Tips / Hints / Suggestions for Lowering SAC?

[bobco]

Daylonious

2. Sing, loud and with verve, preferably alone in the car. Hold long notes, feel your diphram and sqeeze every note you can out of those lungs. I'm not kidding. Long slow deep breaths are what it's all about and this will help.

4. Long slow deep breaths. You're breathing at multiple atmospheres so your body has many molecules of oxygen available to it. The critical thing is to drive the stale breath out of your lungs. CO2 will trigger the need to breathe, get it out of there. Retaining CO2 can also give you a headache.
5. Dive, dive, Dive.
6. See #5

Dive safe and often.
Pete

As above, theses are the big ones, relax, stay calm and breath down to the bottom of your lungs, slow and long. It is the way to better air consumption. I use metric so on a 30m dive I average maybe between 14 and 17 liters a minute, but I do my planing on 25, to give a better margin of safety. Never plan on your best SAC as when problems occur your consumption goes through the roof.

Safe diving

Bobco

 

[Spoon]

more diving, improving your cardiovascular fitness. weight training, eating right and an overall wholictic approach to a healthier lifestyle will spill over to your diving life.

 

[Daylonious]

Thanks for all the tips! Like I said, I just don't get into the water on a regular basis - but I'll try the singing and breathing exercises - Probably wouldn't hurt to do some cardio as well.

Thanks again!

D.

 

[serambin]

On dry land practice the four second drill. Four seconds in, four seconds out.

I think air is wasted in other ways than excess exertion. if you fail to hold air in your lungs long enough, you fail to remove the amount of oxygen you should. When you first try this procedure on land with 'normal' breathing, you may find it feels like your hyperventilating. The reason for this is that in normal, everyday breathing, you're breathing much too shallow to get maximum oxygen extraction from your breaths.

While this is fine on land, the deficit your building under water results in gasping which in turn increases your SAC rate.

Stan

 

[pterantula]

Sing, loud and with verve, preferably alone in the car. Hold long notes, feel your diphram and sqeeze every note you can out of those lungs. I'm not kidding. Long slow deep breaths are what it's all about and this will help.

I took this one step further...I started singing underwater (makes my wife/buddy nuts). My rationale is if I'm singing, I'm breathing out, not in. As a musician, I was taught from 8 years old on to breathe in deep and fast, then control exhalation in order to play complete phrases without needing another breath. When I finally applied this concept to diving, my SAC rate was cut in half almost immediately.

Yes, yes and yes - it didn't even occur to me to mention this since I've been a musician for over 20 years, so it's no longer a conscious thought-process. Pick a favorite band that uses lots of big, open, sustained vowels, and even take some singing lessons if possible; you'll learn that in order to really belt out those big, long notes you actually have to be very relaxed and use alot less air than it might seem.