yoga breath

[normblitch]

I was talking to a yoga teacher the other day. She told me my breathing was shallow and to practice longer breaths. The goal being to breath-in to the count of 4, and breath out to the count of 8. I have to assume this will only help my gas consumption. Anyone out there has experience with yoga? Do you see benefits?

Most westerners are chest breathers,which means we use the movement of the intercostal muscles to expand our chest cavity to breathe. This results in a more shallow breathing pattern. Diaphragmatic breathing is a deeper type of breathing,but many of us have to concentrate to do it. I do aerobic type exercise to increase my VO2 max,but my improvements in SAC rate have come from training myself to breathe and do relaxation-simple things that can be done when driving a car.

Will watching Anime help develop Eastern breathing patterns?

Just curious..

Norm

[Moonfuzzy]

In addition to Yoga helping you learn to breathe more efficiently I have found that I am generally more mellow. And if something goes wrong on a dive (siltout, light turns off, etc.) I tend to mellow out, not stress out and start sucking down gas. I think that is a wonderful side affect, but maybe that is a combo of yoga and meditation.

FYI - when doing yoga notice your tendancy to tense up when stretching. Instead focus on relaxing (yourself and the muscles). You will find that you stretch better and come out more relaxed.

[Stu]

I found that, especially once I started cave diving, my consumption rate came down anyway. Never done yoga, but it's for the same type of reason.

Here's the post I put on this kind of thing to www.aberdeenwatersports.com forum (saves me retyping it - wouldn't want to put the extra stress on me bod and have it making me breathe heavy ):

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I've noticed that I use a lot more air during the first 10 mins of my dive than I do at any other time. This could be put down to tank temperatures equalising etc, but I saw this in Florida recently as well, where the water temp was way above the air temp (6 degrees at the surface, 21 degrees in the water). There's always the bit of time at the start of a dive where you're getting comfortable in the water again, where you may breathe down a bit more, but this just didn't go far enough for me.

The trigger for the following theory kicked in on a recent dive where I was being towed on a scooter for the first 1/4 mile, and I reckon I could almost have done the same dive swimming. On the scooter though, I was able to breathe normally and use my wing to keep me mostly neutral in the water...

I reckon that apnea comes into air consumption rates. I've seen it discussed for freediving, but never for Scuba. I do a lot of my buoyancy just on lung volume, and this breath-hold (apnea) triggers the body to release more red blood cells from the spleen into the bloodstream, allowing for higher volumes of oxygen to be squirting around your bod. At that same dive site, I'd normally see myself having high air consumption rates for the first 25 bar of the 75 bar that I'd use before turning around. On the scooter run, I used 25 bar on the scooter, another 25 bar on about 35% of the total "post scooter" distance, and the rest on the other 65% (which got me right to the point I wanted to get to - woohoo! Getting back to the scooter was probably around 40bar, but some of that was messing about and I really didn't care too much by that point

There are basic, proven ways to get your air consumption down: remove excess gear, streamline your equipment, trim yourself horizontal. I've never heard of apnea being discussed though.

Thoughts?
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btw, if you check out that website, you'll also find manuals on a lot of the dive gear that's out there in their knowledgebase. Handy stuff.....

[Gary]

When I practice deep complete brething on cave dives I can usually drop my air consumption for the dive by about 30%. I find though that this requires extra concentration and planning in my swimming to make up for the loss of extra fine bouyancy control that I would otherwise automatically use breathing to adjust bouyancy as I swim.

In big passageways this is less of a concern though then in areas with limited floor to ceiling height - and easier when there are frequent pull and glide points or when scootering.

Also I know the local caves and how much gas I'll need to get from place to place, and I'm framiliar with my dive buddy's breathing rate. Since we are well matched breathing rate wise and I'm not usually limiting us on our dive I seldom have any reason to concern myself with lowering my breathing rate.

But on the occasional dive where it is an issue I adjust my SAC down however far I feel I need to just by slow deep breathing, a pause at full inhalation and efficient complete exhalations. (As I said though I will notice a tendancy to float upward at each peak and to drift negative each exhale if I'm swimming in a low flow cave doing this.)

Since I don't usually do this on a dive it's also nice to know if I ever am in a situation where air conservation on the way out of the cave is a concern I can do this (though I obviously don't depend on it).

Also sice Kathleen's SAC drops incredably low in the OW I occasionally have reason to apply these techniques whenever we go OW diving and we have rental single 80's (two dives in the last 2 years / 162 dives)

[D1V3R]

yah, it has to be pretty hard on boyancy control, you hold in your breath for 8 seconds and you start geting boyant pretty quick

[Stu]

yah, it has to be pretty hard on boyancy control, you hold in your breath for 8 seconds and you start geting boyant pretty quick

Well, that's kinda what I'm getting at. The simple act of breath-hold, *to maintain your bouyancy in a narrow area*, is enough for me to get my consumption down. If you *really* want to try this, do breathe-up exercises for 45 mins before going diving. First breath hold, relaxed can be up to 2 mins for me (but I'm pushing it at that). After 45 mins of breathing, holding as long as possible, breathing, holding as long as possible, I can hit 4.5 mins breath-hold time. More red blood cells to carry all that nitrox you're inhaling.