Cross-Training for Freedivers: Part I
Posted By Peter Scott on 17 May 2004
Hockey players now hop, jump and skip to improve their jump on the rush.
To keep a straight face they call it "plyometrics". Football linebackers attend Aikido classes to learn how not to get run over by the offence. Windsurfers now surf, skateboard, snowboard and kiteboard - anything to gain an edge and to have more fun. Cross training is a now a permanent fixture in mainstream sport. If you're not doing it, you'll get left behind.
Are the world's best freedivers getting creative with cross training, too? Should you? There are lots of exotic choices to tantalize a freediver. There's Ashtanga Yoga, Pranayama, Qigong, Pilates, apnea exercising, isometrics, and exhale apneas, to name but a few. For those of you who like gadgets, you can salivate over a Powerlung, an IHT machine, or even a high altitude tent that lets you count sheep at Mt. Everest base camp.
Freedivers are a long way from reaching a consensus on the best way to train. Part of the problem is that most of them don't monitor their training strategies with regular scientific tests. Most just can't afford it. Instead, they wait to see if they get any better.
One could very well argue that we haven't devised the right tests to evaluate what goes on in a freediver's body during a constant weight dive or static apnea.
Sport physiologists are fairly confident that they have an idea of what the body goes through during, say, the 100-metre dash. A typical analysis includes things like the different metabolic and chemical energy pathways at use in various stages of the race, cardiovascular function, blood buffers, cellular interactions, vital organ function, breathing, and body mechanics. Does that depth of analysis exist in freediving? Aside from proving the blood shift and bradycardia ten times over, we're far from understanding what goes on inside a freediver's body on a 100-metre dive.
So how are we supposed to cross train effectively for freediving, whether our goal is ease and safety for recreational dives or increasing our ability to pull off personal bests or world records? We can rely on what has worked in other sports and try to make informed guesses about how it will work for us, or we can go on the experiences of successful freedivers, using the "what worked for Martin and Mandy should work for me " approach.
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