Hi,
How can people hold their breath for a super long time? The longest for me was a 1 min and 50 seconds . The world record underwater is 24 mins ? please
In: Biology
It requires a lot of training. When you hold your breath the first you notice is carbon dioxide poisoning. This is not actually dangerous on its own, especially in the small amount you get from holding your breath for a couple of minutes. However it is a very strong signal to your body that it is suffocating. It hurts very badly, your instincts is to fight for the surface, to breathe out to take another breath, you start producing adrenaline, your muscles tense up and convulse uncontrollably. But this is just your nerves and instincts reacting to the carbon dioxide. It is possible to train your body to ignore those signs and stay calm.
And training your body in staying calm and not use muscles unnecessarily will reduce your oxygen consumption. So people who are able to dive for long time is able to keep completely still and even lower their heart rate. And then it is also possible to train your body to absorb more oxygen and have bigger lungs.
So when you have people who have trained extremely hard on all this the very best of them is able to hold their breath up to 10 minutes, the world record is almost 12 minutes. There are indeed people who have managed to hold their breath for 24 minutes, but not without assistance. What they are doing to prepare to hold their breath for that long is to fill their lungs with pure oxygen. Regular air is only 20% oxygen. If they breathe pure oxygen before their dive they can fill their lungs with five times the normal amount of oxygen. This means they can extend their dive from 10 minutes to 24 minutes.
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