Note this is oxygen assisted - the diver breathed pure oxygen and (from the article) can increase available oxygen from 450mL to 3L in doing so.
Still impressive nonetheless and I didn't know that this trick is sometimes used in Hollywood to extend underwater filming time. Avatar 2 comes to mind when I was impressed to find out Sigourney Weaver trained to hold her breath for 6 and half minutes in her 70s!
Coming back to the article, I'm disappointed that the details were sparse - how do they check whether the contestant is conscious? How does the contestant know what his limits are before passing out?
- A coach / safety will give a signal to the athlete, e.g. pinching of the arm and the athlete will react to it by e.g. lifting a finger.
- Training. You get to know your body and limits very well when training freediving for a longer time. That does not mean that you always avoid blackouts, particularly in competitions they happen but that's what safeties are for. In the end, a free diving competition is one of the safest places to explore your limits.
I've seen people react so instinctively to tap-out signals both in martial arts and sometimes outside of it that I've often wondered if you could fight dirty in a real fight by tapping out and then clocking them or at least breaking a hold during that instant where they start to back off.
I think I have used it successfully both in chiropractic and physical therapy contexts. The thing with really top-shelf pain is that if you're not screaming you can't even talk at all. But your hands still work.
These sorts of little reflexive physical communications are super effective.
For sure - what I find interesting is that passing out is a disqualification (I assume) so there is a fine line between achieving your utmost limit and being disqualified. Which is like most sports but my understanding is that it is quite easy to accidentally slip under so the guy must have incredible body awareness
In a documentary about freediving they explained that during competitions there are strict rules and steps for the diver to follow after they emerge from the water surface. Only when followed the dive is considered ok.
This is nuts. I remember reading that Hollywood gave up on underwater filming after near death accidents on sets of The Abyss and especially Waterworld making such productions too risky and expensive so they resorted to VFX faking long underwater scenes after that. Obliviously Cameron didn't get the memo.
> how do they check whether the contestant is conscious?
already answered but they'll apply pressure on your hand (or similar) and you need to apply pressure back
> How does the contestant know what his limits are before passing out?
When you hold breath for a long time your body will have muscle contractions. The time that needs to pass for each contraction to happen varies from person to person but it is quite consistent for each person. So free divers can know that they are good up to X contractions which will take after X minutes in certain conditions. The fun part is you can train to experience your first contraction by holding your breath while laying down in bed.
In a group sport like club cycling, it can be everyone's responsibility to make sure that your fellow riders haven't gone either hypoglycemic or into heat stroke. We all watch each other so we can go a bit harder and the people who can still talk keep tabs on everyone else.
I understand that with submersibles and astronauts there's a bit of this going on as well. Everyone is watching everyone else for nitrogen narcosis or hypoxia. Maybe another reason the Navy doesn't like assholes on submarines. How can I tell if you're being a jerk today or we need to check the CO2 sensors? Better to notice Lieutenant Ivers only gets short with people when his blood ox goes a little south.
If you go to solo walking or running, now you are the only one tracking your mental state. Now you have to use your own judgement to try to detect when your judgement is going away. It's... tough. Personally I think it's easier if you've already had practice on team settings. But it's still tough.
Same thing with alcohol. There's a reason bartenders don't serve drunks. No judgement anymore. You should have put the glass down half a drink ago and had some water instead. And I think you can only learn that safely by slowly sidling up to it from the safe side, and have someone to look after you if you go a little fuzzy.
When I was a kid in the 70s, I think the record was somewhere in the neighborhood of 3–5 minutes (maybe seven?) and we used to think that was such a short time that we could do it and then trying in the backyard bucket pools that were endemic in my neighborhood we found that cracking a minute was enough of a challenge.
As a teenager I did about 4.5 minutes, as I recall, in a bucket of water. I played the trumpet quite a bit at the time, so I think my capacity was above average. It was a competition and I got first, and the second place fellow was also a trumpet player.
I once held my breath for 5 minutes when I was 14, sitting in class. I suppose it’s possible I was accidentally breathing through my nose a little as I wasn’t underwater.
Amazingly so Stephane Mifsud's 11:35 "regular air" WR apnea was set in 2009 and has stood since (at least as far as AIDA is concerned). There was a lot of speculation online back then as it is an extraordinary time and was quite high compared to the previous record. If I recall correctly the hold was performed at his home pool, and he has a lung capacity almost double the average adult male's.
This is a video of the end of Mifsud's 11:35 breath hold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHPGKb7ipgc . The protocol after the hold is that you have to take off your goggles/mask and noseclip, look at the judges and do a clear hand signal that you're ok. Your chin/face should not touch the water before you get a reply from the judges, in the form of a card. It's nothing short of amazing how clearly he follows protocol given that his brain has been oxygen deprived for more than 11 minutes.
We train for surface protocol to become automatic, so even depraved of oxygen, it becomes a reflex. It does a big difference, you'd be surprised to see how many ppl blackout when surfacing because they exhale too much first :/
Regarding Mifsud, he had a YouTube channel, in French, which is full of information about freediving ! He worked a lot with scientists to understand how his body work and how to reach this world record.
Also he confessed that he does not have spams when holding breath, so it helps a bit.
I somehow thought that pure oxygen was poisonous[1], and it needed to be a nitrogen mix. I mean, I guess this stunt demonstrates that I'm clearly mistaken, or that the nuance is in the pressures involed?
Pure oxygen puts oxidative stress on your cells. Your body can handle that just fine at 1 atm, but at elevated partial pressures the increased concentration will (quickly) overwhelm your cellular mechanics.
Underwater, the maximum operating depth for 100% O2 is 6 meters (20 feet) - which isn't very much at all. If you dive any deeper than that, you'll be at severe risk for a seizure and unconsciousness, and likely drown. (I'm simplifying, see [1].)
Which is why you don't go diving with pure O2.
However, in this case the freediver wouldn't be breathing compressed O2 gas underwater. They would've been breathing it at the surface, at 1 atm.
Oxygen weathering is a primary constraint on life on Earth, and every carbon-hydrogen based organism in the past 2.5 billion years has had to develop biochemical coping mechanisms for this toxic gas that wants to react with carbon and with hydrogen; It is harnessing this reaction ("respiration") with biologically mediated processes and modulating it to specific rates that permits us life.
For humans, acute breathing gas toxicity only happens in a high pressure environment.
Air approximates an 80/20 nitrogen-oxygen mix. Atmospheric pressure is 14.7psi.
The 120psi air compressor in your auto body shop is equivalent to a dive only 81 meters deep. SCUBA divers and later saturation divers have probed the various limits of the human cardiopulmonary system using very specialized gas blends all the way down to 700 meters. Too much oxygen partial pressure causes all the symptoms you see listed, and higher partial pressures cause symptoms to appear faster.
> The curves show typical decrement in lung vital capacity when breathing oxygen. Lambertsen concluded in 1987 that 0.5 bar (50 kPa) could be tolerated indefinitely.
This means you could breath 80/20 nitrox at 2.5 bar, or 37 psi, or 25 meters depth, "indefinitely" in the sense of hours or days.
PS: Chronic use of 100% oxygen at atmospheric pressure causes other types of toxicity. Some of the oxidative damage therein, accumulated over the years at a normal 20%, probably directly analogizes parts of the human aging process. Other types of oxidative damage probably work faster than proportional exposure. We only start to notice damage like this in people with impaired lung function who rely on an artificial supply of oxygen boosted to beyond an 80/20 ratio, to breath.
It’s really several factors. Supplemental oxygen is common for people with diminished lung capacity, carbon monoxide exposure etc. However long term it’s not a good idea for healthy people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_therapy
At low pressure pure oxygen can similarly be beneficial, mountain climbers eventually need supplemental oxygen for Mount Everest though a few have made the trip without it they can’t stay at that altitude indefinitely. It can even help on airplane flights as commercial airlines don’t set things to sea level.
Where healthy people run into issues is when partial pressures get well over 100% at sea level. Part of the issue is people adjust their breathing based on carbon dioxide not oxygen levels. So at say 10 atmospheres at normal atmospheric mixtures your breathing the equivalent of 210%, but you don’t slow down enough to compensate. Thus why divers care so much about gas mixtures, however people with diminished lung capacity are going to encounter issues at different levels than normal divers.
Yes, partial pressure is what matters. Normal air at 1 bar (1 atmosphere) contains about 0.2 bar of O2. Pure oxygen at sea level is 1 bar of O2.
The article you linked has a graph showing that 0.5 bar of O2 can be tolerated pretty much indefinitely, and it takes hours for significant toxicity to show up at 1 bar. Higher partial pressures cause much faster symptoms.
It is, kinda sorta, but at 1 atm you need to be breathing pure o2 for ~24 hrs before its meaningful (and longer than that before treatment is anything beyond "stop breathing pure o2". The dose isn't even cumulative. Just being on room air for 20-30 minutes resets the clock.
How is it even possible to hold breath for 11 minutes? I tried it last week (to avoid inhaling insecticide fumes) and could manage about a minute after trying very hard.
Assuming I understand such a feat even with exposure to pure O2, how does he manage to avoid CO2 build-up? Or, how did he train to retain CO2?
Cells use up O2 and release CO2 into the blood to form carbonic acid (keeping it simple), so the blood pH levels drop, which the body does not care about at all. This is what induces the suffocation reflex.
I wish I had known this while trying to master breathing while swimming freestyle: it is not just their VO2 max, but also their ability to retain CO2. Both aspects need to be trained.
The body doesn't notice a lack of oxygen. Hence the danger of carbon monoxide poisoning or air without o2 etc, as you won't notice o2 lacking. What you notice is co2 buildup, and as long as you keep breathing that's not happening.
When freediving, you can't really avoid it. What you learn however is how to deal with it. Control your diaphragm when it wants to start breathing, as the spasms are wasted energy. It's mostly a mind thing. With simple exercises (co2 tables) and just getting used to the feeling, it took my quite a short time to reach 5 minutes.
One "trick" btw is hyper ventilating. But DONT DO IT! It get rids of lots of co2 in your blood stream / lungs, so it takes a bit longer for the co2 buildup. But you need that buildup. Even though it's painful, that's your only signal as to how you're doing and which you kinda calibrate against. Especially when diving, hyper ventilating before can make it so you suddenly go unconscious before you felt the urge to surface.
Wow, TIL hyperventilating increases the danger! My brothers and I used to compete against each other in swimming pools, and we'd always hyperventilate at the beginning, thinking this 'got the oxygen in'. In any case, it definitely helped. Glad we never got into trouble this way.
My personal record is ~3:30, but I'm pretty sure I could go well past that if we had practiced instead of just competing.
You cant avoid co2 build-up, you can only slow it down, main factor here is relaxation. Particularly your brain needs loads of o2, so if you can keep that calm it helps a lot. Obviously a slow metabolism helps as well, so before big static performances fasting is common.
And regarding co2 tolerance, it is a training effect. With training you can withstand much higher levels of co2 without resulting in panic
And co2 build up isn't even that dangerous, just really uncomfortable. Lack of co2 (from hyperventilating) actually inhibits oxygen uptake and causes dizzyness (up to passing out) that way
I briefly got into breath holding. It's impressive how long you can go with simple techniques; slow stretches with lungs full of air, packing, and iterating animal names.
But I started to question the brain damage and couldn't find good science to confirm it either way.
Did you ever try wearing a pulseox and seeing what your sat looked like? As long as sats aren't ever dipping below (NOT medical advice, but I'm being conservative here), say, 90%, brain damage is very remote. Plenty of COPD patients walking around with sats in the 80s, or even 70s.
But as someone with bad lungs...yeah, you only get one set and most meds/treatments are partial symptom relief at best.
Hey, I happened to try this recently when I was holding my breath for another reason! It hit 70% or a little lower by the end*, but that was after having exhaled for a while. I do wonder what effect that kind of thing can have, even minor.
I read an article years ago on this. It was interesting. There'a a big psychological component to holding your breath. If I remember correctly, you go through the alphabet and think of an animal that corresponds to each letter. You can also try to think of a person you know for each letter. It's to help you stay calm and focused. The fear and accompanying response will have you out of the water fast. I suspect it's also dangerous. If you start freaking out underwater you're in trouble. I tried applying it while doing Wim Hoff exercises and it helped a lot.
Again I read this in an article. I'm just some guy on the internet. Please don't try without investigating how it's actually done and about any associated dangers.
I'm curious about breath holding and freediving: When you're depriving your body of oxygen for such a long time, do you not risk cells dying, in particular in your brain?
Can you use the oxygen trick to practically extend snorkelling dives?
I used to do a little scuba, but overall didn't like the reliance on often poorly maintained kit. But I do love snorkelling - the lightness and simplicity of it.
Can I breathe pure oxygen for half an hour on the boat and be able to repeatedly snorkel longer?
The desire for breathing comes from CO2, not oxygen. Pre-breathing pure oxygen will likely not have a significant impact on non-trained free divers
Pure oxygen also has its own issues and risks which is part of the training for people who use it. It is not a stretch to call it the opposite of simplicity.
Even though you can do it with pure oxygen, it won't be fun. This is because our breathing reflex activated from the rising carbon dioxide levels - meaning that for a significant portion of the attempt the person was fighting their urge to breathe.
shallow water practice is the best way to gain capacity and confidence, or some sort of winhoff method....sitting on the couch or whatever as it is a simmilar flex that you can drop into any sort of free STATIONARY time, ie not while driving, or on top of anything like that, or before doing a dive, even just blowing your head up, blowing baloons, again within limits, as I believe that there are possible ways to injur yourself doing that, but as an easy to do (very rough) capacity test that can be repeated as often as desired for
almost no cost.
I got to the point where I could swim a full lap(two lengths)in an olympic pool underwater with no trouble, and only a few extra breaths before going, it seemed to be mostly up to following a very moderate and steady stroke.
And he should avoid high impact sports and never get into a motorcycle accident.
Spleens are big bags of blood, and trauma to them, especially when enlarged or inflamed, can be fatal. It's one of the easiest accidental ways to bleed out.
Just came from 2 week vacation in Togian islands in Indonesia where there is big community spread across various places of these 'sea gypsies'. Their ability to hold breath easily for 5-6 minutes while freediving to 20m depth and chasing fish with harpoons is quite something to see.
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Still impressive nonetheless and I didn't know that this trick is sometimes used in Hollywood to extend underwater filming time. Avatar 2 comes to mind when I was impressed to find out Sigourney Weaver trained to hold her breath for 6 and half minutes in her 70s!
Coming back to the article, I'm disappointed that the details were sparse - how do they check whether the contestant is conscious? How does the contestant know what his limits are before passing out?
- A coach / safety will give a signal to the athlete, e.g. pinching of the arm and the athlete will react to it by e.g. lifting a finger.
- Training. You get to know your body and limits very well when training freediving for a longer time. That does not mean that you always avoid blackouts, particularly in competitions they happen but that's what safeties are for. In the end, a free diving competition is one of the safest places to explore your limits.
I think I have used it successfully both in chiropractic and physical therapy contexts. The thing with really top-shelf pain is that if you're not screaming you can't even talk at all. But your hands still work.
These sorts of little reflexive physical communications are super effective.
That is crazy. It seems Kate Winslet broke Tom Cruise's old record while filming Avatar 2; over 7 minutes(!) in her case:
https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/kate-winslet-beat...
already answered but they'll apply pressure on your hand (or similar) and you need to apply pressure back
> How does the contestant know what his limits are before passing out?
When you hold breath for a long time your body will have muscle contractions. The time that needs to pass for each contraction to happen varies from person to person but it is quite consistent for each person. So free divers can know that they are good up to X contractions which will take after X minutes in certain conditions. The fun part is you can train to experience your first contraction by holding your breath while laying down in bed.
In a group sport like club cycling, it can be everyone's responsibility to make sure that your fellow riders haven't gone either hypoglycemic or into heat stroke. We all watch each other so we can go a bit harder and the people who can still talk keep tabs on everyone else.
I understand that with submersibles and astronauts there's a bit of this going on as well. Everyone is watching everyone else for nitrogen narcosis or hypoxia. Maybe another reason the Navy doesn't like assholes on submarines. How can I tell if you're being a jerk today or we need to check the CO2 sensors? Better to notice Lieutenant Ivers only gets short with people when his blood ox goes a little south.
If you go to solo walking or running, now you are the only one tracking your mental state. Now you have to use your own judgement to try to detect when your judgement is going away. It's... tough. Personally I think it's easier if you've already had practice on team settings. But it's still tough.
Same thing with alcohol. There's a reason bartenders don't serve drunks. No judgement anymore. You should have put the glass down half a drink ago and had some water instead. And I think you can only learn that safely by slowly sidling up to it from the safe side, and have someone to look after you if you go a little fuzzy.
The record for regular air is 11min 35sec.
Pretty impressive either way.
I was also a kid doing this, my cousins and I held ourselves underwater with the ladder rungs in a swimming pool.
At first, yeah a minute was tough. But then it rapidly increased. Unfortunately I don't remember where we topped out, but I think ~3 minutes.
We would also swim pool lengths underwater(but it was a relatively small pool at a condo building). I think I swam 9 once.
They'd let us stay out all night at that pool, it was great. Florida summers don't really get chilly.
This is a video of the end of Mifsud's 11:35 breath hold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHPGKb7ipgc . The protocol after the hold is that you have to take off your goggles/mask and noseclip, look at the judges and do a clear hand signal that you're ok. Your chin/face should not touch the water before you get a reply from the judges, in the form of a card. It's nothing short of amazing how clearly he follows protocol given that his brain has been oxygen deprived for more than 11 minutes.
Regarding Mifsud, he had a YouTube channel, in French, which is full of information about freediving ! He worked a lot with scientists to understand how his body work and how to reach this world record. Also he confessed that he does not have spams when holding breath, so it helps a bit.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity
Pure oxygen puts oxidative stress on your cells. Your body can handle that just fine at 1 atm, but at elevated partial pressures the increased concentration will (quickly) overwhelm your cellular mechanics.
Underwater, the maximum operating depth for 100% O2 is 6 meters (20 feet) - which isn't very much at all. If you dive any deeper than that, you'll be at severe risk for a seizure and unconsciousness, and likely drown. (I'm simplifying, see [1].)
Which is why you don't go diving with pure O2.
However, in this case the freediver wouldn't be breathing compressed O2 gas underwater. They would've been breathing it at the surface, at 1 atm.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_operating_depth
For humans, acute breathing gas toxicity only happens in a high pressure environment.
Air approximates an 80/20 nitrogen-oxygen mix. Atmospheric pressure is 14.7psi.
The 120psi air compressor in your auto body shop is equivalent to a dive only 81 meters deep. SCUBA divers and later saturation divers have probed the various limits of the human cardiopulmonary system using very specialized gas blends all the way down to 700 meters. Too much oxygen partial pressure causes all the symptoms you see listed, and higher partial pressures cause symptoms to appear faster.
> The curves show typical decrement in lung vital capacity when breathing oxygen. Lambertsen concluded in 1987 that 0.5 bar (50 kPa) could be tolerated indefinitely.
This means you could breath 80/20 nitrox at 2.5 bar, or 37 psi, or 25 meters depth, "indefinitely" in the sense of hours or days.
PS: Chronic use of 100% oxygen at atmospheric pressure causes other types of toxicity. Some of the oxidative damage therein, accumulated over the years at a normal 20%, probably directly analogizes parts of the human aging process. Other types of oxidative damage probably work faster than proportional exposure. We only start to notice damage like this in people with impaired lung function who rely on an artificial supply of oxygen boosted to beyond an 80/20 ratio, to breath.
At low pressure pure oxygen can similarly be beneficial, mountain climbers eventually need supplemental oxygen for Mount Everest though a few have made the trip without it they can’t stay at that altitude indefinitely. It can even help on airplane flights as commercial airlines don’t set things to sea level.
Where healthy people run into issues is when partial pressures get well over 100% at sea level. Part of the issue is people adjust their breathing based on carbon dioxide not oxygen levels. So at say 10 atmospheres at normal atmospheric mixtures your breathing the equivalent of 210%, but you don’t slow down enough to compensate. Thus why divers care so much about gas mixtures, however people with diminished lung capacity are going to encounter issues at different levels than normal divers.
The article you linked has a graph showing that 0.5 bar of O2 can be tolerated pretty much indefinitely, and it takes hours for significant toxicity to show up at 1 bar. Higher partial pressures cause much faster symptoms.
Deleted Comment
Assuming I understand such a feat even with exposure to pure O2, how does he manage to avoid CO2 build-up? Or, how did he train to retain CO2?
Cells use up O2 and release CO2 into the blood to form carbonic acid (keeping it simple), so the blood pH levels drop, which the body does not care about at all. This is what induces the suffocation reflex.
I wish I had known this while trying to master breathing while swimming freestyle: it is not just their VO2 max, but also their ability to retain CO2. Both aspects need to be trained.
When freediving, you can't really avoid it. What you learn however is how to deal with it. Control your diaphragm when it wants to start breathing, as the spasms are wasted energy. It's mostly a mind thing. With simple exercises (co2 tables) and just getting used to the feeling, it took my quite a short time to reach 5 minutes.
One "trick" btw is hyper ventilating. But DONT DO IT! It get rids of lots of co2 in your blood stream / lungs, so it takes a bit longer for the co2 buildup. But you need that buildup. Even though it's painful, that's your only signal as to how you're doing and which you kinda calibrate against. Especially when diving, hyper ventilating before can make it so you suddenly go unconscious before you felt the urge to surface.
My personal record is ~3:30, but I'm pretty sure I could go well past that if we had practiced instead of just competing.
And regarding co2 tolerance, it is a training effect. With training you can withstand much higher levels of co2 without resulting in panic
But I started to question the brain damage and couldn't find good science to confirm it either way.
But as someone with bad lungs...yeah, you only get one set and most meds/treatments are partial symptom relief at best.
* sensor accuracy not guaranteed
Again I read this in an article. I'm just some guy on the internet. Please don't try without investigating how it's actually done and about any associated dangers.
If not, how do we know it's not happening?
I used to do a little scuba, but overall didn't like the reliance on often poorly maintained kit. But I do love snorkelling - the lightness and simplicity of it.
Can I breathe pure oxygen for half an hour on the boat and be able to repeatedly snorkel longer?
Pure oxygen also has its own issues and risks which is part of the training for people who use it. It is not a stretch to call it the opposite of simplicity.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095250/
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/bajau-sea...
Spleens are big bags of blood, and trauma to them, especially when enlarged or inflamed, can be fatal. It's one of the easiest accidental ways to bleed out.
Impressive hack and performance, though!
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