How to hold your breath for 20 minutes

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

How long can you hold your breath? For a minute or a minute and a half? The human body is able to hold out without breathing much longer, you just need to know how it is done.

Magician-illusionist Harry Houdini became famous for his ability to hold his breath for three minutes. But today, experienced divers can hold their breath for ten, fifteen and even twenty minutes. How do divers do it, and how do they train to hold their breath for a long time?

My best result on holding my breath in a static position is not impressive at all, I think it is about 5.5 minutes. Mark Heli, surfer

It seems that such a result is simply unrealistic, and Heli is simply being modest. Someone will say that holding your breath for such a period is simply impossible, but this is not the case for people who practice "static apnea".

It is a sports discipline in which the diver holds his breath and "hovers" underwater without moving for as long as possible. So, for such divers, five and a half minutes is really a small achievement.

In 2001, the famous freediver Martin Stepanek held his breath for eight minutes six seconds. His record held for three years, until June 2004, when freediver Tom Sietas raised the bar by 41 seconds with a best underwater time of 8:47.

This record has been broken eight times (five of them by Tom Sietas himself), but the most impressive time to date belongs to French freediver Stéphane Mifsud. In 2009, Mifsud spent 11 minutes 35 seconds under water.

What is Static Apnea

Static apnea is the only freediving discipline measured over time, but it is the pure manifestation of the sport, its foundation. Holding your breath for a long time is important for all other freediving disciplines, both in the pool and in open water.

Freedivers have different disciplines, such as "dynamics with fins" or without, when the diver needs to swim as far as possible underwater, or "no limits" - the most difficult discipline in which a diver dives with a cart as deep as he can, and then with the help of the ball floats back up.

But both disciplines are based on apnea - the ability to hold out for as long as possible without air.

Changes in the body

The oxygen that you inhale enters the bloodstream and is delivered to various tissues of the body, where it is transformed into energy. At the end of this process, CO2 is produced, which flows back into the lungs and is excreted from the body as you exhale.

When you hold your breath, oxygen also converts to CO2, but it has nowhere to go. It circulates through your veins, oxidizing your blood and signaling your body to breathe. First, these are burning lungs, and then - strong and painful spasms of the diaphragm.

Freedivers spend years training to improve their breath holding, and their physiology gradually changes in the process. Freedivers' blood oxidizes more slowly than the blood of ordinary people, who breathe in and out reflexively all their lives.

The activation of the sympathetic nervous system causes their peripheral blood vessels to constrict shortly after they stop breathing. Oxygen-rich blood is stored in the body and is redirected from the limbs to the most important organs, mainly the heart and brain.

Some freedivers also practice meditation to calm the heart. They slow down natural rhythms, and oxygen is more slowly converted to carbon dioxide.

Meditation has a calming effect on the mind as well, because the main difficulty in holding the breath lies in consciousness. You should know that your body can live on the oxygen it already has and successfully ignore the body's need to breathe.

It takes years of training, but there are other faster ways to hold your breath.

"Buccal pumping" and hyperventilation

There is a way divers call personal "gas storage" or "buccal pumping" … It was invented by fishermen-divers a long time ago. The method involves breathing as deeply as possible, using the muscles of the mouth and pharynx to increase the air supply.

A person completely fills the lungs with air, after which, with the help of the muscles of the pharynx, he closes the access so that air does not escape. After that, he draws air into his mouth, and when he closes his mouth, using the muscles of his cheeks, pushes additional air into the lungs. By repeating this breath 50 times, the diver can increase the lung capacity by three liters.

In 2003, a study was conducted to measure lung capacity in divers, and the following results were obtained: "buccal pumping" increases the lung capacity from 9.28 liters to 11.02 liters.

Lung capacity can also differ from person to person. The approximate volume of a woman's lungs is four liters, a man's six, but it can be more. For example, the famous freediver Herbert Nitsch had a lung capacity of 14 liters.

There is another way - hyperventilation of the lungsoften used by divers. This method allows you to rid the body of carbon dioxide and fill the body with oxygen. The most extreme version of this technique involves breathing oxygen only 30 minutes before the dive.

The air contains only 21% oxygen, so if you breathe in atmospheric air before diving, there will be less oxygen in your body than if you breathe in pure oxygen.

It was this technique that allowed magician David Blaine to break the world record for holding his breath in 2008, holding out without air for 17 minutes and 4 seconds. With her help, Stig Severinesen broke this record in 2012 with a time of 22 minutes.

Unlike "static apnea", which is not allowed to breathe pure oxygen before diving, the Guinness Book of Records is not so severe, so the record of 22 minutes is now considered the first in the world.

The dangers of apnea

But all these techniques and training are dangerous in their own way. Prolonged holding of breath and oxygen starvation of the body can be bad for health, and hyperventilation can lead to loss of consciousness and other risks. As far as the buccal pumping method is concerned, lung rupture can occur from this.

And for this reason, freedivers do not practice alone, only under supervision. Even when they are in shallow water, because there is no difference at what depth you are if you lose consciousness.

So, if you decide to practice holding your breath, it is better not to do it alone, you never know what can happen.