I'm challenged with: Deep Yoga-Style 'Diaphragm' breathing vs Buoyancy Control.

[scubadada]

Hi @scubafanatic

Out of interest, do you know your RMV, have you followed it over time?

I have found, that for me, the most effective breathing pattern is the opposite to that on land. On land, we take a breath, nearly immediately exhale, have a short pause, and then inhale again. Underwater, I take a prolonged inhalation at a little greater volume than normal, have a short pause, take a prolonged exhalation and then nearly immediately inhale again. I have never taken the time to calculate my breathing rate. This breathing pattern seemed to evolve spontaneously over time and has become such second nature that I never think about it. I did not start calculating my RMV until about 450 dives. It was already pretty much established by then. In the last 1100 dives, the average has not changed much, but it has been very interesting seeing the factors that contribute to variation. Of course, exertion does increase the RMV, but not as much as I would have thought. For me, thermal comfort is an important variable. When I am cold, my RMV routinely increases. I frog kick most of the time and find it most efficient for most conditions. You may want to add frog kick to your armamentarium if that is possible.

Best of luck on your upcoming trip to Costa Rica. I dived the Bat Islands and the Catalinas from a land-based operation and has a great time.

Good diving, Craig

 

[mi000ke]

Being a sax player who has been practicing diaphragmatic breathing for years, I do it naturally. But I have found that I have to throttle it back a bit when diving so as not to get that up and down motion you described. While I am never consciously counting, I am guessing I probably do 3 - 4 breaths per minute even though I can go slower (like when having to play a long passage on sax with one breath). I also use minimal weight and have very little air in my BCD so that helps.

Once (or if) you can get into a regular breathing rhythm and have had some practice with deep breathing you will be able to time your breathes to take advantage of the inertia/time delay between inhale/exhale and your up/down body movement. You should be exhaling just before you start to rise, and inhaling just before you start to sink. If you time it right, you will get some but minimal movement up and down. Also you need to break with the long breathes when you need to fine tune your movement. If I'm diving through small spaces (a tunnel, a wreck, etc.) I will shorten up a bit on my breathing (still from the diaphragm, though) to fine tune my buoyancy and movement.

In addition to more efficient air consumption, another side benefit is that deep breathing naturally relaxes you, which keeps your breathing slow - so you get a virtuous cycle going. And if you are really good at diaphragmatic breathing, even under stress your breathing will be more efficient. (Diaphragmatic does not necessarily mean slow, it means using your diaphragm to motivate your breathing.)

 

[scubafanatic]

Ok good. Im not diving the same rig as you. But first impression is two things... Is your strap so tight that it effects your breathing and 16 lbs of lead too much? Imagine if you were 4 lbs heavy on your lead... at the surface you need additional air/gas to hold you above the water line. Then at 33 FSW you would need twice as much air/gas and 66FSW 3 x and 99 FSW 4 x. Imagine how much air/gas that would account for.

No problem with gear/strap being too tight, I go to some effort to get that ironed out, so that's not an issue. During pool testing I started out with 12 lbs lead and couldn't sink, hence the move to 16 lbs. It has been my experience (both in the pool and on assorted trips) that I cannot achieve the absolute 'perfect' weighting because they are short on weights or have limited sizes. For example, it's rare I can obtain 1 lbs weights, so if I want to go above 12, and have both sides even balanced, adding a pair of 2 lbs weights brings me to 16 lbs (real world). Moreover, it's 16 lbs in the fresh water pool, and salt water diving requires a bit more weight anyway, so I'm feeling 16 lbs is actually pretty zeroed in.

 

[RyanT]

I'll reiterate what a couple of other folks have said. Focusing on such slow breathing rates will cause you to retain CO2, which can cause you a number of problems. Just get your buoyancy squared away, relax, and breathe.

 

[scubafanatic]

Hi @scubafanatic

Out of interest, do you know your RMV, have you followed it over time?

I have found, that for me, the most effective breathing pattern is the opposite to that on land. On land, we take a breath, nearly immediately exhale, have a short pause, and then inhale again. Underwater, I take a prolonged inhalation at a little greater volume than normal, have a short pause, take a prolonged exhalation and then nearly immediately inhale again. I have never taken the time to calculate my breathing rate. This breathing pattern seemed to evolve spontaneously over time and has become such second nature that I never think about it. I did not start calculating my RMV until about 450 dives. It was already pretty much established by then. In the last 1100 dives, the average has not changed much, but it has been very interesting seeing the factors that contribute to variation. Of course, exertion does increase the RMV, but not as much as I would have thought. For me, thermal comfort is an important variable. When I am cold, my RMV routinely increases. I frog kick most of the time and find it most efficient for most conditions. You may want to add frog kick to your armamentarium if that is possible.

Best of luck on your upcoming trip to Costa Rica. I dived the Bat Islands and the Catalinas from a land-based operation and has a great time.

Good diving, Craig

Per my Perdix it appears I averaged '12' SAC. During the dive I saw extremes from 7-9 up to 14. I haven't really followed RMV over time, other than generally knowing historically an AL80 lasts me about 45-50 minutes on a typical ocean reef profile. I do enjoy deeper dives, so I'm not one to spend the entire dive puttzing around @ 40' for max bottom time, I like to hit 100' ish or so for a while at the start of the dive. I don't think you can tell Perdix what capacity tank you're using, on my Cochrans I can program in my tank size as a variable, but I don't have time right now to double check what tank capacity I had programmed in for my pool dives, I might have it set for an AL100 as that's what I originally planned for this trip, when I'll really use an AL80.

Hoping we don't get blown out for a 2nd time as last Oct 'Nate' sent us home before we even saw the boat. I do wear a 2 mm beanie, and sometimes thin gloves, with a full 5 mm wetsuit for this trip as long ago learned about heat loss underwater and the resulting increase in air consumption. Will consider the frog kick option but I'm very used to flutter so it may be a hard habit to break.

 

[scubafanatic]

Being a sax player who has been practicing diaphragmatic breathing for years, I do it naturally. But I have found that I have to throttle it back a bit when diving so as not to get that up and down motion you described. While I am never consciously counting, I am guessing I probably do 3 - 4 breaths per minute even though I can go slower (like when having to play a long passage on sax with one breath). I also use minimal weight and have very little air in my BCD so that helps.

Once (or if) you can get into a regular breathing rhythm and have had some practice with deep breathing you will be able to time your breathes to take advantage of the inertia/time delay between inhale/exhale and your up/down body movement. You should be exhaling just before you start to rise, and inhaling just before you start to sink. If you time it right, you will get some but minimal movement up and down. Also you need to break with the long breathes when you need to fine tune your movement. If I'm diving through small spaces (a tunnel, a wreck, etc.) I will shorten up a bit on my breathing (still from the diaphragm, though) to fine tune my buoyancy and movement.

In addition to more efficient air consumption, another side benefit is that deep breathing naturally relaxes you, which keeps your breathing slow - so you get a virtuous cycle going. And if you are really good at diaphragmatic breathing, even under stress your breathing will be more efficient. (Diaphragmatic does not necessarily mean slow, it means using your diaphragm to motivate your breathing.)

Yes, the confines of swim throughs cause me to minimize changes in lung volume used so as to not yo-yo at all. I'm hoping to realistically hit 5-6 breaths/min overall average. I use very little air in my wing as well. I do the buoyancy/breathing timing thing to stay just ahead of the yo-yo effect to try to cancel it out as well. Hopefully I'll get more relaxed and Zen-like as the trip progresses.

 

[scubafanatic]

I'll reiterate what a couple of other folks have said. Focusing on such slow breathing rates will cause you to retain CO2, which can cause you a number of problems. Just get your buoyancy squared away, relax, and breathe.

Point taken, I went to a bit of an extreme under lab (pool) conditions @ 2 breaths/min, real world I think I'd be in pretty good shape if I could average 5-6 breaths/min overall.

 

[scubadada]

Per my Perdix it appears I averaged '12' SAC...

Not sure what cylinder you used in the pool, with an AL80, a SAC of 12 psi/min would translate into a low RMV of about 0.32 cf/min. Of course, floating around in the pool is not exactly diving, but an RMV of 0.32 would easily give you over an hour at an average depth of 66 ft.

From my log book, dives at Catalinas and Bat Islands mostly had max depths of 70s-80s feet, I do not have the average depths.

 

[scubafanatic]

Not sure what cylinder you used in the pool, with an AL80, a SAC of 12 psi/min would translate into a low RMV of about 0.32 cf/min. Of course, floating around in the pool is not exactly diving, but an RMV of 0.32 would easily give you over an hour at an average depth of 66 ft.

From my log book, dives at Catalinas and Bat Islands mostly had max depths of 70s-80s feet, I do not have the average depths.

It was an AL80 @ 2800 psi, ended with 170 psi, bottom time 172 min, entire dive at bottom of 12' pool. I did a lot of slow laps orbiting the bottom of the deep end, it was an indoor LDS pool, not a nice, big university sized pool. Based on your math things are looking more promising for me. Thanks for the real world max depths you experienced there, 70-80 ' max is shallower than I was expecting.

What were to water temps and what time of year did you go ?

 

[scubadada]

...What were to water temps and what time of year did you go ?

We were there at the end of August, water temp was generally around 80-81, there were some cooler thermoclines, maybe mid 70s.