Learn and practice some crucial techniques to improve your underwater breathing in scuba diving. The techniques are really helpful to improve your scuba dive time by consuming a standard amount of air. It promotes much underwater exploration by increasing actual dive time. Visit our official webpage to learn how to improve your underwater breathing.

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Debal Deb Das 3 August 2023
Tips to Improve Your Breathing in Scuba Diving
seahawksscuba.medium.com/tips-to-improve-your-breathing-in-scuba-diving-23cad0d3da13
Debal Deb Das
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. 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

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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

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& 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

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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

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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

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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.