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Cristian Castano Villa is Colombia's deepest freediver, having been down to -92m in CWT and -82 with his trusty V3 carbon fins. Recently, we had a chat about how has relaxation helped him to improve his depth & dive times. Here's what he had to say about it.
"For me, relaxation is simply the most important thing in freediving. Relaxation, next to adaptation and technique, are the main skills you really want to develop but it is not always easy to be “relaxed” when you freedive. You have to accept that almost every time that you put your body to a maximum effort, trying a PB or some difficult skill, there will be a certain degree of nervousness or stress present, so it is almost impossible to be 100% relaxed. Despite this, there are ways to hack your brain to reduce the amount of stress and improve your relaxation. It all comes down to the basics. There are no shortcuts for freediving and the key for this is repetition. The more you repeat a dive, the more you go in the water, the more times you train and reach a certain depth, the more your body gets used to it and the more your brain accepts the depth as something “normal”, you get used to it and become more relaxed".
"Relaxation is strongly connected to almost every problem freedivers face. From equalization, early contractions, the feeling of pressure, and technique. It is possible to go to big depths just by improving your relaxation because once you do it, everything else will follow. There is this common belief that you can’t go deeper because you just can’t equalize or because you haven’t mastered your mouthfill technique, but only with repetition and working on your brain you can. I personally reached depths of 60 meters + before even learning how to use mouthfill and without the use of reverse packing, I did this only by working on my relaxation".
"Other things that have helped me reach deeper levels of relaxation are positive thinking and visualization. By repeating mentally your dive in a positive way several times, you train your mind to accept the dive itself and to see it as something good. This improves your relaxation and makes you become “ready” for it. It’s easy to say it but sometimes not so easy to do, so yes, if you want to have better dives, just “relax”.