Breath Taking

By Savannah Welch

Freediving: An Overview

Freediving is one of the world’s most dangerous extreme sports. While deep-sea divers face extreme risks that can be life-threatening, there’s a reason they pursue it.

With a passion that, they say, is sometimes hard to put into words.

Sure, there’s the thrill. And the lure of records that stretch the limits of the human frame and our imagination. How deep can a person go? Without breathing — for how long?

Yes, it’s all that.

But what it also is, say those who have been there and done it, experienced the depths and returned to life as we know it, is profound.

It’s the feeling of being alive — purposefully, vibrantly alive.

While at the same time feeling — and knowing — the calm of inner peace.

Without that peace, a diver at extreme depths can perish.

So being down at 50, 60, 70, 100 feet and more, amid the green kelp forests, feeling the never-ending rhythm of the sea, is a lesson in meditative calm.

“Freediving is an incredibly meditative process for me,” Davis said. “It’s very much something where I'm focused on the moment at hand and I'm not trying to think ahead. I'm really trying to be blank when I do a dive.”

The History

Freediving, also known as skin diving, is an extreme sport that relies entirely on breath-hold until resurfacing. A diver swims without scuba gear or a snorkel.

While freediving may be a relatively young sport — sport defined as we moderns might — it goes back to the dawn of recorded time, since the first human ventured beyond the waves.

Through the ages, humankind embraced the sea as a source of survival, innovation and inspiration.

Humans have been freediving for more than 8,000 years. While studying Chinchorian mummies, people who lived in what is now modern-day Chile, archaeologists discovered signs of exostosis. Exostosis, also known as surfer’s ear, is a benign growth of new bone that grows on top of existing bone to protect the eardrum from exposure to cold water. This indicates the Chinchorian people spent much time in what we now call the Pacific Ocean.

Alexander the Great was known for being heavily involved in diving apparatuses. During the Siege of Tyre in 332 BC, he used a diving bell to send humans underwater to dismantle barricades protecting the harbor in the Mediterranean Sea. Alexander is one of the earliest known users of the diving bell, a rigid cage that traps air, allowing a diver to take multiple breaths while submerged.

The Greeks were certainly no stranger to the water. Surrounded by the Ionian, Mediterranean and Aegean seas, the Greek people have been diving for at least 4,000 years. The Minoan civilization, which flourished between 3000 to 1450 BC, left behind ceramics made from shells and scripts and artifacts that feature images of the ocean. In ancient Greek manuscripts, Homer and Plato mention the sponge as part of the bathing ritual. The Dodecanese island of Kalymnos was the commercial center of sponge diving for centuries. How would they get them? Using a skandalopetra, which is a marble or granite stone to collect sponges, divers would descend up to 30 meters beneath the surface to gather sponges.

In 1913, Greek sponge diver Stathis Hatzis dove 88 meters, or 288 feet, to locate and tie the anchor of the Italian battleship Regina Margherita, which was said to have been lost. His dive lasted four minutes and was the first recorded freedive.

Recorded modern freediving again resurfaced in 1949 when Raimondo Bucher dove for 30 meters to the bottom of the ocean near Naples, Italy, on a wager. Quickly, other divers stepped up to the challenge, reaching depths that would leave Bucher far behind.

Italian diver Enzo Maiorca reached 45 meters in 1960.

Robert Croft was another influential player in the timeline of freediving. Known as the Father of American Freediving, Croft was a U.S. Navy diving instructor who could hold his breath for up to six minutes. He developed the lung packing technique, which forced extra air into his lungs for a deeper hold during a dive. In 1967, he dove more than 60 meters, which at the time seemed impossible.

In 1988, Maiorca reached a depth of 101 meters.

His rival, French diver Jacques Mayol, had set another world record in 1983, diving 105 meters. Maiorca and Mayol’s rivalry is depicted in Luc Besson’s 1988 film, “The Big Blue.”

After Maiorca, Mayol and Croft came Francisco Pipin Ferreras and Umberto Pelizzari.

Ferreras reached 128 meters in 1995, 170 meters in 2003. Umberto Pelizzari trained under Jacques Mayol and set 16 world records, including 150 meters in 1999.

Austrian freediver Herbert Nitsch currently holds 33 world records in all eight freediving disciplines. He surpassed his previous 2007 record of 214 meters by pioneering 253 meters – 830 feet – in 2012. He is known as “The Deepest Man on Earth.”

Why Freedive?

Swimmers know the rush of diving in a pool to 10 or 12 feet — as well as the pressure, literally. Freediving is like that, but so much more.

Freediving is considered the more natural, or “primal,” means of diving. Divers can reach depths on a single breath with nothing more than a mask and maybe a pair of fins. The sport is about using the body’s physical abilities in extreme, and sometimes life-threatening, environments, whereas scuba requires gear. That gear offers existentially more control in the water.

The acronym ‘scuba’ means Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. The main equipment used is a regulator, a Buoyancy Control Device (BCD) and an air tank. A BCD is a water stabilizer that allows a diver to adjust buoyancy at different depths. A regulator controls air pressure and delivers oxygen. The air tank contains that oxygen, under high pressure, for breathing.

Davis received his scuba certification when he was 15 — it demands basic proficiencies in use of the regulator and BCD as well as mask clearing and essential emergency preparation.

He said he didn’t immediately get hooked on scuba diving, however.

“I don't like breathing underwater — it was weird for me. The act of breath-hold swimming just always felt very natural for me,” he said. “I find swimming underwater on a breath-hold so much more enjoyable than breathing on a scuba tank.”

Davis lives in Torrance, California, and has done work on and off camera in Hollywood as an actor, stuntman and filmmaker. He’s worked on the Avatar sequels and films like Bombshell and The Love Guru. While he enjoys his acting career, he always returns to the ocean. He said his freediving career initially started as an escape from his Hollywood routine.

“At the time, I lived in the center of Hollywood,” he said. “It was mind-blowing to me that I lived in such an urban environment, but I could escape to the ocean. It became — just a refuge.”

Even though diving, from one perspective, is all about pressure.

Diving exerts a cumulative amount of pressure. Absolute pressure, meaning the weight of the water and atmosphere above, exerts more weight as a diver goes deeper.

Water is about 800 times denser than air, meaning water pressure changes at a faster rate than the pressure on land.

In saltwater, pressure increases by 14.7 pounds every 33 feet.

Freshwater is less dense than saltwater. In freshwater, one atmosphere of pressure is exerted every 34 feet instead of 33 feet.

Basic scuba training involves knowing the atmospheric changes to and through 33 feet underwater. Since most dives are in saltwater, the math is easy. The pressure at 66 feet is double that of 33. At 99, triple. And so on.

A great many scuba dives — in warmer, tropical waters — hardly go beyond 33 feet. Certain dive spots, though — among them Fiji and other Pacific locales — require deeper dives. To get to the sandy ocean floor off the Hawaiian coast, for instance, means dropping down to 155 feet.

Now — contemplate doing that without air.

That assuredly makes for an exotic niche.

But not an insubstantial number.

Worldwide, there are roughly 5,000 registered competitive freedivers.

Competitive freediving is regulated by two associations:

The first is called AIDA International (International Association for Development of Apnea). The other goes by its French acronym: CMAS (Confédération Mondiale des Activités Subaquatiques — World Underwater Federation).

The USA Freediving team is a member of AIDA International. Team USA for 2021 and 2022 is composed of nine women and eight men who hold national records.

There are eight generally recognized disciplines in freediving:

Constant Weight — a diver descends using fins with small weight
Constant Weight Without Fins — diver descends without use of fins
Free Immersion — diver descends by only using a guide rope to propel them
Dynamic With Fins —diver travels in a horizontal position with fins
Dynamic Without Fins —diver travels in a horizontal position without fins
Static Apnea — diver holds breath for as long as possible floating face down
Variable Weight — diver descends with a heavy weight and resurfaces using own strength
No Limit — diver descends with heavy weight then ascends using any method

Dynamic and static disciplines are typically practiced and performed in a pool. Static apnea is centered on time, while dynamic focuses on distance. Apnea is defined by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) as the cessation of breathing for a minimum of 10 seconds.

Is it Dangerous? You Bet.

Roughly 100 people die every year from dive-related incidents around the world.

“Everything is just very raw and immediate,” Davis said. “Things can go from OK to life-threatening in the space of a few seconds.”

Scuba diving offers the once-unthinkable: a human being, surrounded entirely by water, can breathe, just as if she or he were on land.

Breath is the key to human life. What is the very first thing a baby does? The very last thing anyone does?

Scuba is safe. But, like anything, it comes with risk — all of which is, by now, well recognized. Equipment can malfunction because machines are machines.

Then there are the likes of nitrogen narcosis and decompression sickness. Nitrogen narcosis is where water pressure alters the gas at deeper depths, causing disorientation or hallucinations. In the worst cases, a diver can go into a coma or die. Decompression sickness happens when a diver ascends too quickly, causing nitrogen absorbed at depth to create bubbles in the bloodstream and body tissues.

A freediver is not breathing oxygen at pressure. She or he is not breathing. It makes for a precise and exact opposite of the way we are supposed to be. We do not have gills. At some point, we demand breath.

Breathing is life.

Holding your breath in the pool to 10 or 12 feet is one thing.

To reach the depth that competitive freedivers do takes rigorous mental and physical training.

“Either I make the depth or I turn early, which I don't do very often, or I make the depth and I blackout — I lose consciousness before I hit the surface,” Davis said. “Those are where the stakes are.”

The Divers Alert Network is a North Carolina-based agency that monitors, among other things, diving-related injuries and fatalities. Its most recent annual report cited 57 diving deaths related to breath-hold in 2019. Between 2016 and 2019, an average of 56 diving fatalities were reported each year.

Freedivers, like scuba divers, can face a range of risks: blackouts, hypoxia, pressure problems and equalization issues. Lung barotrauma, or “lung squeeze,” is one type of pressure injury, in which air space within the body begins to compress from the change in water pressure. This can lead to the tearing of lung tissue.

Davis has broken several national records and holds the U.S. National Record in constant no fins at 72 meters, roughly 236 feet. He owns the Guinness World Record for Most Consecutive Underwater Somersaults on a Single Breath: 36 somersaults.

“Freediving is another level,” Davis said. “It's the physical side, but also this mental side where you're going to this place that is in many ways very hostile and alien, but you have to embrace it.”

Davis has blacked out twice during competition, both times diving deeper than the U.S. National Record for Constant No Fins, 71 meters (232 feet).

During one of his blackouts, Davis was attempting a 75-meter dive in Hawaii. That day, an intense underwater current started during the dive. He reached the surface, took two breaths and blacked out.

“I lost probably about 30 seconds,” he said. “You can look at the footage — I was swimming for most of that, I just don't remember it.”

Even though the dive ended in a blackout, Davis said the experience was incredible.

“It was probably one of the best dives of my life from the standpoint of the psychological side of it, the physical side of it,” he said. “But it's the ocean. We can't control everything.”

Freediving taught Davis to appreciate the beauty in extreme environments:

“No matter how difficult or challenging the dive, you can try and find beauty, not just external beauty, but I mean like beauty in the sensation, beauty in the feelings, no matter how grueling or difficult they are.”

Meditation in the Deep

How to embrace the untameable depths of the ocean, which can be so grueling, so difficult?

Davis said the draw for him is freediving’s introspective venture.

“I don't meditate, but I freedive,” Davis said. “That's part of my mental health because the activity itself I find incredibly meditative.”

He said strengthening the mind-body connection makes you more competitive as a diver.

“There's a physical training, but there's also a huge mental training — the two are intimately connected,” Davis said. “There is a physical connection, and you can't train just the mind. You can't train just the body. The experience of mind and body — it’s highly connected.”

British freediver Sara Campbell, based out of Dahab, a small town on the Red Sea in Egypt, said she discovered freediving after coming to the sport as a yoga and meditation instructor. Her deepest dive when she was competing was 104 meters, about 341 feet, and said meditation is a fundamental aspect of how she was able to compete at such an advanced level.

“My freediving career was very unusual in that I started as a reluctant beginner, I had no desires or ambitions, and within nine months I had three world records,” she said in a recent Zoom interview.

Early on, Campbell said, she realized that holding her breath underwater was a powerful form of meditation. Campbell said as her meditation went deeper, so did her dives. Diving provides her a way to connect with herself, and meditation is fundamental to her diving technique.

“Almost every time I got in the water, I was attempting a depth that I'd never done before,” Campbell said. “I was constantly pushing against the limits of my perception of who I am and what I'm capable of doing.”

Campbell founded Discover Your Depths, a personal transformation program that encourages people to discover their potential in freediving and meditation.

“We're actually training people how to freedive in a way which is in harmony with their body and therefore enables them to progress in a much healthier way — so without injury — and without pushing through their fear or pushing through their discomfort.”

Campbell is a Kundalini yoga instructor and teaches pranayama, the study of breath control in yoga. This application is a foundational tool in her athletic and mental training. The practice of intentional breath-hold enables her, she said, to stay present and in the moment, both in and out of the water.

“If my mind really understands the process that it's going to go through and can communicate that clearly to my body — calmly and without any fear, without any hesitation," Campbell said, "then the body receives that message clearly and can carry out the necessary physiological processes that need to occur for a dive.”

With the mind in control, Campbell said the mind allows for more relaxation in the body. The function of the breath plays a major role in mental and physical clarity. Mindfulness on and off the mat allows Campbell the ability to be present in the moment. And it starts with the breath.

“We're breathing all the time, whether we think about it or not, but we can also control and direct the breath,” she said. “The breath is really fundamental to our health and the quality of our breath is inextricably linked with the quality of our mind.”

Campbell created her business, Discover Your Depths, as a way to combine freediving, yoga and meditation. The program uses meditation and yoga practices to focus on the breath and teach divers how to train the mind and body.

In her training as a Kundalini yoga instructor, Campbell teaches pranayama, the practice of breath control in yoga. "Prana" means the life force energy and "ayama" means to draw out. Campbell says breath-control practice is vital to the health and discipline of the mind.

Campbell offers a Yoga for Freediving Program which features meditation practices, training techniques and visualisations. In the lectures and teaching guides, Campbell implements the methods she used to claim four World Records in freediving.

The philosophy behind Campbell's training encourages mindfulness, inspiring people to manage their mental health through psychological and physiological exercises. Meditation allows people to stay present by observing their body, emotions and energy.

DIVING
PRANAYAMA
YOGA
MEDITATION

Where Science Meets Mindfulness

While athletes like Campbell and Davis put meditative components into practice, researchers see the scientific effects of mindfulness and the breath.

Rael Cahn, the director of the USC Center for Mindfulness Science, is an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry and the behavioral sciences. Cahn studies how the brain responds to long-term meditative practice and its effect on overall well-being. He found that gamma wave brain frequencies, the fastest brain waves, increase in long-term practitioners.

Gamma wave frequencies show peak levels of and focus in the brain. It means there’s an increase of information-processing and problem-solving taking place.

Cahn uses an EEG, an electroencephalogram, to measure the electrical activity in the brain. In long-term practitioners, he has also found that people who meditate are less distracted and more aware of the self.

Cahn also said the relationship between meditation and extreme environments can lead to higher toleration of pain. Exposure to extreme environments means exposure to pain — and meditation can reduce sensitivity to pain.

“One of the fairly consistent effects of meditative practice is to increase one's capacity to withstand and be basically relatively comfortable with discomforting physical sensation,” he said. “The brain starts processing those sensations in a different manner.”

Cahn said because of the dramatic reduction of noise and stimuli at greater ocean depths, diving offers a similar experience as a meditative practice. Divers can expand their capacity for discomfort, regardless of whether they formally meditate.

“You have to dis-identify from the pain,” Cahn said. “Whether you have an experience of dis-identifying those kinds of processes when meditating and there's no goal in mind or not — either way, you have to do that in the process of expanding your physiological capacities to something like freediving.”

Michael Posner, a professor emeritus in the University of Oregon’s psychology department, studies how white matter in the brain alters during states of meditation. White matter is the connection of neural axons in the brain that link together. He looks at how the fluctuation in white matter alters cognitive performance.

Posner recruited a group of undergraduates and randomly assigned them to Integrated Body-Mind Training or to a form of relaxation training, used in cognitive-behavioral therapy. After five days of training, the study saw improvements in the IBMT group’s moods, attention spans and decreases of the stress hormone cortisol.

After a month of training, researchers found more improvement in the connectivity in white matter in the IBMT training group.

“How could it be,” Posner said in a Zoom interview, “that a purely cognitive task like meditation, no physical activity, but just keeping your mind in the present, keeping it away from wandering and judgment and so on, could change the white matter of the brain?”

The answer? Increased theta rhythm.

Posner discovered a strong increase in frontal theta rhythm for those exposed to meditation. Frontal theta rhythm is connected to creativity, emotions and sensation and is especially strong in internal focus, meditation and prayer.

This focus on meditation can keep the body from going into reactive modes. The mindfulness involved in staying relaxed helps keep the psychological and physiological balance in check.

“Without the mind being in that position of leadership, then the body will receive confused messages,” Campbell said. “There will be maybe impulses of fear or hesitation or doubt. Anything that has that kind of mental energy will transfer a contraction into the body.”

Campbell said if the mind is not relaxed, the body will move into fight-or-flight mode. The sympathetic nervous system, which directs the body’s involuntary response to situations, shifts into “doing” rather than “being.” This creates tension in the body.

“Tension in the body when we're on a deep dive will completely block the process,” Campbell said, "and will stop us being able to dive deeper.”

Blackout

Freediver Lance Lee Davis recounts a 75-meter competition dive in Hawaii where he suffered a blackout. An underwater current started during the dive, forcing Davis to travel almost twice the distance to the surface. He continued to swim through, relying on his lung capacity — and his safety team — to make it back to air. Click below to hear Davis's story:

Freediving: The Dive

In preparing for a dive, Davis said, the mind follows the body. Once his body relaxes, his mind relaxes.

“The real training of freediving is learning how to create physical relaxation and physical mastery whatever the mind state is — independent of the mind.”

It starts at the surface, he said.

Just breathing at the surface and staying mentally centered.

“I can't think about breath-hold. I can't think about the depth. I can't think about any of the dangers,” he said. “I have to trust the safety team to take care of me there and just only focus on my own process.”

It takes energy and propulsion to get further underwater, Davis said. Having taken a big breath, he has to fight buoyancy to begin his descent. As Davis swims down, the airspaces in the body compress. And, at a certain point, he stops swimming and starts freefalling.

“That’s one of the addictive parts of deeper freediving,” Davis said. “You have to really just surrender.”

Campbell said that when she was freediving competitively, her preparation for the next dive began once the previous dive was finished.

Her process includes a lot of visualization.

This means walking through the dive mentally and adjusting for errors made during the previous dive.

“If my mind is visualizing something working perfectly, my body is receiving that message and understands what it has to do better next time,” she said.

Prayer is also important, Campbell said — connecting to something bigger and greater than herself. While competitively diving, she would spend an hour or two in meditation a day.

“For me, diving was a meditation,” she said. “It was the meditative aspect that enabled me to go so deep, rather than training myself on the physical level.”

Campbell also said yoga was an integral part of both her mental — and physical — training.

“I never went to the gym,” she said. “I didn't do drill work in the pool.”

Instead, Campbell said she would train through yoga.

“I would focus mainly on the exercises to do with my spine — opening up my spine, making sure that the lifeforce energy can flow, that my spine is flexible,” she said. “Also, the lungs, ribcage, anything to do with flexibility and compression of the lungs is essential.”

Like Davis, Campbell focuses on the present moment, not thinking too far ahead.

“So, when I'm on a freedive or if I'm preparing for a freedive, I don't want to be worrying about what's going to happen to me at 10 meters or 50 meters or 100 meters,” she said. “While I'm doing my duck dive,” the dive required to break the surface at the beginning of the dive, “I want my duck dive to be 100 percent. If I'm stressing because maybe my last breath wasn't the best, then my duck dive is also not going to be the best.”

Davis said freediving gives him a greater appreciation for the people around him and the city of Los Angeles.

“Freediving really makes me feel alive. When I hit the surface, I'm so much more connected to the people I'm with, the people in my life,” he said. “Ironically, I think that freediving and the loneliness of the dive makes me feel more connected at the end of the day to the human world.”

He sees how the experience has allowed him to go deeper — into himself.

“When you start freediving, you're kind of diving to see things. Now, as I've gotten more and more into it in competition, I sort of freedive to see inside myself.”

Which, Campbell said, is how to connect to others — back on land, breathing deep sweet, air, to construct deep, meaningful relationships.

The very essence of what it means to be human.