don’t over stretch before a dive.

No Fins

Another piece of the jigsaw fell into place once I started No fins. Up to this point, even with all of the changes I’d made, I was still experiencing some small squeezes once I got to over the 85m mark in CWT. So I decided to scale the depth back again and progress with No Fins, and up to this day I have never had a squeeze on a No Fins dive. Again, I can’t really put my finger on the reason why, I’ve dove well over 80m so it’s not necessarily the shallower depth. But I suspect, once I started swimming in a different way, this allowed me, to greater effect, enact the changes I was trying to put in place with how I experienced breathing reflexes.

Since then I have continued on my journey of eliminating my squeezes from the positive experience I had with No fins, and it may be due to this reason why I love No fins so much. I’ve had some hiccups along the way, namely while arriving at the 100m mark with CWT, but I put this down to comp nerves and poor tag grabbing. But overall these days I don’t have an issue with squeezing. There are a lot of other small things I have added since those days in Dahab, such as a long rest after a dive over a certain depth, sometimes only doing 1 dive if I feel it’s necessary. Not pulling up the rope after a heavy session, also avoiding over hydration in the morning is another small thing that might make a difference. But as I said at the beginning, I don’t think there’s a panacea for squeezing, and nothing can compensate for experience and time at depth, and I think this is probably the key factor among many that has allowed me to overcome squeezing.

Conclusion

So to summarise, I approached this complex puzzle by isolating certain components of a deep dive and to try and adjust them one by one. By breaking down and working on these individual basics, I also saw huge improvements in other areas of my freediving. Naturally relaxation was the key improvement, and I guess in freediving it always comes back to this. So to answer the question of how to stop squeezing, it can be answered in a simple way, to relax. But as you begin to delve deeper, you learn that relaxation is influenced from many different angles, and it’s not always so simple to solve.

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1

How I Adapted to Deep Diving -Part 1

2
Dec
1
December 2, 2020 dean / / / / / / / / / 1

For so many depth divers, our main limiting factor is adaption. It’s usually one of the last pieces of the jigsaw that falls into place. That and equalising of course, but we’ll save that for another blog. For now I’d like to share with you my journey from frequently squeezing on deep dives, to not even considering it a possibility. It was by no means a quick journey, and knowing what I now know could have made the process a little less frustrating. So hopefully by reading this, you might be able to find something that will be useful for your journey.

Celebrating after my first 100m dive with the legendary Steve Keenan. Photo Credit @Daan Verhoeven

I began freediving back in 2012 with Freedive Gili. After my first course I quickly decided that it would be a big part of my life, and I needed no extra persuasion. After a few weeks of diving I was below 50m, after a few months I was reaching depths close to 70m, in a year I had managed to get to 80m. But in all honesty, I wish I hadn’t progressed so fast. After diving past 65m I began squeezing regularly, and in the long run this severely hindered my progress. 

We’ll head back to when I began deep diving. Unlike some, I didn’t have a problem with equalizing, Frenzel was fairly straight forward, along with mouthfill too. I remember being able to maintain constant pressure one of the first attempts of trying a mouthfill during an FRC. I tinkered with a few things as I progressed deeper, but all in all until 90m I rarely failed a dive due to EQ. This was due to the fact I had a fantastic instructor, Michael Board, who broke down the mouthfill in a very concise, though easily digestible style. This created a sense that it was something everyone did with ease, so I went into it expecting that it should work. This I think, is one of the key building blocks of learning how to equalise successfully, but again I won’t delve too deep into this topic for now. 

Progressing up to 67m was injury and incident-free, but on my first dive to 67m I felt a little strained immediately afterward, then after returning from the session, I saw the tiniest speck of blood. At the time I was instructing a lot, and so I couldn’t take a complete rest from diving, but I took 3 weeks off any of my own training. It was from this dive that planted the seed in my mind that perhaps I would, from this point, begin to see more injury. This in itself can cause unnecessary tension and potentially result in more injury. In my case, this was a small factor, it was mainly due to the lack of time spent adapting to depth, and predominantly the speed of my progression and lack sufficient relaxation.

While I was instructing at Freedive Gili, I had only small windows where I could head out for depth training, and at the time I wasn’t very knowledgeable when it came to training, therefore I wasn’t very efficient at maximising my training with the time I had. So it would always be a build-up process to my PB depth again, with deep diving only, and maybe reach a dive or two where I could attempt a PB, then back to teaching. Because of this, I decided it would be a good idea to head to Dahab for 3 and a half weeks of dedicated training so that I could have a solid run. Again to reiterate, I didn’t really know how to train at the time, I figured the best way to dive deep was to deep dive, so that was the general plan. In hindsight, I should have laid a more solid foundation in the pool, made more adaptation dives, built more strength and so on. These areas were where I could have spent time training on, even while I was instructing.

As you can imagine, after being restricted to the number of opportunities to dive deep, I went a little gung ho when arriving in Dahab. I expected myself to dive past 70 and into the 80s, those who met me on that trip will definitely attest to the wrong way of diving I adopted, a huge lesson. As soon as I started diving to 70m I began having small squeezes, they were very small, but they were injuries none the less. While I was having these injuries, I continued to dive deeper thinking it wasn’t a big deal. But what was also happening was the squeezes were compounding on top of each other, and then finally on my final dive to 82m I had a very bad squeeze and a big BO, thanks to my safety Max Lindqvist I was okay. But this was a huge wake-up call and really shook me out of my sense of urgency, this was indeed not the way to dive.

Up to this point, I thought the squeezes weren’t a big deal, bear in mind this was early 2013, just before Nick Mevoli and Vertical Blue that same year. I remember being told that “if you dive deep, you will probably get squeezed”, so this was just something I assumed was supposed to be accepted, wrong. I learnt this the hard way, but I learnt my lesson.

So after this trip, I headed back to continue teaching, but I didn’t really have the same gusto I had prior to the trip, I felt I needed to change everything with my diving and I also needed a break from freediving. September of that year I used the last of my visa to surf around Indonesia before I headed home for the first time in 4 years.

I then spent a winter season in the Alps working as a chalet driver and maintenance man. By the time I finished my season at the beginning of 2014 I was ready for my first year of actual training, Dahab was the destination once more, but this time I had a plan.

To be continued…

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2

My Plan for 2020

9
Mar
2
March 9, 2020 dean / / / / / / / / 2

At the beginning of every year, I always set out what I plan to do in terms of my training goals and what competitions I aim to compete in. There’s always some small deviation from the plan, this can be down to many ever-changing factors, though the change of plans usually only really affects how I plan my training peaks, and how I’m focusing on different training elements.

For example, if I’m approaching a peak but find that my strength and conditioning isn’t what it should be, I may decide to scale back on max dives and spend a little more time in the pool, or perhaps my breath-hold isn’t up to scratch and I need to address this area of me training a little closer. On occasion, I have found that financially things might be tight and so I’ve changed my comp plans because of funds, but for the most part, the plan gets followed. If I find my training isn’t going so well and I have a comp just around the corner, I’d still go ahead with it, even if I may not be where I want to be, these are usually the periods where we learn the most about ourselves.

The planning of my comps and training usually happens at the end of the year in preparation for the following. I’ve found over the years that the shape of what the next year will look like usually starts to take form slowly as I come towards the end of the season, I find myself starting to see what I might want to do in terms of goals, and what competitions I fancy going to. 2019 was the first year that Vertical Blue didn’t go ahead, so throughout the whole of last year, I was pretty adamant that I would be there for the showdown in 2020. But after my invite came through and I reserved my spot I started to question if it would be the best plan for the overall performance of the year. It is for sure the best competition for results, because of conditions, but also because of the stimulus that an event like VB provides, it brings the best out of us.

Vertical Blue @Daan Verhoeven

For all of my previous VB comps I had been permanently based on the Island, and so it meant that I didn’t need to travel to and from the comp, instead, I would just slip back into training in a, once again, empty Blue hole. This time I would have to travel from the Philippines, meaning I would have to adjust to a completely opposite timeline, sync up, compete then head back to Asia and sync up once again. This isn’t really the issue, it’s more the fact that it was in the middle of the year, plus VB being such a big comp, after finishing it can leave you pretty spent, to say the least. With this in mind, combined with around the world trip will inevitably take a serious chunk out of training, realistically between 1-2months. I figured if I just spent this time staying in one place I could get much more quality training done, albeit not in the limelight that VB provides, but the same level of diving none the less.

Asian Freediving Cup 2019 @Potti Lau

So I’ve decided to stay put in Panglao for 7 months, starting from February until the end of August. Prior to arriving back in Panglao, I was staying with Adam and Erin in Australia, so both Adam and I started back at training in January. I’ve learned over the years to start back slowly and not try to put the foot down too fast, so January was very much prep before the training really begins. So lots of swimming and medium intensity but high volume pool training, focusing on generating a positive vibe for the upcoming season.

Pool Training @Stefan Randig

I’m targeting the first depth peak of the year to be in May for the Uba cup, scheduled from the 19-25th. After this first peak, I will scale back on the depth and head back to the pool along with more physical workouts again, not as long as the beginning of the year, only for a few weeks or so, then build back the depth for another peak in August before my time in Panglao comes to an end. What I’ve also found over the years is that if I set a really solid foundation for the first few months of the year, when I slip back into base training again I only need a few weeks to bring myself back up to fitness after a long stint of deep diving. This year in Panglao, there are no scheduled competitions in August yet, so if it stays like this then I’ll focus on hitting my targets in training if things go really well I may consider scheduling a record attempt or two, though only for the records I currently have, which are in CNF and CWTB, ideally, I’d like to make my dives in a competition environment.

Cross-training @stefan Randig

After this second peak, I will do the same as the first, scale back to the pool and slowly build back up again. The last peak will hopefully be the best, this is the plan, but it is also important to keep the fire going all year and to enjoy the process as much as the end result. So my plan is to target Dominica for the Blue Element competition as my final peak and the end of my season, this comp is scheduled November 6-13th and is an epic place to do some big dives.

Dominica, Scotts Head

I competed in Dominica for the first time back in 2016 and I really loved it, conditions are perfect, zero current, good visibility and awesome surface conditions. The dive site is actually in an old volcano crater that creates a shelter from the outside ocean currents, and the surrounding topography provides shelter from the trade winds that blow from the east. All of this culminates for a very beautiful place to dive in, with the surrounding mountains as a backdrop.

Blue Element 2016 @Daan Verhoeven

So that’s the plan, my first depth peak in May, another peak in August to finish off my time in Panglao for this year, then ending the year back in the Caribbean for Blue Element.

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