Your subjective experience of needing to breathe isn’t the same as your physical need for oxygen. You actually can hold your breathe much longer than you think you can without blacking out.

This is partly because (for most people but not all) your need to breathe is based on carbon dioxide building up in your body rather than lack of oxygen. If you take deep enough mouthfuls of air, and just force yourself to not breathe, you can physically tolerate some of that CO2 buildup for awhile. The O2 won’t drop to dangerous levels until a bit later.

Final point though, this is assuming you aren’t moving (and therefore not needing oxygen more). So the final thing is that they’re physically prepped for it. Good cardiovascular efficiency.

The first factor is the Mammalian Dive Reflex. When your nose and mouth are submerged your body automatically does some tricks to reduce your need for oxygen. Your heartbeat slows, certain nonessential organs slow way down, parts of your brain slow down, etc. With zero training or preparation, you can almost certainly hold your breath much longer under water than on land.

Then, they also do a lot of training and preparation. One thing they do is hyperventilating. This is *not* something you should do without training! They breathe rapidly for a short time to saturate their blood with as much oxygen as possible before diving. Some may even do this with a higher oxygen mixture from a cannister.

Finally, as others have pointed out, they train to be aware of their body and suppress the *feeling* of needing to breathe. That feeling doesn’t come from your body detecting a lack of oxygen, it comes from your body detecting a buildup of carbon dioxide. With the other tricks, they have more oxygen so they know they can stay down longer when if their body is telling them to breathe.

Along with the other answers, a lot of free divers will breathe pure oxygen prior to immersion, this fully oxygenates the blood. The downside is that when hyperventilate you eliminate co2, go too far and you lose the trigger to breathe

They train for it for years. The average human probably takes 6 times longer to stagger round a marathon than a pro athlete.

I’ve hold my breath for 5 minutes when I was bored by sheer will and I’m just a normal guy. This was pre-smartphones.

Training. The same way some ppl can run a marathon and I almost die of i try to run more than 1km.

How do you train ? My guess us holding your breath unerwater again and again and slowly bulld up, and doing a lot of cardio to make your body better at absorbing oxygen out if the air yo u breath in. Otherwise, Google that shit, id bet there is lots of breath holding training videos on YT.

It pretty much all comes down to training. The average person can’t run a 4 minute mile, but if someone trains in a very specific way, then it can be done. The average person can’t deadlift 1000 lbs, but the world record is like 1100 lbs because deadlifters train specifically to lift insane amounts of weight.

There are a lot of breathing exercises that can be done in order to increase your lung capacity. And to be clear, holding your breath isn’t just taking a deep breath and *holding* it all in. You need to slowly and steadily exhale the carbon dioxide throughout the process, otherwise you could elevate your blood pressure and/or heart rate to dangerous levels.

I’ve done some freediving, and by doing it you just get better at it. At some point you recognize that the first urge to breathe can be ignored, and then it gets easier. I went from one minute to over two minutes under water – not sure how long I got to as I wasn’t wearing a watch/dive-computer, but I could easily see how people could pass out once past that initial urge to go up and get a breath. I really only did that one summer, so I got better at it fast. I was in shape, and TBH kicking out all the way to where I wanted to free-dive down was at least 1/4 a mile, so that got me in even better shape yet. With free-diving it was the first time I could see veins on top of muscles on my abs.

Finally, my time to shine, I went recently from 1 minute to 4 minutes!

First and foremost, their heart rate slows. Heart rate is basically proportional to the speed your body vastes oxygen. I went from 70 bpm to around 45 bpm during the period of my trainings.

Second, meditation like state. Your brain is the biggest energy waste in the body. By letting all the thoughts go away, you can really get a large boost of time you can spend without oxygen.

Third, lung capacity. Kinda obvious, but it also can change, and normally divers have larger capacity.

Fourth, understanding the signals your body sends you. When you start feeling that you need to breathe in, it’s around 1/2 of your total time. When you start getting convulsions in abdominal area it is around 2/3rds. Normally people would get afraid when their diafragm convulses, but for free divers it’s just a signal.

All these factors combined with training can get you to 4-5 minutes in a couple of months.

Please consider that over breathing and swimming holding your breath can lead to “shallow water blackouts”, in which you faint without feeling that you are suffocating