Long time no see

It’s been a while since my last entry. The break from updating this blog began because I was out of contact with my computer for the remainder of the summer. After that I’ve intentionally refrained myself from updating this blog since it could have led to misunderstandings while I was applying for a new job. After all, freediving is only a hobby for me, but while analyzing my development as a diver and obstacles for training the work-imposed issues keep coming up quite frequently, and I have the bad habit of using harsh language to describe it that could be interpreted negatively from the part of potential employers. Anyway, I’m starting in my new job next week, so I can write more freely about my training once more.

So, I’ve been training consistently all this time but I’ve also made some fundamental changes in my training routines and weightings.

The first impulse to change my current practices came from a course that Martin Stepanek gave to a bunch of Finnish freedivers in the beginning of fall. The main take-aways that I got were the

1. Systematic and disciplined training focus that had strong resemblances to other competitive sports training.
2. Identifying and working on more clearly separated dimensions of diving (CO2-tolerance, adaptation, technique…).
3. Focusing on providing the body the prerequisites for reacting to the training in a way that is beneficial to freediving i.e. by recovery nutrition and hydration.

These may seem like self-evident observations, but Martin had developed the first two into a completely new level that I want to pursue myself as well. The third had been embarrassingly neglected aspect in my training until then: basically I had just typically gone to bed after training without ANY nutrition that the body could have used to rebuild itself after training! No wonder my development had been so slow!

The second impulse came when Susanna Saari organized the Finnish national team the possibility to take part in a comprehensive and professionally organized physical condition and body structure test. The results were for me quite devastating and disappointing. Although I had been training relatively hard, and I thought that I would have been in a comparable shape to that of my navy year the results indicated that I was almost on an average level compared to normal recreational athletes. My relative O2 intake was 52,8 ml/kg/min, and my lactate was 14,58 which is not much compared to my training amount. This got me recalling a course that Sebastien Murat gave us a year back when he told us that at his peak condition his max O2 intake was similar to a 12-year old girl: So low max O2 intake can be a sign of a body that is well adapted to perform under low blood pO2-conditions, so nothing to be worried yet. Then came the aerobic and anaerobic thresholds, 121 and 171 bpm respectively. So, when I stand up, my aerobic threshold is exceeded, and basically ALL my endurance training (interval running, spinning etc. had been well above my anaerobic threshold. That is, I have no base condition to speak of, which is a poor ground to build other training routines. Finally there was the body composition analysis. There the effects of my vegetarian (occasional fish and eggs) diet and poor emphasis on post-training nutrition intake were clear as day: the composition was healthy in general, but I had absolutely no muscle mass to speak of: 36kg of muscle out of 73kg total weight, which is only slightly above the normal population’s average although I honestly claim that I train more that the average guy… In comparison, Lauri Lilja, who is about 5-10cm taller had 12kg more absolute muscle, and even Mikko Pöntinen who confessed that he trained very little strength exercises had more muscle than I did. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been bothered by these results, since excess muscle mass only consumes unnecessarily much oxygen, that should be reserved for the brains, right? Then I recalled, that some of the world’s best divers are currently not shying away from building up muscles (Herbert, Martin, Stig). I figure this has to do with developed dive reflexes that restrains blood circulation to muscles, so that muscle mass is not, if well prepared, counterproductive to freediving, and can even be advantageous repository of energy needed for long dives.

So, what should I do with these new insights on my training’s impact? At first I was stunned and demoralized for a while after it occurred to me just how much unproductive work I had done, how much unnecessary pain I had endured and how much development I had missed. Then, slowly I began taking into effect the revised training practices:

1. Nutrition drink before and after training composing mostly of carbon hydrates and some protein to enable my body to develop after the training. The results have been amazing: I feel very energetic during training, and I have swiftly reached some milestones of physical strength that have eluded me for years although I haven’t been training on strength as much as before.
2. Technique training with small training fins to focus training effect on the most wanted muscle groups. The other reason for this emphasis is that my monofin is falling apart, and the replacement I ordered from Polyorg 19.2.2007 (yes, more than a year ago) is nowhere to be found and the guy responsible does not even bother answering my emails anymore… Let’s just hope that the patched monofin holds together for a few more weeks.
3. O2 tolerance and dive reflex training. I began this by doing empty-lung statics, but progressed in doing empty-lung static at the bottom of a pool followed by a dynamic apnea, usually 45sec static and 30-50m dynamic with small fins. This is an excellent exercise to develop dive reflex (hr drops below 40 during static, and does not rise above 50 during dynamic), to teach the body to operate under low O2-levels, and to increase awareness to what it feels like when a DYNAMIC dive goes near LMC/BO-limits (very different from a static dive’s warnings, as I unfortunately found out during my last competition DNF dive…). A strong word of warning however: DO NOT DO THIS ALONE! NOT ONCE! EVER! These dives end up systematically very close to LMC-limits, and personally I trust only a handful of dive buddies so much that I am willing to do these trainings at all: I’ve been training with these guys for several years and without exception all of them are competitive divers themselves as well. Basically these exercises are THE most dangerous things I have ever done in water, and I strongly recommend avoiding them unless you have trained freediving consistently for at least 5 years. A safer variant of the same exercise can be done out of water as well: empty-lung crouch jumps: 4x25 + 5x20 = 200 jumps. Trust me, you know when you have done this set of exercises…
4. Additionally I’ve been including some base endurance training to my weekly program as well: 1x hour+ jogging session at average hr of 145 and some relaxed swimming as well. I have tried to take the intensity down in spinning and squash as well, but but with little success so far.

So, now I need to see how well this all is coming together to aid my overall freediving abilities. The next real test should be our national championships on 23.3. Before that we’ll be having national team’s diving camp this weekend, which I'll devote to training my competition readiness. Let’s see how things are coming together. My expectations are very high, assuming that I can overcome the psychological barriers related to long dives that I haven’t been working on at all for several months now.