Last night, we began a free-diving course. The course is covering both static and dynamic apnea which is basically a fancy way of saying it's covering holding your breath when you're holding still (static) and when you're moving (dynamic).
The session last night was lecture, covering things like techniques to use, safety--recognizing potential signs of loss of motor control (LMC) and blackout (BO), the gear used in free-diving (slightly different than scuba because you want very lightweight, flexible gear), and various disciplines within free-diving.
Tonight's session was practicing both static and dynamic apnea but both on dry land. We would lie on the ground, breath-up (breathe slowly and carefully building up to holding your breath), and then test to see how long we could last. Right at the get go, using just what I'd heard about last night, I lasted far over a minute longer than I anticipated with a breath-hold of 2:16 minutes. We did two more static breath-holds after that and I made it up to 3:24 minutes. Finally, we walked around the room while holding our breathe to try our hand at dynamic apnea. This time I got 2:52 minutes.
I'm excited to get in the pool on Friday! Ryan, one of our instructors and one of the Oceans directors, says people generally improve about 10% once they're in the water and I'm aiming for at least 4 minutes!
I like the way they use highfalutin acronyms like LMC or BO to say you become paralyzed, become unconscious, and DIE (that's not an acronym, by the way).
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