How deep can freedivers dive?

How Deep can Freedivers Dive?

How deep can freedivers dive? This question is often asked by both those who are just starting their way in this sport and those who are already practising for some time. What limits us? What helps us?

 

How Deep Can Freedivers Dive?

If you enjoy this article, please share it with your friends and family! Thank you!

Freediving as we know it now is relatively new, with freediving courses and a complete education system with instructor courses and such. Still, the practice of deep diving and staying under the water has its deep roots in history. Here, we have a complete overview of the history of freediving and its records.

In Ancient Greece, some people collected food and special sponges in the depths. These divers used special large stones, skandalopetras, weighing about 15 kg, to go under the water to collect the sponges quickly. It is believed that they dove up to a depth of 30 meters. In another part of the world, in Korea, on Jeju Island, there were Haenyeo divers (literally sea women) already in the sixth century AD. They continue their traditional work now, as they used to do it many centuries ago. Girls begin learning to dive at an early age and work until old age, up to 70-80 years. With each dive, the Haenyeo women descend to a depth of 10-30 meters and can hold their breath for more than 1-3 minutes, harvesting various seafood. The Philippines’ Sama-Bajau people, whose lives are closely connected to the sea, also have an interesting traditional diving technique. It allows them to dive up to a depth of 60 meters and stay with one breath for up to 10 minutes. Many scientists believe that using such skills has changed the people of this tribe’s genes over a thousand years, adapting them for diving. If we turn to common people, our contemporaries who were born in conditions similar to ours, we will still be able to find many record-holders among them.

In 1913, Stotti Georghios lifted a lost anchor from over 60 meters deep, receiving his £ 5 prize and a lifetime permit to fish with dynamite. His dive was recorded but not widely known. Doctors at the beginning of the 20th century confidently stated that pressure at a depth of over 30 meters would kill any diver. Their opinion was disproved in 1949 by Raimondo Bucher, who dived on a bet to a depth of 30 meters, thereby winning 50,000 lire. Bucher’s record was interesting for many young people. One of them, Alberto Novelli, beat him in 1951, diving to a depth of 35 meters, and later, in 1956, dove even deeper, to 41 meters.

And a few years later, the era of the Italian Enzo Maiorca and the Frenchman Jacques Mayol began – perhaps the most famous freedivers in the world, who were glorified in one of the best freediving movies in history, “The Big Blue” by the great Luc Besson. Physiologists of that time determined the absolute depth limit for humans – 50 meters, but in 1961, Enzo Maiorca overcame it. Soon, Maiorca and Mayol conquered 60 meters – their achievements led physiologists to an absolute deadlock.

Today, when freedivers dive deeper than some submarines, physiologists only partially explain the phenomenon of freediving and can not even approximately define new limits for humans. The leading theory about the human body’s adaptation to depth is the theory about the “underwater reflex of mammals.” The essence of the theory is as follows: all mammals left the World Ocean and have not lost their aquatic skills in the process of evolution. Those skills allowed some species – like whales and seals – to return to the ocean. These animals did not acquire any fundamentally new adaptations, which led the scientists to believe that with sufficient training, a person can dive deeper than seals and some whales.

Physiologists have studied the body’s basic physiological reactions to great depths even during Mayol, and nothing has changed since then. Under the influence of pressure, the chest is strongly compressed, causing a decrease in heart rate by 40-70 percent—bradycardia, which, in turn, leads to a decrease in oxygen consumption.

Under the pressure, after 10 meters, the blood flow is redistributed toward the vital organs. As a reaction to holding the breath, the spleen contracts, and the number of red blood cells that transport oxygen increases in the blood. Carbon dioxide gradually begins to accumulate, which, in turn, improves the release of oxygen to the tissues—the lungs contract to their minimum volume (less than a quarter of the original). In physiology, this process is called the body’s adaptive response.

Although everyone has the same adaptive response, you will not be able to simply go and dive a hundred meters. The first limiter is the diaphragm, a dome-shaped muscle that goes down when inhaling and pulls up when exhaling. The more elastic the diaphragm, the higher it can be pulled up when diving, the less the lung residual volume. That is why an untrained person, even if he or she knows how to hold their breath well, will not be able to dive deep right away because of the pressure and the pain in the diaphragm and lack of equalization of the middle ear will stop them. Also, there will be a feeling that there is insufficient air – a normal reaction to CO2 buildup.

If a person wants to dive deep, he must have an elastic diaphragm and trained intercostal respiration muscles. These muscles must stretch well for a fuller inhalation. You also need to learn how to equalize the pressure in the middle ear and sinuses with the outside pressure.