Stop Worrying Whether Freediving is Aerobic or Anaerobic: Think Sport-Specific Fitness Instead

The body and mind are designed (more accurately evolved) so that they are very good at adapting to new challenges, stimuli, and demands.

Because of that, we have an excellent capacity to improve at the things we practice regularly.

In sports science, the S.A.I.D (specific adaptation to imposed demand) principle, supports this idea.

When it comes to improving in a sport, we can generally attribute at least 80% of our incremental improvement to sport-specific training, which in our case is actual freediving.

At most, only 20% of our total improvement can come from non-freedive training.

To put that in practical terms... If you improve your depth PB by 10m, only two of those metres are from non-freedive training.

Showing that sport-specific training really is more beneficial and valuable to our overall progression, and the whole ‘aerobic or anaerobic’ cross-training debate starts to get a little silly.

Remember, if we want to become good freedivers, we need to develop our ability by freediving. The better quality freedive training we do, the faster we will improve.

There is a persistent argument that freedivers should focus on doing ‘explosive’ training as their ‘main’ or at least the most important type of cross-training. It could be something like heavy Olympic lifting (snatching, and clean and jerking, more than your bodyweight).

The theory here is that ‘explosive’ training can develop and convert your muscle fibres into type 2b fibres. This is theoretically beneficial to freedivers because type 2b fibres have the least capillaries than any other muscle fibre type.

In short, they naturally receive the least blood flow and therefore consume the least oxygen, compared to type 2a and type 1 muscle fibres.

If you could build type 2b dominant muscles, you would switch to anaerobic respiration much earlier in your dives and consume much less O2 overall..

There's just one problem.

Changing the ratio of your muscle fibre types takes years of specific muscular training, and even then, the change will be minimal.

Many researchers still debate whether it’s even possible to change fibre types and believe that you will die with the same ratios you are born with.

Assuming that it is possible to make a significant change, there would still be some extremely negative consequences for freedivers attempting to elicit these changes.

The years of highly specific explosive training needed to elicit significant changes will;

• - Make you too bulky for freediving.
• - Create inefficient / unhealthy type 1 fibres
• - Neglect cardiovascular health resulting in high metabolic O2 consumption
• - Prevent you from focusing on sport-specific freedive training for years.

So, in theory, it makes sense to do a lot of explosive work... but in reality, when you consider how challenging it would be to make even the smallest change in fibre-type ratios, it makes almost no sense in practice.

In my opinion, the safest bet is to maintain and develop the fitness of each of your muscle fibre types. Do some cardio training, some lactic-training, and some explosive strength training as well. A good balance is the most logical approach for a freediver.

That brings me to another point. Is cross-training even important?

In my opinion, yes it is.

Any athlete needs to do some form of training outside their primary sport to maintain general fitness qualities neglected by that sport.

If you consider freediving limitations, we cannot effectively train cardio, strength, or explosiveness, which suggests that cross-training these things can benefit our overall health and wellbeing... Which will have a positive effect on our performance.

However, lactic cross-training might be a waste of our time... This is something that can be trained quite effectively with properly programmed dynamic apnea tables.

I really want to make clear that what you do for cross-training isn’t so important.

Whether you choose to build strength with a kettlebell or a barbell or train cardio on a bike or rowing machine, won’t drastically affect your freediving performance, as long as you do something.. So pick something you like.

Remember the S.A.I.D principle.

Nearly all of your performance comes from actual freediver training, so what you do on top of it doesn’t need to be tailored or selected as carefully.

It’s undeniable that being generally fit and healthy will improve your capacity for freediving.

If walking up two flights of stairs leaves you out of breath, you can’t touch your toes, or you can’t pick up something heavy, likely, freediving won’t feel very easy either.

An all-around athlete will always have an easier time specialising in a specific sport.

However, don’t waste your time debating whether or not anaerobic exercises are more beneficial than aerobic exercise for freediving. The truth is we don’t know, and the likelihood is that both are beneficial and neither is more important than the other.

Doing freedive training with healthy muscles will be more beneficial than doing apnea training with muscles which are only healthy anaerobically, or aerobically.

And just remember, freedive training is the most important type of training for your progress anyway, so spend your energy and time trying to find the most effective freediving you can do, and then you’ll see real improvement.