Tips to Improve Your Breathing in Scuba Diving

Improved breathing is a vital skill for advanced scuba divers. It’s how they can stay down for longer and basically just their air last longer improving your breathing means that you can stay down longer and enjoy your dive. You can explore the oceans and just go further as you progress through your diving you start to learn about your resources and whichever resource runs low first is what usually ends your dive.

To start with your resources will usually be your air supply, your no decompression limit, dive time, and your body heat. It’s usually your air supply that runs out first unless you’re down somewhere particularly cold and you’re diving in just a rubbish rented wetsuit. With enough practice and calm, you are going to stop cursing your pressure gauge for sending you back to the surface and you are going to start hating your bottom timer because you have to be back at the boat in just 5 minutes time.

But you still have plenty of gas left in your tank it’s also better for the group if everyone is just better on and if there is an incident and you need to share your air supply whilst you are doing a safety stop then I would rather have too much air than just not enough. If you surface to discover that another scuba diver is missing then you can actually help with the preliminary search because still have plenty of gas left. The guy next to you with only 30 bars left in their tank. They can’t go back down so in all sense it’s just smarter to improve your breathing both for yourself and the entire group. Learn Scuba diving in India to let you introduce to the diverse and lively marine life.

Let’s take a look at a few ways that you can improve your breathing

Yoga

Yoga is not all about bending and stretching yourself into really odd positions. It actually focuses much more on your breathing than you might think by spending some quality time to actually focus on your breathing. You’re retraining your body on how to breathe more effectively. We really don’t use our lungs to their full potential I mean just take a normal breath in now keep going there is a lot more room in your lungs than what you use most of the day.

It’s actually the small corners of your lungs that are the most efficient. A bit of yoga every single day and especially in the morning of a dive will work wonders to help you be more aware of what your lungs are actually doing. You might get a bit more flexible and toned too.

So breath control will help you with your skills and your buoyancy as well. Keeping water in your airway and clearing a flight mask is much easier if you have better control of your lungs. Your airways and you can better control your position in the water if you can spend some time holding your breath with empty lungs. So if you can find some time to do a little bit of yoga to help you control your breathing better.

Go scuba diving

Scuba diving in Andaman & Nicobar Islands is quite pretty and one of the richest diverse marine life ecosystems. This is a pretty easy one just get in the water and go scuba diving. Do you really want to know the real secret of white dive guys instructors are so darn good at breathing underwater. It’s because we have been underwater a lot. The more time you spend underwater, the more relaxed you’ll be and the less air you’ll need. The more relaxed you are the less air you’re going to need and the more you’ll go diving. The more streamlined your equipment and efficiently you’re going to be moving around in the water.

Swimming against the current because you didn’t see the little signs around you that current was coming or because you were just too far away from the reef where the current is stronger will mean that you’re just working harder than you need to be. If your gear is flapping all over the place and not stowed away neatly in a pocket or a pouch, then you might as well be diving with a parachute or towing the buddy behind you. Because you’re dragging all of that extra weight and extra resistance.

Make your life as easy as possible so you won’t be huffing and puffing whilst you’re underwater. The best way to do that is to just go scuba diving. That way you are always looking at your own gear and your others’ gear and improving your stuff so you are nice and streamlined.

Know Your SAC Rate

It’s hard to lose weight if you never step on the bathroom scales and the same goes for your breathing rate. If you don’t actually know your actual breathing rate for each dive then you won’t know if you’re improving or not. That’s where your sac rate can really help. Your sac rate is your surface air consumption rate and it’s effectively how quickly your breathing or at least how much gas passes through your lungs.

As suggested, it’s what you breathe on the surface at sort of one bar of pressure so as we descend as the pressure increases you’re actually breathing more and more gas so it needs to be converted. The easiest way to work out and monitor your sac rate is with a wireless air transmitter then basically your dive computer worked it all out for you and just spits out a number that will probably be around 20-something litres per minute.

You can do it manually if you have a sharp pencil and a calculator but there are actually website calculators for that to help you out, type your average depth of the air you used and it will basically spit out your average sac rate. Having a tangible number can actually help you quantify how you’re improving and what actions are actually helping so it’s important to actually know your sac rate.

Try A Breathing Technique

There are a few breathing techniques so do your own research that how to calculate your sac rate to work out which is best for you. But breathing rates basically range from just don’t even think about it just breathing as normal so your actual times breathing. The important to keep in mind that what controls your urge to breathe logically and it will be the declining amount of oxygen in your bloodstream as your body burns and but the clever human body actually monitors the concentration of carbon dioxide in your bloodstream to tell you when to breathe.

Your body starts to scream at your booths and fresh air in If the co2 levels in your bloodstream get too high. It is crucial to clear out all co2 by proper breathing technique. Personally, I tend to use a 4-pause-6 cycle where I take a good four seconds to inhale and fill my lungs with good fresh air pause for a little bit and then exhale for six seconds. The long inhale fills every corner of my lungs so then the pores can do their job to give my lungs a good chance to flush out all of that nasty co2.

At this point, It is important to remember that I’m kind of holding my breath so it’s important not to ascend at this point as you can really hurt yourself. So then I take a longer six seconds to exhale so that I can clear out as much of that dead air space as possible and the longer you can spend exhaling the more time that you’re not inhaling and using up your valuable gas.

Sort Your Weight Out

One of the best ways to improve your air consumption though has nothing to do with your lungs or even your mindset but your weight belt. When you first learn to dive you’re normally little hold it up with just too much lead mainly so that you don’t go floating off to the surface and you know hurt yourself. When you start out it’s quite natural to hold a little bit of a deep breath of air than normal until you kind of relax into it. So your instructor puts more lead on you but afterwards, when you do relax into it you don’t change the amount of weight on your weight belt.

You just add a bit more gas into your BCD and that’s what is hurting your air consumption. The air that you filled your BCD with is perfectly good breathing air so there’s just waste there but you’ll also be adjusting your buoyancy all the time if you are wearing too much lead on your weight belt. Next time you go on a dive just watch your instructor with your dive guys and see just how often they touch their inflator.