Never Ever Hold Your Breath But......

[ietermagog]

Okay, just to re-clarify - my technique suggested is to be practised ON THE SURFACE as clearly stated. If you try it underwater, not only will your buoyancy be adversely affected, but you will feel dizzy. Why would you continue with something that is uncomfortable? This breathing on the surface trains your body to utilise the air efficiently and, importantly, always controling the rate of exhalation (a forceful or sudden breath out will also cause dizziness due to the sudden decrease in pressure) and you will develop your diving pattern of: breathe in. use. breathe out. at the ratio that is comfortable for you. (Can I vaguely compare it to the fact that in athletics training we had to run sideways across the field - something that if we put into practise during a race would severely hamper our chances of success, but was used to train and develop various muscles that were needed in forward motion?)

You HAVE to relearn to use your body underwater and not work against it. Being underwater goes against all of our natural instincts and you need to learn, right from the beginning, to switch on an underwater brain and aim to be as comfortable down there as you are on the surface.
I have realised the scary thing with the internet regarding giving advice is that you can't instantly judge via facial expression or body language whether someone has understood exactly what you are saying. What works for scores of other students will suddenly be misconstrued by one. This we know from physically teaching and then we can reword an explanation or demonstrate it in another way. Now online, who knows how many people are misunderstanding? I guess I'll stick to one on one demonstrations and avoid correspondence courses where a universal answer is demanded and given - hence "never hold your breath" (which is designed to prevent a lung expansion injury but as a result has thousands of ill-taught divers shallow breathing and hyperventilating with all the resultant problems)

 

[MauiScubaSteve]

The reason that divers are told never to hold there breath, is that in an assent, all gasses expand, even the ones allready in your lungs. Holding your breath restricts the air movement out of your lungs, and in doing so you risk a ruptured lung.

As you will hopefully learn when you finally do your scuba training, lung expansion injury is the main reason we say you should breath continuously (except while equalizing ears on descent). As stated repeatedly in varying threads over this new year, holding your breath also interferes with the bodies elimination of carbon-dioxide.

As with life, absolute answers such as those starting with "the reason" are rarely correct on SB.