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Introducing The 3 Trainable Parts Of Freediving: A New Way To Categorise And Structure Your Freedive Training
Freedive training can feel very confusing and hard to manage if you don’t have an objective system for categorising and managing your training exercises.
Without understanding…
- – what ‘things’ we need to train
- – which exercises target those things best,
- – and when to train them
...We can struggle to feel confident that we’ve worked on all the essential things in equal measure that will allow us to perform at our best when it matters most.
Very often, a big source of nervousness before my PBs, or competition dives, was not knowing if I’d accidentally ‘neglected’ any crucial aspects of training – the qualities of freediving fitness – during my training cycle.
I’d wonder, am I prepared?
This may be a source of conscious or subconscious anxiety for you as well.
The doubt creeps in with worries like…
Did I do enough? Did I train everything I needed to train? Did I train all aspects of freediving in the right proportion or at the right time?
To help you overcome doubt, I want to introduce you to the ‘three trainable parts’ of freediving...
The Three Trainable Parts Of Freediving
I came up with the ‘three trainable parts of freediving’ to better categorise, visualise, and manage my overall training approach.
Training freediving in this way, ensures we are training our ‘complete’ freedive-fitness consistently, giving us the best chance of progressing with ease.
The three trainable parts of freediving are Breath-hold, Movement, and Pressure.
We can understand what we need to train in these areas by asking three simple questions:
1. Breath-hold: How long do we need to hold our breath to achieve our dive goal?
2. Movement: How many metres do we need to cover, and with which technique(s)?
3. Pressure: Which minimum lung volume do we need to be able to safely equalize to?
These 1-3 parts of freediving are what we need to train and improve.
Even the most complex forms of diving, and the depth disciplines, can be broken down into these three parts, each representing a particular demand of our overall goal.
For pool divers, training can be 33% or 66% more simple. The dynamic disciplines don’t have a pressure-demand, and static really only has a breath-hold demand.
We can use these demands to inform all of the important decisions like exercise selection, weekly and monthly planning, and even inform us when we’re ready to peak for maximum performance.
They also inform us of how much better we need to get to achieve our goal dive(s).
Alternating The Three Trainable Parts Of Freediving
One of the hardest things to manage as a freediver (or any athlete really) is making sure you're training everything in an efficient way.
You need to make sure you’re not neglecting any important parts of your training and ensuring that you can fully recover between each session, maximising your physical, mental, and technical adaptation and altogether avoiding over-training.
In my opinion, a great way to do this is to alternate the trainable parts session-to-session.
This will ensure you receive a very balanced input of training stimulus and avoid burning yourself out by doing the same thing every session.
As an example…
A DYN diver might do; breath-hold specific training on Monday, movement training on Wednesday, and breath-hold again on Friday. The following week would go; movement, breath-hold, movement, and so on.
This will help them get an optimised balance of training and avoid overworking ‘just’ their breath-hold, which can be a significant cause of over-training. It’s safer to spread the overall fatigue of training out instead of concentrating it on the same thing every session.
Specific vs Accessory Exercises (and) Cross-Training Exercises
To really grasp the three-parts concept, I need to tell you about the different types of exercises. These types apply to all sports, but here are viewed through the lens of freedive-training.
A specific exercise replicates either the entire demand of the sport (all three parts) or the whole demand of one of the three parts. For example;
- – 2 x 45m (75%) CWT is a ‘sport’ specific exercise for 60m CWT.
- – 2:00 (100% time) dive to 30m is a breath-hold specific exercise for 60m CWT.
An accessory exercise is something that isolates individual areas within each of the three parts. For example;
- – ‘O2 tables’ are an accessory exercise for the breath-hold.
- – ‘FRC mouth-fill from the surface’ is an accessory exercise for the pressure demand.
What’s important to understand is that ‘accessory exercises’ do not directly improve your freediving performance. Their job is to help improve your specific exercises’ quality, which in turn improves your freediving performance.
Any other training; weights, cycling, yoga, meditation, rock-climbing etc. is ‘cross-training’. The job of cross-training is to keep you healthy and happy, but it doesn’t fit into the global umbrella of ‘freedive-training’.
The Three Trainable Parts & Their Accessory Elements
To fully understand how the three parts apply to your training, you need to know how to categorize your training by parts, accessory-area, and exercise types. Here’s what that looks like for freediving.
These accessory areas and their exercises are designed to improve the quality of the specific exercises associated with the three parts. What’s important to note is that these accessory areas come in an ‘order of importance’ within each part.
You cannot improve your ‘style’ if your ‘strength & conditioning’ is too poor to move your fins correctly. You cannot improve EQ skills if your chest isn’t flexible enough to reach appropriate depths etc.
Putting it all together
To get the best training plan possible, you need to work on all of these things and, most importantly, with the right timing.
Make sure to spend more time doing accessory exercises far from your PB or competition, and transition to doing more ‘specific’ exercises the closer you get to achieving your goal.
It’s also important, no matter which phase of training you're in, and whether you’re focusing more or less on the accessory or specific exercises, to make sure to alternate relatively evenly between the 3 (or 1-2 as they apply to your discipline) parts of freediving.
By the end of your training cycle, you should have spent almost equal time training each part, and each accessory area. This will be the best way to ensure you’ve trained ‘completely’ and haven’t neglected or forgotten any important part(s) of your overall freediving fitness.
As a bonus, spreading yourself between each of the parts and accessory areas will help you avoid over-training by making sure you have plenty of time to recover from each type of training stimulus, never finding yourself too far ‘down in the hole’ of fatigue.
So there you have it – the three trainable parts of freediving.
Consider how that applies to your current understanding of freediving, and try to categorize your favourite exercise by part and type to get the most complete and effective training plan possible.
Want to know exactly what EXERCISES to do to get the BEST RESULTS in your freedive training?
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