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Why Are You Stuck?
The 3 Causes of Freedive Plateaus
Getting stuck in your progression, or hitting a plateau, is probably one of the most frustrating parts of being an athlete in any sport, including freediving.
Of course, hitting a plateau is not inevitable, but there’s still a very high likelihood that at some point in your freediving journey, you will temporarily plateau for one reason or another. I’ve had my fair share of them, and while they were frustrating at the time, they also provided great learning opportunities which have helped me become a more competent coach & athlete today.
It’s all part of the process.
That being said, being on a plateau is still SUPER FU**ING FRUSTRATING, and I’m sure that all you really want to know is how to get off a plateau, or even better how to mostly prevent them in the first place.
So the questions are, what causes a plateau, how can you tell what’s causing yours, and which decisions can you make in training to avoid getting stuck, or to get yourself unstuck.
How Training Works
Whether you are a freediver, a runner, a tennis player, or a rock climber, training pretty much works the exact same way across the board, in all cases.
Training: The long term act of performing a set of exercises designed to help you improve in your sport, presents various stimuli. These stimuli can be; physical, mental, technical, neural, or any combination of the 4.
It’s extremely important to recognize that any stimulus by itself, is not enough to make improvements. You also need to have proper recovery in both the short and long term between your training sessions, and training weeks. Without recovery, the stimulus will break down the body, mind, & nervous system, leaving you less capable of performing than when you started.
Adaptation = Stimulus + Recovery
Just to make things clear, this A = S + R applies to all 4 categories of training (Physical, Mental, Technical, Neural). So you need to present these different kinds of stimuli, and then allow proper recovery between training sessions to make the desired (Physical, Mental, Technical, Neural) adaptations.
Yes, this means you need to recover even from technique and skills training. That being said, technique recovers much faster than physical, mental, and neural training.
A great way to visualize the training process is the SRA (Stimulus, Recovery, Adaptation) curve. This ‘curve’ shows how training breaks down the athlete to less than baseline, and with adequate rest, they initially recover to above baseline (supercompensation) until eventually over-recovering back down to, or below, baseline (detraining).
The ideal way to train is to make sure that you're doing each similar session during the supercompensation phase of the curve when you’ve recovered to above baseline from your previous session.
So with that little sports-science lesson, let’s look at the three reasons you wouldn’t be progressing.
- -Reason 1: Undertraining
- -Reason 2: Overtraining
- -Reason 3: Overstimulation
Undertraining
Undertraining is one of the most common reasons that freedivers aren’t making progress. In the most simple terms, undertraining literally means not doing enough training. Not enough reps, sessions, or exercises to generate enough stimulus to elicit adaptations.
I think it’s very important to say here that undertraining cannot be solved by pushing yourself harder and harder. In almost all cases, adaptations are not made by training ‘hard’. Undertraining means not doing enough total meters per week / month / year in freediving in general, or on a given exercise(s) targeting your main weakness(es)
In fact, pushing too hard can actually lead to under-training. As you start to lose motivation for maximally difficult training sessions, you become less likely to do them, causing a further drop in training volume and frequency.
It’s better to tone down your sessions, making sure you can comfortably sustain them for months and years on end.
All of that being said, there are two types of undertraining that affect freedivers.
The first type is not having enough training sessions per week. Of course, this depends on your level (PB), but diving only 1-2 times per week will only work for relative beginners. Eventually, you’ll need to step it up to 3-4 discipline-specific training sessions per week if you want to improve.
The second, and more common type is simply neglecting a key part of your freediving. You may be training 3-4 times per week, but if you’re only working on CO2 tolerance & EQ, literally everything else that has a role in freediving will stop progressing. Very quickly, this neglect will hold you back and progress will become impossible.
Check out this other article to find out all of the things you need to train according to your discipline(s):
So in short, you might not be training enough in general, or simply not training one or more parts of your freediving enough. In either case, you’re not getting enough sport-specific stimulation to improve part, or all, of your freediving fitness.
How to tell: The best way to tell that you’re undertrained is that you’re training in the same way as ‘normal’ (normal for you), but all of a sudden you stop improving. If this happens either you need to add another session per week, or more likely, you need to add exercises to target your current weaknesses as they themselves are undertrained and neglected.
Overtraining
Overtraining is a really common problem for divers who either live in diving locations (like Dahab) or who travel to train for more than a month.
Overtraining happens simply by violating the SRA curve by training too frequently. In short, you expose yourself to some kind of training stimulus and then re-introducing a similar training stimulus too soon, training before supercompensation can happen. This could look like doing 2 EQ training sessions, or 2 CO2 tables, 2 days in a row.
If you keep doing this, eventually the endocrine system (your fight or flight hormones) starts to panic, and this causes all sorts of weird symptoms like “tired-wired” (our term for feeling exhausted but also like you drank 6 cups of coffee), loss of appetite, mood swings, and in general a sudden loss in performance: Overtraining syndrome.
Basically, if you’re still tired from your last session, you're not ready to train (anything similar) again until that fatigue is completely gone.
You know when you see/hear of divers doing big dives easily in training & suddenly having BOs in competition on dives that should be easy.. This isn’t comp nerves, it’s the sudden loss in performance from over-training (usually neurological overtraining from doing too many near-max dives).
This is common in ‘diving locations’ because of the availability of training days. If you have the option to train 365 days per year, it takes a lot of discipline to take proper rest days and make sure your always training when you feel fresh.
This can happen easily with STA training as well, since you can train STA at home on the couch it’s up to you to take proper rest days and train your weaknesses. Not just try to outwork a lack of progress.
How to tell: The most obvious way to tell that you’re on your way to overtraining is that you’re feeling more and more fatigued week after week. Perhaps you start to perform worse and worse in your training exercises. Sudden lack of motivation to hold your breath is also another great and obvious sign.
Overstimulation
Overstimulation is a problem that I mainly see with divers who are either getting in-person coaching or who are preparing for competitions.
In short, overstimulation occurs when you produce too many SRA curves. This happens by doing too many different kinds of training all at the same time. We have our ‘main’ SRA curve for freediving, but what if you’re also doing yoga, meditation, weight training, swimming, finswimming???
Each of those other activities gets its own SRA curve, and eventually, supercompensation cannot happen. If by some miracle you don’t overtrain, your body, mind, and nervous system don’t know which is your main sport? Should it make freediving adaptations or swimming ones?
The reason this is common with in-person coaching is the coach might feel obliged to fill your day with all kinds of training to give you your money’s worth. This means you might end up doing a 1hr stretch and meditation before freedive training, and a swim or weight-training session in the afternoon. Maybe yoga and a run on your days off from freediving.
If you’re preparing for a comp, you could also feel the self-imposed need to do more training. Again, this will likely lead to overstimulation. All the extra training is taking away from the freediving adaptations you could have made if you were more sport-focused.
Now, of course, all these other non-freedive training (Cross-Training) are important, and you should do them in general. However, if you are 6-8 weeks away from a competition, a PB attempt, or on a diving holiday, you should not be spending many of your weekly “adaptation points” on non-freediving activities.
Work on your freediving. Adapt to freediving. Then after setting a new PB or getting white cards in comp, take some time away from serious freedive training to rebuild your general fitness with these other non-freediving training modalities.
How to tell: This one is very simple. Look at your calendar/schedule, and make sure that your total time spent on non-freedive training is less than ½ of your total time spent freediving.
So if you are in the water for 6 hours per week, you shouldn’t be doing more than 3hrs total of any other non-freedive training per week. *This applies mainly to the final 6-8 weeks of training before PBs / Comp, roughly speaking.
What to do about it
The short answer is to improve your training structure.
If it’s undertraining, you’ll either need to improve your exercise selection to stop neglecting your weaknesses or find a way (at least periodically through the year in preparation for PBs and Comps) to increase the amount of in-water training sessions you can do per week.
If it’s overtraining you’ll probably need to train apnea less frequently or decrease the number of dives you do per session to lower total fatigue. Either option will contribute to you feeling stronger and stronger through the training period, instead of more and more tired.
If it’s overstimulation you’ll need to take temporary periods of the year, at least 6-8 weeks before a competition where you consider yourself a pure freediver and cut out most of your non-freediver training. So next time you find yourself preparing for a PB or competition, this means LESS stretching & strengthening, NOT more.
So, while the overall management of training can be quite complex, understanding where the problems come from isn’t rocket science. Either you’re not doing enough, or you're doing too much, and making further progress requires some type of fix to be made to your overall approach.
The best way to tell that you’re training properly is that you see consistent improvements in both the quality of your diving and numerical performance week after week. If you’re not getting better something is wrong and better management of your training will fix the problem allowing you to once again make progress.
Additional Help
An experienced freediving coach can analyse your current training to identify what's going wrong and then reprogram your training to fix the problem(s).
Not only will this speed up your progression, it can also help avoid those annoying (actually SUUUUPER FRUSTRATING) plateaus in the first place.
Check out the TrainFreediving distance coaching page to look at what this additional help can look like if you work with me on an ongoing basis.
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