My reference was solely to breathing rate. If two divers are having the same dive but breathing at different rates, there is no difference in NDL.
I decided to make another point clear (if possible), something I have often seen people confused about.
When you are diving, your
body accumulates nitrogen, most of which must be lost before surfacing. For most dives, your
body can ascend directly to the surface without stopping. At some point, though, your body must stop on the way up, a decompression stop, or it will get decompression sickness. Although we almost never talk about it that way, when your
body can go directly to the surface at a safe rate, your
body is within its personal no decompression limit.
We don't know when that is, though, so over more than a century, studies have been done to try to find a way to predict that limit, and thus we have tables and computers to guide us. They can never be perfect, though, because not only are we all different from one another, we are different from ourselves on different days. When the tables or computers think we are within no decompression limits, it is really the computer
table or
computer that is within NDLs. In the overwhelming majority of cases, if your
computer is within NDLs, then your
body will be, too, but that is not always the case.
So when we talk about breathing or perfusion or temperature or anything else affecting our NDL, we are talking about our
bodies, not the
computers. In most cases, individual differences during a dive will not affect the computer (other than breathing rate with an air integrated computer). Some computers will try to adjust according to things like heart rate, but I know of no study that can guide such an adjustment.
