The Hidden Link Between Freediving and Mountaineering

Ever considering that reading through James Nestor’s 2014 e-book Deep, I’ve been fascinated by the scarcely believable feats of freedivers. Plunging 335 feet beneath the surface area of the ocean and building it back on a solitary breath, or only holding your breath for 11 minutes and 35 seconds, plainly involves a incredibly distinctive set of techniques and attributes.

But right until a recent meeting talk, I’d never deemed whether these exact same characteristics may well be valuable in other configurations where oxygen is scarce—such as the slim air of significant-altitude trekking and mountaineering. At the Drugs in Extremes conference in Amsterdam past month, Erika Schagatay of Mid Sweden University gave a presentation that summed up far more than two a long time of freediving analysis. The twist that caught my notice: knowing what makes a very good freediver could be valuable for predicting and perhaps even mitigating altitude sickness.

Schagatay’s initial analysis fascination was in what she phone calls “professional” freedivers, as opposed to recreational or competitive freedivers. These are persons who dive for fish and shellfish, just as their ancestors have for uncountable generations: like the Ama pearl divers in Japan, and the Bajau subsistence fishers in the Philippines and Malaysia. The latter group do repeated dives to about fifty feet, and often go as deep as one hundred thirty feet, with these quick recoveries that they devote about sixty p.c of their time underwater. More than the training course of a nine-hour working day, they may well devote as considerably as five hours underwater, not respiratory.

These diving populations, Schagatay and other people have uncovered, share 3 unique characteristics with profitable competitive freedivers, who take element in contests about the world sanctioned by AIDA, the worldwide freediving authority:

• Big lungs: In one study of fourteen world championship freedivers, critical capacity—the maximal total of air you can expel from your lungs—was correlated with their opposition scores. The 3 finest divers in the group experienced an typical critical potential of seven.nine liters, though the 3 worst averaged just six.seven liters. And it is not just genetic: Schagatay uncovered that an 11-week program of stretching enhanced lung volume by just about 50 percent a liter.
   
• A lot of purple blood cells: Divers do have a tendency to have greater degrees of hemoglobin, the ingredient of purple blood cells that carries oxygen. Which is most likely a direct outcome of their diving. Even if you just do a collection of fifteen breath retains, you will have a surge of normal EPO an hour later on, which triggers purple blood cell development.

  But there is a far more direct and rapid way of boosting your purple blood cell count: squeezing your spleen, which can shop about 300 milliliters of concentrated purple blood cells. Seals, who are among the animal kingdom’s most extraordinary divers, actually shop about 50 percent their purple blood cells in their spleens, so they never squander electrical power pumping all that added blood about when it is not required. When you hold your breath (or even just do a tough training), your spleen contracts and sends added oxygen-abundant blood into circulation. Not amazingly, spleen dimension is correlated with freediving overall performance.

• A robust “mammalian diving response”: When you hold your breath, your heart amount drops by about 10 p.c, on typical. Submerge your experience in h2o, and it will drop by about twenty p.c. Your peripheral blood vessels will also constrict, shunting precious oxygen to the brain and heart. Jointly, these oxygen-conserving reflexes are known as the mammalian diving response—and as soon as again, the power of this reaction is correlated with competitive diving overall performance.

These 3 variables assist you offer with a comprehensive cessation of respiratory for a handful of minutes. Do they have any relevance to extended exposure to a mild reduce in oxygen, like you working experience in the mountains? Which is what Schagatay and her colleagues have been exploring in a collection of reports involving Sherpas, trekkers, and Everest summiters in Nepal.

In a examine released past year, they followed eighteen trekkers to Everest Base Camp at seventeen,500 feet (5,360 meters). Guaranteed sufficient, the trekkers with the greatest lungs, the greatest spleens, and the greatest reduction in heart amount during a breath-hold were being the minimum likely to develop indications of acute mountain sickness.

The dimension of the spleen isn’t the only issue that matters—its gains depend on a solid squeezing reaction to get all the purple blood cells out. In a 2014 examine of eight Everest summiters, they uncovered that 3 repeated breath retains prior to the ascent brought on spleen volume to squeeze, on typical, from 213 milliliters to 184 milliliters. Immediately after the ascent, the exact same 3 breath retains brought on the spleen to squeeze down to 132 milliliters. Extended exposure to altitude experienced strengthened the spleen’s diving reaction. In reality, there is also evidence that only arriving at moderate altitude will result in a sustained mild spleen contraction, as your system struggles to cope with the oxygen-poor air.

Some of these diversifications are plainly genetic. Equally Sherpas and Bajau freedivers have even larger spleens than other closely related populations, presumably many thanks to generations spent either significant in the mountains or underwater. But Schagatay does not think it is all genetic. Immediately after all, Sherpas who no longer reside at altitude have even larger spleens than Nepalese lowlanders, but not as big as Sherpas who nonetheless reside at altitude. Alongside with other attributes like the diving reflex, it is anything that improves with instruction, she thinks.

What can you do with this facts in observe? Here’s some knowledge from the Everest Base Camp examine, demonstrating the p.c reduce in heart amount during a just one-moment breath-hold. The individuals are divided into 3 teams, primarily based on their Lake Louise Questionnaire (LLQ) scores, a measure of acute mountain sickness during the trek. Those with the maximum scores—the sickest, in other words—barely have any reduction in heart amount these with the lowest scores averaged about eighteen p.c reduced:

To exam your own heart-amount reduce during a just one-moment breath hold, you’d need to have a right heart-amount monitor, considering that the pertinent knowledge stage is the lowest instantaneous amount you get to by the close of the moment. It is just just one component among lots of, but it may well give you some indication of whether you are likely to go through from altitude disease on a trek, which could assist notify your determination about how aggressive an itinerary to adhere to or whether you want to take Diamox prophylactically. (This distinct examine was accomplished in Kathmandu, at 4,800 feet, so it is probable that the predictions would be distinctive at sea level—grist for a long run examine.)

Even far more intriguing is the chance that you can train these responses. For illustration, in a 2013 examine, Schagatay and her colleagues uncovered that two weeks of 10 maximal breath retains for every working day strengthened the diving reaction, producing a a lot quicker and far more pronounced drop in heart amount. The up coming phase: figuring out whether this style of advancement would make any sensible variance to trekkers.

The even larger takeaway, for me, is the idea that freediving isn’t as mad and unnatural a pastime as I originally considered when I initial read through Deep. The mammalian dive reflex originates way back in our evolutionary history—it’s what For every Scholander, just one of the initial researchers to examine it, identified as “the master change of existence.” And if Schagatay is appropriate, the circuitry that allows us to go deep is also what allows us to make it to the top of Mount Everest—because, as she places it, we were being born to dive.

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