Freediving training in the pool is a powerful practice to enhance your abilities in breath hold and technique. In deep freediving, you are limited to the number of dives you can do. If you are doing deep diving you may do only one dive, after your warmups, if you are doing shallower still only a few dives in depth. So, on a limited number of dives, you are only able to work on your technique for a short period of time. In pool training, you can train and do many repetitions. Pool training may not be the most appealing medium to deep divers, or to those who are more drawn to the ocean. But pool training can give your deep diving a huge added advantage because you are able to do many dives in a session and really spend much time working on technique and on breath hold, so higher levels of CO2.
One great way to train in the pool specifically for depth is to simulate the dive. You can do this by diving the length of the pool or more and then performing a static and then performing a dynamic to return. Training in a 25-meter pool is a great way to do this because it will simulate the freefall starting at 25 meters, the static is the time of the freefall, and the dynamic swim back to the other side of the pool, perhaps even returning to the other end again, would simulate the 50-meter dive.
So to break that down again, dynamic swim 25 meters, hang in static for 25-30 seconds, return with the dynamic swim, swimming the length of the pool twice more.
This may be quite mentally taxing for many as you do not get the wonderful enjoyment of the freefall and the experience of the pressure from the depth. But to perform this would make 50-meter dives to depth so much more easier and enjoyable. The tolerance to lactic acid in the legs will be greatly enhanced and CO2 tolerance increases.
Training for longer dives that can also mimic a spearfishing or photography dive and learning to place more focus on your relaxation is where delay training excels. The idea is to place a delay or static apnea at a point of your dive depending on what you are training for. Set a distance of your swim, set a time for your delay, and pick a spot in your dive for a delay (start/middle/end).
Get your safety buddy to carry a stopwatch and follow you throughout your dive, a good mental booster is to also record the total dive time so you can feel more confident in longer performances in the future. For longer dive times, more relaxing dives, delay at the start. For a dive that mimics a depth dive to pursue prey or a picture, delay in the middle of your dive. And for those that like a challenge delay at the end of your swim, each of these will feel different as there is a changing level of co2 present in your body at each delay.
If you are training for depth, spearfishing, or really anything but pool distance apnea (DYN or DNF), leave your wetsuit and weights at home. If you are wearing a wetsuit, you will not feel the water flowing on your skin, which means you will get less feedback on how effective and efficient your kick or stroke technique is. The same goes for weights. If you are pool training as conditioning for the ocean, you should be swimming at a fast enough pace that you do not need weights to stay down (particularly if you aren't wearing a wetsuit).
Try training with short fins as opposed to the regular long freediving fins. This means that to get the max out of your kicks you will need to have a much more efficient kick. Also that you can build your tolerance to lactic as you will feel that burn much sooner than if you are wearing the long fins. Even practicing monofin you can use the short fins, practice dolphin kicking, and eventually, you will even try mono-finning and bi-finning without fins on.
Apart from being a competitive discipline in its own right, Dynamic Apnea is probably the single most important training mode for Constant Weight, other than doing Constant Weights training itself. Dynamic is breath-hold with stress, as in Constant Weight, providing the opportunity to do Hypoxic Training – Lactic Acid Training, to train the specific muscles you would use in Constant Weights and train style and rhythm.
The best exercises are those that don’t feel like exercises. If you don’t enjoy doing static or dynamic sessions, there are still ways you can train. You simply need to find some fun things to do underwater. Here are some ideas.
Freediving games - Anything done in the pool on breath hold qualifies. Bang bang, chess, or series of rock paper scissors or the penny race (from the manual of freediving by Pelizarri & Tovaglieri).
The kicking relay - this exercise helps you with your comfort and posture underwater. Try to kick perfectly vertical (into the floor of the pool). The first diver goes down on RV, FRC, or full lungs, and kicks twice once the hands are on the floor. Once the first diver is up the second diver goes down and does two kicks. And so forth. For each round the amount of kicks increases. Three divers is ideal (the last one to dive becomes the safety of the next diver).
The weight walk - in this exercise the freediver carries a heavy weight along the bottom of the pool. It is difficult to move fast underwater while holding a heavy weight, so this exercise forces you to relax.
The slow crawl - a simple crawl along the bottom, as slow as you can. Feel the water glide over your hands and face and relax. Time spent is more important than distance for this exercise.
Frog flow - lounge at the bottom for a while, and then leap like a frog. Repeat. Try to focus on all the sensations in your body. Again time spent is more important than distance.
Beat up your buddy - underwater jujitsu, karate, or other martial arts are a great workout. We realized this after spending a pool session with a couple of freedivers that work as film stunt performers. Keep it fun and safe… no intense chokeholds. Unless you really don’t like your buddy!
Puzzle - in case you do not have enough divers in the pool for two divers to go down simultaneously for games, some fun puzzles will do. A Rubiks cube is a great way to increase your comfort level underwater without focusing on the clock. Just stop before it gets too frustrating!
A lot of freedivers, even experienced competitors, skip this step. All you need to do for your warm-down is about 10 minutes of easy, aerobic activity, such as some relaxed surface swimming. This will get the blood flowing to the muscles, open up capillaries, flush out metabolic waste, and aid in muscle recovery. For apnea, warm-down is particularly important because while we want to experience vasoconstriction and dive response during our dives, dive response and any lingering effects are not good for building or maintaining muscles. Our muscles need blood flow and oxygen to recover.
