Team Sharkbait News

This is a post by Sanne.

We’ve had this exercise for quite a while now and I’ll take this opportunity to further explain the crawl without breath exercise, as it’s an exercise which really helps in building endurance levels and also builds confidence for doing dynamic performances.

It’s an idea that we came up with about a year ago when we were in the project 13 schedule, where I had to be able to train on by myself due to circumstances where Jorg would not be able to make it to the pool. The idea is simple, just do a normal crawl like the swimmer do at the surface, but then without breath and we mix it up into a build-up-, exhale- and an endurance schedule.

Build-up schedule (interval)
At first we were unfamiliar with how much and how far we should be alternating the not breathing part in the crawling at the surface. This is how the build-up schedule first originates, we would set out a schedule of 500 meters. Were I would try to do 100 meters of breathing every 6 strokes, where we count a stroke as after both arms had made a full motion. The second 100 meters I’d up it to breathing only every 10 strokes and so on. I gradually got to a point where  I would almost do full lanes of crawl without breath. Although rest times in between the almost full lanes (50m) had to be somewhat longer than at the start of the schedule.

Example schedule:

1. 2 x 50 meter: breath every 3 strokes
2. 2 x 50 meter: breath every 5 strokes
3. 2 x 50 meter: breath every 7 strokes
4. 2 x 50 meter: breath every 9 strokes
5. 2 x 50 meter: breath every 11 strokes

Exhale schedule (slowly exhaling)
To mix things up with the static O2 tables, the next step we tested as part of a good training would be a O2 training. Getting rid of the CO2 building up during the lane by slowly exhaling the air within a set amount of arm-strokes.

Example schedule:

1. 2 x 50 meter: 5 exhales
2. 2 x 50 meter: 4 exhales
3. 2 x 50 meter: 3 exhales
4. 2 x 50 meter: 2 exhales
5. 2 x 50 meter: 1 exhale
6. 1 x 50 meter: 0 exhaling

Endurance schedule
This came into play when Jorg got curious into how it would work out if I’d just do a full lane without breath, as we had been upping it since the Build-up schedule, this was a thought we’d both been playing with and this actually would be the next schedule we’d go by, focussed on endurance.

Example schedule:

1. 2 x 50 meter: 2 minute rest time
2. 2 x 50 meter: 1 minute 30 seconds rest time
3. 2 x 50 meter: 1 minute 15 seconds rest time
4. 2 x 50 meter: 1 minute rest time
5. 2 x 50 meter: 45 seconds rest time

Maximum attempts
As we were progressing pretty good with this exercise and it was really fun to do as well, Jorg added the mental factor again by letting me push my limits into trying a maximum performance with crawl’s without breath. To be honest at the time it was not really a success for my mental state, but doing a maximum performance of almost 75 meters in crawl was enough to prove it’s a serious exercise.

This is a post by Jorg Jansen.

On Thursday it was pool time with Sanne again. Time for some testing and experimenting! Now we’re training regularly again, it is also time to fine tune other parts besides the monofin kick itself. Streamlining, weighting, glide moment, everything.

At the moment we’re looking for an alternative for the normal neck weight and weight belt around the waist. While both systems have their positives, there are also some negatives. Around the neck is a pretty good place with regards to aligning, but not so for comfort and relaxation. I’m also not so convinced with regards to the streamlining of some of the neck weights I see. Especially the 5+ kg belt around the neck give some stress in the neck and drag in the water

Around the waist is a pretty comfortable place and what most people are used to. But it’s not in the center of your body and doesn’t hold you down in the right place, especially when you’ve got big lungs. Streamlining is still an issue here. But if you use half kilo blocks, it is pretty minimum, but still a disturbance in the flow.

So, we did some testing with placing weights on very strange parts of the body in also very interesting shapes. And we were very surprised about what we found out and how it worked! It coming weeks we will fine tune our new weight setup and make some video’s about it. I think a lot of people will find it ‘interesting’ and in the beginning probably even stranger then the first neck weight they saw.

This is a post by Sanne.

This has been a question for me since I found out that a lot of freedivers just close their eyes when freediving. My normal way of conduct is different per discipline:

• Static – I start out with my eyes closed, but when the contractions or the boredom starts I usually open my eyes for distraction or no real reason and I’ll be looking around the pool floor.
• Dynamic with or without fins – I always have my eyes open, if I close them I’ll end up in lane 8 instead of lane 1 where I started. I did try a few times to close them, but it’s a must to re-open them every few meters to stay on track, which in my perception is not bringing extra relaxation to my game.
• Depth disciplines – I generally do not close my eyes when I freedive into the deep, but as I explained in an earlier post, this had to do with not being able to fully control or anticipate the environment variables.

Why close your eyes?
I’m aware of the fact that whenever you open your eyes, the brain gets extra stimulus on all the images it receives, so closing the eyes sounds like a good idea to have your mind relax and get along with images you control for yourself. Having said that, for me it’s feels like a mandatory thing to really know the variables from the environment I’m freediving in.

Change is good!
So, I’m willing to change my way of the game just to see how much this can help me relax and being able to get my mind at ease with this way of freediving. Over the last two weeks I started closing my eyes in the depth disciplines. As I know now how the bottom setup looks like at the 23 meter deep buoy in Panheel, it’s much easier to freedive descending with my eyes closed. I still need to get used to it and I still haven’t made a depth without ever opening my eyes.

So the next time I’ll visit the outdoors for some depth freedive training I’ll have to make a depth without opening my eyes until I resurface and see how that feels.

Your thoughts, tips or useful info?
What is your way of freediving and dealing with eyes open vs. eyes closed? Please leave your thoughts, tips or useful information in the comments below.

Last night I was out for training in the Tongelreep and Kostas was also training with me. Along the way of explaining the prerequisites for a DNF freedive to Kostas, I hit the topic of checking out balance and alignment under water. I had been analyzing the balance of YugYug in earlier training sessions and Jorg had been spotting mine a long time ago. It reminded me that if you want to have a good alignment for your DNF freedive you’ll have to test certain things before you can find your perfect alignment.

Buoyancy

Balance and alignment all originate from the buoyancy you have whilst freediving at a certain depth, with a certain are intake. To find your balance and alignment underwater the altitude and air intake are the parameters you can play with.

The buoyancy is a very important part, if you don’t want to become a jig-saw DNF swimmer that is. A jig-saw DNF originates by the fact your buoyancy is positive or negative, which will make you ascend or descend. A normal respond to this is to help yourself is by swimming down or up when you make the arm-stroke. But again you’ll ascend or descend and this will lead to the jig-saw movement when you look at it from the side.

Exercise
To counter-act this behavior you must play around with the altitude and air intake, to find a point where you’re neutral or slightly buoyant. A great exercise for this is to push-off from the wall and see how far you can float, whilst doing so you can check if you ascend, descend or remain neutral.  Before even making any neck-weights, you want to see if you can vary any of the parameters to help you find the buoyancy you need.

Altitude
If you’re in the position where you normally would swim at 1,5m depth, but the pool itself is 3m deep. Try and drop down to 3 meters deep and prepare for a push off from the wall at that depth. Once you made the push-off, just let yourself glide until you are completely stopped. If varying the depth isn’t helping you to stay at 3 meters deep, you’ll have to change the air intake.

Air intake
This relates to how much air you take in before starting your DNF freedive. As a lower air intake will result in less buoyany, try and do a DNF freedive at 3m’s deep with a neutral air intake. If you still float up, try with a smaller ammount of air intake, but most definately you’ll find that a neutral air intake should already be pretty close to finding your neutral buoyancy.

Variation
Varying with both of these parameters will result in a perfect way to find out, how a good balanced DNF should feel like. When you know how it should feel, the freedive itself will feel totally different. You no longer have to swim down or up, so now you can fine-tune your DNF freedive by paying attention to other aspects i.e.  streamlining.  In the end variation with the altitude and air intake will help you in making the neck-weight, waist-weight, etc. to suit your needs. Every freediver has a different body composure, thus a different setup is required as well.

Spotter
Most importantly to all of the information described is a good spotter, with preferably an underwater camera to aid in your goal of finding a good balance and alignment.

Good luck on finding your balance and alignment and if you have some other tips or remarks, be sure to comment about them.

Wednessday evening Kostas and I went out for a dynamic technique training. Kostas had to focus on his finning technique and I was trying out the speedo breeaststoke fins to test a DNF question from Eric van Riet Paap.

What I noticed with Kostas was that he was floating upwards while trying to improve his technique, so I stopped him and said he’d be better of trying to swim a little deeper with a whole lot less air intake, because we didn’t have any extra weight to drop him straight down to the bottom . Before I could get him to swim deeper, we still had to solve his ability to equalize.

Equalize it
What seemed to be the trick into getting Kostas to equalize is that he was not using the pressere in his nose to equalize the ears. Although he was trying to put pressure on his nose, there was no air to compress and built pressure, so the effect was zero. After I checked for myself what I was doing whilst I equalize, I gave Kostas this tip of building pressure with air in his nose. After he tried it once…he heard a popping sound for the first time in his freediving experience. He was now convinced about the technique and knew what pressure to build to hear a popping sound. Welcome to the world of equalization Kostas !

Next week
Now he was able to equalize he could focus on his technique in dynamic with fins. His appearance in training at depth was very relaxed and unlike before ideal to focus on his technique. I guess he’s going to be very eager to go to the pool again next week.