How to: Survive a Two-Wave Hold-down!

Too late for Aaron Gold, but not for you…

Yesterday, I paid $175 for a four-hour Breath Enhancement course with Mick Fanning’s trainer Nam Baldwin. I’d read and heard plenty about the breath-holding game, written about it few times, even, and wanted to crawl into the darkness of oxygen deprivation.

Specifically, I wanted to hit a point where the oxygenated blood is released from the spleen… euphoria!… and I wanted to learn how to activate the mammalian dive reflex, that dramatic decrease in heart rate and the peripheral vasoconstriction that pulls the oxygen from the limbs and to the vital organs.

Nam Baldwin can hold his breath for seven minutes.

I wanted to find my inner dolphin.

Outside magazine’s James Nestor tells a wonderful anecdote of the first time the dive reflex was proven.

“In 1949, a stocky Italian air force lieutenant named Raimondo Bucher decided to try a potentially deadly stunt off the coast of Capri, Italy. Bucher would sail out to the center of the lake, take a breath and hold it, and free-dive down one hundred feet to the bottom. Waiting there would be a man in a diving suit. Bucher would hand the diver a package, then kick back up to the surface. If he completed the dive, he’d win a fifty-thousand-lira bet; if he didn’t, he would drown.

Scientists warned Bucher that, according to Boyle’s law, the dive would kill him. Formulated in the 1660s by the Anglo-Irish physicist Robert Boyle, this equation predicted the behavior of gases at various pressures, and it indicated that the pressure at a hundred feet would shrink Bucher’s lungs to the point of collapse. He dove anyway, delivered the package, and returned to the surface smiling, with his lungs perfectly intact. He won the bet, but more important, he proved all the experts wrong. Boyle’s law, which science had taken as gospel for three centuries, appeared to fall apart underwater.”

Oowee, who wouldn’t want a piece?

And, today, after the big-waver Aaron Gold had to be resuscitated after a two-wave hold-down?

How would your or I be able to deal with the sorta waves that make you involuntarily suck in your gut, that lock your throat with panic?

I was among 12 students, ten studs, two gals, who all wanted to get better at choking off their oxygen supply. A couple admitted to being a little terrified at even being there. Others wetted their lips in anticipation. Most were a week or so away from boat charters in Indonesia.

Nam, who is 43 years old with a vee-shaped torso and calf muscles that form perfect ovals, begins the course with a classroom physiology lesson.

That instant, panicked gulp of air? It ain’t no good.

If you want to really inflate your lungs, you’ve gotta breath from the diaphragm upwards. We do a bunch of exercises so we get used to the idea of sipping air through a straw. Of expelling air like a whale.

Psssshhtaaaaw! 

A yoga teacher interjects and describes the feeling of sucking in air as our life force.

“Ah, it’s the oxygen in our lungs,” he says, pointing out to the anatomy diagram on the screen, although he quickly, and diplomatically, soothes her disappointment when he tells her oxygen is, indeed, “chi, life force” and holds his hands in a prayer position.

Soon, we’re in a 25-metre pool, practising breath holds with drills. Three in-breaths, then five metres underwater, ten freestyle, five underwater, back, and repeat every forty five seconds.

Harder than it sounds on paper.

Then, the Caught-Inside-at-Ten-Foot-Sunset drill.

Five metres underwater, ten freestyle, ten underwater, ten freestyle, ten underwater.

Repeat. Four times. I did one and a half.

Get good and you should be be able to nail 12.

In other words, train yourself to be able to deal with being caught inside by the longest, biggest set, you’d ever face on earth.

Later, we activate our mammalian dive reflex with a series of slow breathing exercises and floating face down in the pool.

Euphoria?

How about being hypnotised by the dancing waves of light hitting the bottom of the pool. Becoming miniaturised and slowly climbing over each link of the bracelet of the diver next to me. Studying every detail in the grooves of the pool titles.

And surviving two-wave hold-downs?

Don’t breathe as soon as you hit the surface. What if a wave is there and your mouth is open? Thing is, you’ve got more oxygen than you think in your body. It’s the build-up of carbon dioxide that makes you want to breathe.

Come up, look, if it’s clear, breathe out like a whale, inhale.

We practise wipeouts with a drill that is eight seconds being tumbled, three seconds with a foot pushing you onto the pool floor then your leash being pulled taut. You have to release the leash, then swim five metres underwater.

Fun, yeah, surprisingly fun.

Mick Fanning’s gotten so good at the game he trains in a five-metre deep pool, simulating wipeouts by wrestling with Nam underwater.

Should you do it? I can’t believe it too me so long.

Watch Mick underwater here.