Skip breathing correction

[DA Aquamaster]

I have to fess up to skip breathing some when I'm diving, but I make sure not to ascend any when I do it. Keeping an open airway is important, but it gets less important as you descend in the water column. The deeper you go, the less effect rising a foot or two during deep breathing has on gas expansion in the lungs.
By the way, I NEVER let my students know I'm doing this, and I don't do it all the time.

Pausing at the top of an inhalation by holding the air in with the diaphragm is fine. If you ascend in that condition your throat is still open and any excess gas will vent through your throat with no lung injury resulting.

I agree to an extent with not promoting it with students as many divers do not understand the difference.

I would also imagine that Nitrox would be bad under this circumstance, am I wrong?

The combination of skip breathing and Nitrox is not good.

The US Navy experimented with enriched air mixes in the 50's and decided not to approve them for use. This was in large part due to the test subjects they used - former helmet divers who had very high levels of CO2 tolerance who also had skip breathing tendencies and in the process retained high levels of CO2. The Navy found that in that test group the onset of oxygen toxicity was unpredictable. The other reason was that the navy was pretty well equipped to do decompression and nitorx added little in terms of operational flexibility.

In general skip breathing increases CO2 levels that in turn elevate the divers risk of ox tox and exacerbate nitrogen narcosis. So skip breathing at depth or with elevated PO2's is something you are better off avoiding. I'd focus on a slow but normal inhalation and exhalation with only a short 3-5 second pause between inhalation and exhalation during low exertion portions of the dive.