You know this feeling. It’s not a good one. Relax! Photo: Mark Tipple.
If you surf, you’ve been held under. If you have been unlucky enough to held under for a whole set, waiting patiently for it to pass by while trying to fight that panic, you know that learning to relax and holding your breath is a required skill. It is a skill that can be learned, and is probably best learned before it becomes necessary to know!
How long can you hold your breath for? How long do you think you need to hold your breath for?
Let’s start with the basics:
How to breathe in isolation
Inhalation is normally performed through the nose, and exhalation either through the nose or mouth.
There are three phases to the breath. This is the inhalation sequence:
- Diaphragmatic expansion. Think of first letting the belly expand as the diaphragm draws down.
- Ribcage expansion. Once the diaphragm draws down, the breath then fills into the sides (front and back) of your ribcage. The back of your ribcage is commonly forgotten.
- Upper respiratory. ONLY once these two portions of the breath are met, you then use your upper respiratory muscles to help fill the top of your lungs.
An easier analogy is to think of dropping the diaphragm, then filling your lungs in a wave from the bottom up! Whether this is physiologically true or not, I don’t know, but I find this useful to feel the transitions between these three stages.
Why you should meditate: That art of returning to the breath
First thing’s first: I don’t have a spiritual practice, and I don’t believe there is a spiritual component to meditation. If you do, that is cool, but it’s not why we are doing this.
When you get held under, you can panic. When you panic, you burn through energy quickly, which leads to more panicking, and a downward self-reinforcing spiral. You don’t want that.
Learning to relax under pressure is a skill. You need to start learning to listen to your body’s signals, and a seated meditation is the easiest way to get started.
A daily practice need not take you any more than ten minutes. When you get stressed, your breathing pattern changes, and your body will stiffen. So why not just start with those two things?
Simply sit comfortably, either on the floor, or on a chair. It doesn’t matter. You don’t need to adopt a seated yoga posture (unless you want to). I personally like to put on some music. I am currently landlocked, so I like to play some ocean sounds, but that’s just me. Play something soothing, preferably with no lyrics when you are first learning.
There is no such thing as a good or bad meditation. Some days you will be better at it than others. The point is to close your eyes, relax, unclench your jaw, and follow your breath.
Your mind will start to wander, tick off today’s to-do-list, or start following a train of thought. Identify when this happens, and again return to the breath. Continue until the music stops.
I know you can’t return to the breath when you are being thrown around under water, but the practice is to learn to be still, to relax, not to panic, and to relax your jaw and your body until it passes.
As you get better at your practice, try playing something distracting, or sitting in a distracting environment and see if you can still do it!
I personally love this simple practice while I am sitting on my board in between sets.
Box breathing
In the video I demonstrate a basic dry-land breathing technique, where you breathe once every 20 seconds. It looks like this:
1. Full in-breath over 5 secs
2. Hold the breath over 5 secs
3. Exhale drawing the belly inward over 5 secs
4. Hold the breath over 5 secs. Repeat
This is ideally performed for up to 5 minutes, and can be part of your meditation practice if you so desire.
To ramp it up one notch, start contracting and holding the deep abdominals during the outbreath and hold phase. You will also notice an increased level of difficulty if you perform this exercise as the last exercise in a simple full body circuit, or when you are walking down the street.
Just don’t hyperventilate and pass out! Be careful of this if you have a problem with blood pressure, and start gently.
Moving breath-hold practice
In my Advanced Level phase of the Weekend Surf Warrior package, I show you two simple interval and breath hold exercises for swimming. Here is a snapshot of one of them:
This entails a progressive overload of holding your breath for 50m of swimming, taking fewer and fewer breaths per lap.
If you are a newbie to this whole surfing and swimming malarky, you might find that 25m is enough, with a 30 sec rest interval between each progressive effort. Then slowly reduce that time interval by 10 seconds every week or so until you can do the whole thing in one go.
You will notice that when it gets tougher and the carbon dioxide builds up, you start to panic a little and want to speed up your stroke rate. Relax, don’t panic, keep your strokes long and slow, unclench your jaw, and return to a relaxed breathing pattern.
Hope this helps guys, if it does, please drop me a comment below and let me know.
Even better still, if you know someone that could benefit from this information, please share it with them!
If you have questions that you would like to see answered just like this one, please send me an email to ash@weekendsurfwarrior.com, and for more informational tutorials, check out www.weekendsurfwarrior.com
