The world record is 24 min 37.36 sec
How can they stay conscious for so long on a single breath? Doesn’t the body need a constant supply of oxygen?
In: 284
I’m sure they adapted their body to do that.
Literally superhuman ability. Most of us wouldn’t stay conscious a fraction of that time.
Two main things. The first is the *mammalian dive reflex*. Whenever your nose is submerged, your body automatically does a lot of tricks to reduce your need for oxygen. Your heart beat slows down and organs that aren’t immediately necessary for your survival get less oxygen – enough to keep them alive, but not enough for them to be fully “on”. Even your brain gets a reduced supply, and parts that you don’t immediately need get less and work much more slowly.
The other thing is saturating their blood through hyperventilation before diving. Hyperventilating – breathing very quickly – can be bad for you and make you dizzy. If you train for it and do it properly, though, you don’t give your blood much time to use up the oxygen it already has. The rapid breathing causes more oxygen to dissolve into your blood until it’s completely saturated with way more than you need. Right before diving under, these divers hyperventilate so that they are carrying “extra” oxygen in their blood.
And, of course, there’s just good old fashioned training. Training their lungs to expand and hold as much as possible, training their body to deal with lactic acid buildup a bit better, training their moments to be as efficient as possible to use very little oxygen…
My longest is only a bit over 2 mins, so I’m no professional, but here’s what helps: you have to not *consume* oxygen during that time (as well as loading up in advance).
Your bloodstream has a certain amount of oxygen in it, and that capacity is a lot more than a single breath in your lungs. So, over-oxygenating in advance is definitely helpful; but the real key is to be very calm and hold absolutely still without using any muscle movement or tension.
If you’ve never held your breath for more than a minute or more before, I think you can do it like this: lie down on your back, and totally relax. If you know some pwrticular relaxation exercise, going from face to shoulders to stomach, etc., do that. But while you’re getting relaxed, you want to mildly hyperventilate. Just breathe a little extra deeply and a little more often than necessary. Then, when you’re ready to start the clock (without moving at all – maybe you just glance at the clock), take lots of extra breaths until it’s uncomfortable. Don’t use a lot of muscle contraction to do it – just breathe extra. When you’re ready, take a big breath, but just short of your chest being all tense in order to hold it in.
Then, basically try to sleep. Or, try to be as relaxed as possible. As it gets uncomfortable, remember that you absolutely can’t hurt yourself by just holding your breath. Try not to tense up, and stay relaxed. When you get really close to the end, you can buy yourself 5-10 seconds by letting a little bit of breath out at a time.
Using that method, you can go pretty long. The key is to have plenty of relaxation time before you try to start, and stay totally still and chill the whole time.
There are a number of points to cover here.
– Freediving training is like many other forms of training. You can’t start by running a marathon or bench pressing 200lbs, but with enough training your body adapts. Similarly, if you train your body to adapt to low-oxygen conditions, it handles it a lot better.
– A lot of it is mental. Learning to relax all your muscles, clear your mind and go into a zen-like state drastically reduces oxygen consumption. Also, what most people believe is the urge to breathe from low oxygen is actually an urge to expel carbon dioxide and not indicative of a lack of oxygen. Freedivers know that the first diaphragm spasms come ½ to ⅓ of the way through a maximum breath hold.
– As another poster mentioned, Mammalian Dive Reflex is a powerful effect
– The record was set after breathing pure oxygen. Normal air is only 20% oxygen, so he had 5x the oxygen in his lungs as you or I would have when holding our breath. He also trains to expand his chest and take bigger breaths along with “packing” (taking mouthfuls of air and forcing them into his lungs).
– All that said, it’s still an amazing feat. David Blaine managed 17 minutes under similar conditions, so 7 min more is really a lot
There are lots of good points in other answers, but a thing to remember is lack of oxygen is not the biggest problem. It is actually getting rid of CO2. Most of the oxygen you breathe in gets exhaled right back out again. So, if you hold your breath, there will be a lot of oxygen left in the lungs for your blood to absorb over time. As another answer said, if you breathe pure oxygen before hand, you will also build up a lot more oxygen in the lungs. And, Your body doesn’t use up all of the oxygen in the blood right away. By the time blood gets back to the lungs, it has about 70% as much oxygen as when it left them. All this means that you have enough oxygen to last for a good amount of time when holding your breath. The bigger problem is getting rid of CO2. It causes a lot of problems when it builds up. It also is the thing that controls your reflex to breathe. A lot of the training for these world record attempts is to build up resistance to that reflex.
The comments here all explain it, but if you’d like to watch a fascinating video along with answers to your question, [David Blaine](https://youtu.be/XFnGhrC_3Gs) goes into detail about how he achieved 17 minutes – which at the time in 2008 was the record.
I’ve gotten up to five minutes with these tips:
1) Practice. Practice taking big breaths practice staying underwater/holding your breath. The trick is building lung capacity over a period of months/years.
2) No extra moving or thinking. Both of these things use up oxygen. I’ll try to drift in a pool in a zen state.
3) Hyperventilate/breathe deeply before starting. You want as much oxygen in your body as possible.
4) always have a buddy who is watching you and checking on you every 30 seconds or so. Don’t use so much zen that you don’t come back. Know your limits. I haven’t tried it in a while because I would get killer headaches. If I tried right now I doubt I will get much past three. I made it to five, said “this is seems dumb to me” and stopped at that point.
5) get rid of your carbon dioxide a little at a time.
I would recommend watching the David Blaine TED talk about how he held his breath for XX minutes. Spoiler alert, it involves freezing himself to near death temps and practice.
I see alot of comments about hyperventilating / breating techniques, i just want to point out a similar technique is also used by Wim Hoffman aka the iceman to train his cold resistance. Just as how you suppress yourself for the urge to breath you suppress the cold.
You can train your body to be comfortable with a low oxygen saturation, this goes hand in hand with training your „lungs“ (you train the many muscles required for breathing, not really your actual lungs). Yogic breathing techniques (pranayama) have been around for literally thousands of years, but also free divers do this. It is relatively easy to get from 30 sec to about 2min of breath holding via training, afterwards it gets difficult because you have to consciously alter your brain state into a kind of trance, so your brain activity becomes less and your heart rate goes down.
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