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7 Secrets to Better Diving
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RULE
#2: Be Lazy
Doing
everything in slow motion will stretch your air
supply. You ought to kick your fins, move your arms
and turn your head as though any motion were almost
too exhausting to attempt, because it is. Water is
800 times more dense than air, as you've probably
heard, oh, 800 times. Moving an arm or leg in water
requires a lot more energy than it does in air.
Energy is fuel plus oxygen, so the faster you burn
energy the faster you empty your cylinder. It's that
simple.
Slowing down conserves energy and air because speed
is very expensive. For those who've forgotten
physics class, the energy cost is proportional not
just to the speed but to the square of the speed.
Swimming twice as fast requires four times the
energy. Swimming three times as fast requires nine
times as much. And the converse is true too: if you
cut your speed in half, you need to burn only
one-fourth as much energy and one-fourth as much
air.
It takes a conscious effort to move at Tai Chi
speed, but practice will make it second nature. The
payoff is bragging rights over your air-hog buddy at
the end of the dive.
Be lazy out of the water too. Take off your tank and
weights as soon as possible. If a deckhand offers to
lift your tank for you, let him (and tip him later
for it). Sit down as much as possible. You'll be
less fatigued at the end of the dive, therefore more
enthusiastic for the next one.
You'll also be more alert if you've been lazy. When
you're tired and running on empty, you don't think
clearly. So be lazy with your body in order to stay
alert with your mind.
RULE #3:
Hold Your Breath
What
we're advocating is to reverse your normal breathing
pattern from inhale-exhale-pause to
exhale-inhale-pause--the pattern many experienced
divers adopt naturally over time. The pause while
your lungs are full of air allows more time for gas
exchange, so you take in more oxygen and dump more
carbon dioxide with each breath. Therefore, you need
to breathe less and will get more cycles out of your
cylinder. It only takes a pause of a few seconds
after each inhale to make a significant improvement
in your breathing efficiency.
Telling you to hold your breath during that pause
gets close to the fundamental no-no in diving, so
let's be careful here. What you certainly don't want
to do is to hold your breath by closing your throat
and relaxing your chest against it, because that
makes your lungs a closed container. You risk an
embolism if you ascend with your throat closed
because the expanding air has nowhere to go. It is
safe, however, to hold your lung expansion with your
chest muscles instead and keep your throat open.
Now, expanding air can escape up your throat so
there's no risk of embolism.
Instructors don't teach this breathing technique
because they're afraid students will become confused
and close their throats. The difference between a
closed-throat breath-hold and an open-throat
breath-hold is small--the difference between making
a "k" sound and an "h" sound--but it's critical. To
make the difference clear and to prevent you from
inadvertently closing your throat, just keep trying
to inhale slightly during the pause after you've
taken a fairly full breath. Your goal isn't to take
in more air, but to hold your throat open.
Since holding your breath is only dangerous if you
ascend, practice it under conditions where you can
easily control your depth--while holding an ascent
line, for example. And if you think you may become
confused between the "good" breath-hold and the
"bad" one, don't try it. |
