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The No.1 Benefit Of Doing Warm-Up Dives In Freedive Training
I’ve seen some weird and wonderful approaches to warm-up dives during my time as an athlete and a coach.
It seems that some people have discovered exactly what the warm-up does best. While others are still confused about the main benefits of doing it and what exactly they should do.
To clear up any misunderstandings and help you come up with our best possible pre-dive warm-up procedure. Below, I’m covering what warm-ups can and can’t help with, things to avoid when warming up, and ways to get it right.
What warm-ups can’t do
The best place to start is with what warm-ups can’t do, and maybe dispel some myths about the effects of warm-up dives.
To the best of my ability, I cannot find any objective or subjective evidence that doing warm-up dives will improve our dive response. Sorry.
There’s no evidence that warming up improves our blood shift, or that blood shift is cumulative. And, I can’t find any real evidence that warming up improves the “spleen effect” either (I looked for a really long time!)
We can therefore conclude that warm-up dives do not improve our physical ability to perform a deep dive (or a DYN/STA for that matter). They don’t increase our physical ability to hold our breath, and they do not physically protect our lungs from barotrauma.
They do not “kick in” your dive response as we are often taught to believe.
If done correctly, a perfect warm-up will have a neutral effect on our physical abilities. Take a warm-up dive too far and it will actually have a negative effect (see below for why).
So what are warm-up dives good for?
What warm-ups can do
Despite the “fact” (I use the term lightly) that they do not improve our physical ability, I do believe that they can be extremely beneficial to improving our mental ability to dive.
For most freedivers, a good dive can be an extremely relaxing thing. Hanging at neutral buoyancy feels great and can quickly slow down our internal rhythm, kind of like a condensed meditation. For many of us, it’s really hard to fully let go of the general thoughts that consume our normal everyday lives. So, a warm-up dive can be the catalyst to let go.
A warm-up or two can easily get us into the perfect, relaxed-yet-focused, state of mind that we need to be in just before doing anything ‘big’. This ideal mental state is what extends our breath holds and reduces physical tension protecting us from injury and blackout.
No-warm-up divers can achieve this state before the first dive, and some of us can’t. Warm-ups are for those that need the extra help, which isn’t something to be ashamed of or particularly concerned about. If you need warm-ups, do them. Just make sure to do them right.
Getting it right
For me, getting the warm-up right means maximising what it can do, and forgetting about the things that it can’t do.
As mentioned, all a warm-up serves to do is help us achieve a correct mental state. We are using breath-holds to lull us into a sleepy, calm, and focused mindset – ready for our deepest dives, or more targeted training exercises.
To achieve this, we want to do the most comfortable and enjoyable warm-up dives possible, which can be translated into doing shallow dives, without pushing (no contractions) and making sure you enjoy them.
A comfortable 1:00 warm-up is far more useful than a 2:00 one that you need to push for. A gentle 10m hang is better than an exhale dive to 25m that unnecessarily stresses the lung tissues.
Warm-up dives need to be easy and calming.
Every tiny bit of effort whether it’s mental, physical, or technical, takes away from the effectiveness of a warm-up. Unless they are as easy as possible, they are potentially doing more harm than good.
What to avoid
The first and most obvious thing to avoid is becoming hypoxic, even mildly, during your warm-ups. To do a big dive we rely heavily on O2 that’s stored in our blood and tissues and becoming hypoxic, even just a little, means that we’ve eaten into those stores which don’t recover immediately.
In 2019 safetied a small depth competition, and there was 1 hypoxic ‘event’ in the whole comp: An LMC that luckily didn’t require assistance. The diver in question surfaced from their last warm-up dive (20:00 before the competition dive) with blue-lips. Twenty minutes isn’t enough time to fully recover from a hypoxic warm-up and they jeopardised their comp dive as a result of pushing the warm-up.
Secondly, I would avoid any lung compression. Warm-ups do not decrease our risk of squeezing, but they can increase it. Doing FRC or RV (any of the various degrees of exhale diving) is, in my opinion, very risky. All it does is put unnecessary stress on the lungs, without any benefit to our bloodshift or alveolar flexibility.
A warm up dive should never take you below your residual volume. This means <30m on inhale, and <10m on FRC (if you decide FRC warm ups is the way to go for you). My deepest dive to-date was 90m CWT, and I did it with a 1:10 FRC dive to 8m as my warm-up.
Thirdly, we need to avoid any significant nitrogen exposure. In 2019 I participated in a competition where, during the safety briefing, a ~70m diver asked for a 50m warm-up line. Doing such a deep (speaking in %%) dive right before a competition performance is pretty crazy.
This can only be detrimental to physical performance and serves no value at all. I could go on about increased squeeze or BO risk, but the obvious one here is DCS. Of course, it’s probably not going to be a problem doing 50m, then 75m in a single ‘session’, but due to the 0-benefit nature of doing a 50m warm-up dive (don’t forget mild hypoxia, and lung compression problems), I can’t see the nitrogen exposure as a risk worth taking either.
Finally, just don’t complicate things for yourself. I’ve seen divers who descend to 10m, exhale some air, and then continue to 15m to hang. I’ve seen divers who do a 15m dive for exactly 150% of their target dive time, and then 20m for exactly 200% of their target dive time. Some hang until first contraction and then wait for thirty seconds before coming up. The arguments for doing these things are usually; increased blood shift, better dive response, decrease the risk of a squeeze, less this, more that… ETC
With all due respect, these arguments are wrong. These kinds of warm-ups are doing nothing for the body, and are very far from ‘as relaxing as possible’ rendering them less effective than they can be.
The only measurement that matters in a warm-up is: How good it felt.
How do you know you’ve gotten it right?
Your warm-ups can’t be too short, too shallow, and they for sure can’t be too easy. As long as they make you feel relaxed and focused, then you’ve done as much as you possibly can: You’ve done the perfect warm-up.
Remember, the success of a perfect deep dive or dynamic lies in the hands of your training, not in your warm-up. So just enjoy it :)
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