#105: Freediving & Mental Mastery - Will Trubridge

0:02Free diving is a mirror for the way that we would want to respond to stress in our day to day lives. You're put into intimate contact with yourself to take control of both your mind and your body. My name is William Truebridge. I'm a professional freediver and so far the deepest human being on this planet. You're put into contact with what it really means to exist, just pure consciousness. The exploration of yourself can reveal these hidden pearls just the same way that the ocean has so many hidden physical treasures. The interesting thing about freediving is that it is this test tube experiment in extreme stress management.

0:47In other sports, you can channel that adrenaline, that nervousness, the anxiety, all into the performance itself. But not so in freediving. Basically, what I've done is transcribe these techniques, mental and physical, into a system that can be used by anyone. You can access the potential of the breath itself and the mind in order to remain in a place of calmness.

1:24Welcome to the Fitmind podcast, where we bridge ancient wisdom and modern science. Today we have an extraordinary guest, William Trubridge, a world champion freediver and a true master of the mind. He has dedicated his life to exploring the depths of the ocean on a single breath, holding the world record for diving to 102 metres. That's over 350 feet without fins. Freediving is an incredible test tube experiment in stress management. William's physical feats are a result of his incredible mental discipline as he has learned to stay calm under immense pressure. He shares the mental techniques he developed to control his nervous system and manage stress, including the importance of a mantra like, Now is all, and the dangers of scenario thinking.

2:09We also delve into the science behind the mammalian dive reflex and the Bohr effect, exploring how his training allows him to access and conserve oxygen more efficiently. Join us as William shows us how to navigate the abyss of our inner world and find peace in any situation. Without further ado, I give you William Trubridge. Well, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Josh. It's amazing to have you here. I'm an avid freediver myself and I'm super excited to chat. You've dedicated your life to exploring the depths of the ocean on a single breath. For anyone that doesn't know, could you briefly explain what freediving is?

2:50yeah simplest terms it's basically just taking a breath and going under the water in competition we go as far as we can whether that's for depth or for distance in the pool on that single breath and you're using either fins or the discipline I prefer is no fins where you're just using your hands and feet to propel yourself yeah completely unassisted and yeah I look forward to chatting more more about that so in your in your book well actually throughout your life you've had i would say an extremely colorful and interesting life and could you take us back to the beginning like what was your first memory of the ocean first memory uh it's kind of just a patchwork of different memories that merge into themselves like interminable distances on the boat when we're doing these long passages between uh i don't know um panama and galapagos or galapagos to the marquesas islands and uh just we were weeks at sea and you get into this kind of timeless rhythm uh and the the rhythm of the ocean the the waves i mean being that far out to sea it feels like the waves are very different this kind of the kind of long ocean swells that carry boats along and something magical timeless about that uh and those are the earliest memories that i have what sort of because you grew up on a boat what what sort of age were you when you set off on that trip i was 20 months uh so just five too when we left uh we sold everything in the north of England to buy the boat and sail from Europe across the Atlantic, through the Caribbean, through the Panama, through the Pacific.

4:52And we stopped off in places. We were a year in the British Virgin Islands and a year in Tahiti. And so I don't remember when we left. I was too young. But my earliest memories were somewhere on the way, like somewhere maybe in the Caribbean or in the Pacific. So it's kind of like I emerged from that. That's my earliest recollections were always of the life on the water and the water. So you would have had no memory. Your earliest memory would be on the ocean. Exactly, yeah. I learned to swim at about the same time as I was learning to walk. and yeah we just spent all day when we're anchored next to some atoll or island myself my brother would spend all day in the water on the beach looking for shells snorkeling and so it was our playground it was our school it's our highway of course it was our supermarket we'd get fish and lobster and yeah just our whole world really when did freediving emerge then And I assume you were already starting to swim down and grab whatever's on the bottom of the ocean at that point.

6:07Yeah, we were. And it depends how you define freediving. We were snorkeling and we were going deep for kids. When I was eight and my brother was 10, we both went down to 15 meters. And this is with the worst kind of gear for freediving, like big fishbowl masks, short, stubby plastic fins, no wetsuit, of course. and we didn't know anything about technique, let alone relaxation. So we were just kind of like wriggling away on the surface, gasping a breath, charging down, grabbing a handful of sand or a rock or something and then coming up and ripping our mask off on the way up as we came to the surface.

6:47So that was, I guess, the earliest free dives. But it wasn't until a lot later. We sold the boat when I was 10. I went to school in New Zealand, went to high school, university. And then a year after university, left to do an OE, lived in London for a year. And then I found out about the sport of freediving. I found, I heard through a friend that there was a sport where you could challenge yourself to go as deep as possible. And it just kind of rung a bell for me. I was like, I want to try that. So I saved up. and went for a holiday to the Caribbean, to Belize, and then Honduras, and spent just every day back in the water.

7:32I'd go out with the diving boats morning and afternoon, and just be there diving next to the scuba divers, but freediving, of course. Shallow at first, and then getting progressively deeper, as I kind of started to learn the techniques. Do you think that from doing it from such a young age, you had already some adaptation you must have had some i imagine i don't think any physiological adaptation but perhaps mentally i found myself at home under the water it was a natural place for me to be and some kind of natural aquaticity from being a kid and spending so much time in the water so there would have been that but no physiological adaptation in the form of i don't you know, adapted red blood cells or muscle tissue or anything along those lines.

8:27Like when I first tried to hold my breath, when I heard about freediving, I was like, okay, let's go, let's go, laid down in bed. And I managed like two minutes 20 and I felt like it's dying, which is a very ordinary normal time for someone when they hold their breath first time. It took me a while to get to three, you know, a lot longer to get to four and eventually five. And so my progression was very natural and ordinary for someone who's doing the kind of training that I was. That's interesting. Yeah, I'm sure that would be good to hear for a lot of beginners that are doing breath holds. Why is it that we freedive?

9:06For anyone that hasn't done it, and many will be listening now, what is the feeling? What is the experience that happens? except we only have an hour though there's so many i can give to that there's so many directions you can take to because there's this this element of exploration of the underwater world and i mean it's a completely different world right there's these incredible marine creatures some of which are incredibly intelligent in some ways more intelligent than us and all the other like plethora of life that's just so different to what it is above the surface so there's the exploration of that but then there's also the exploration of yourself that can happen under the water when you dive and you free dive you get to you're put into kind of intimate contact with yourself you have to um in order to be able to take control of both your mind and your body and And also, in addition to that, you are put into contact with what it really is, what it really means to exist, like what we are in the very, very center, deep, far, far in, which is just pure consciousness.

10:25And this is something that I talk about in the mental immune system and a lot of the talks I give is that everything else on top of that, the ego, the senses, the thoughts and memories, the hopes, the affectations, everything is just contents to your consciousness. And that's something that was revealed to me through freediving, through these deep hangs that I would do at 50, 60 meters. so yeah the exploration of yourself can reveal these hidden pearls just the same way that the ocean has so many hidden physical treasures and then on top of that there's just this beautiful sensation to it the sensation of flying without wings just being able to move in any direction, three-dimensional space, unencumbered, like a marine creature.

11:21And it's something that's just so far removed from any experience that you have above the surface. Because above the surface, we're just anchored by gravity to the surfaces, to the surface of the floor of the earth, to the surface of the sea, maybe in wingsuit jumping or a few other different activities, you escape that for a few seconds. But only in freediving can you be kind of completely unencumbered by that, by the gravity and by the sense of being anchored to a surface. Yeah, it's aptly named, I think, freediving for many reasons. You can also jump in for free. It's freediving. Although it does get expensive when you're traveling in the gear.

12:09It can be cheap as well. But yeah, no, it's definitely the most free aquatic sport, I would say, in the sense that you are, it's purely aquatic. Like I often talk about how every other aquatic sport you can think of takes place on the boundary between, on that surface between liquid and gas. And most of the kind of important stuff like in, I don't know, sailing or water polo or rowing or windsurfing, all these other aquatic sports, it's all happening above the surface, right? maybe in swimming is half above the surface half under but only freediving has 100 % emotion where the whole performance from start to finish happens in only the aquatic world uh underwater yeah i think i remember you saying that from the tedx talk or your book um yeah beautifully put so you yeah you've described and the deep as a place of stillness and subtraction what what is it what are the stages of diving to over 100 meters like you've done 102 meters dynamic no fin which um it might be worth us actually defining what uh dnf is as well before we we jump into yeah what it was like to do that that dive sure dynamic is actually the discipline in the pool so that's that's where you're going for maximum distance swimming backwards and forwards in the pool and i've done uh just over a couple hundred meters there the world record is 250 but my specialty is depth which is called constant weight no fins cnf and in that uh specialty i've been to 102 meters which is obviously a 204 meter round trip that is incredible so yeah that that um that record was set in 2016 and it's the discipline as I mentioned that I've been training for my whole career uh I've also done world records in other disciplines but it's the one that I see as being kind of pure human aquatic potential because in the same way that like the 100 meter sprint is pure human speed you don't think about the fastest man in the world being the guy who's gone the fastest on the bike or in a in a Formula One car it's it's just the human body how fast can it go and so free and free diving that's that's no fins for me it's just pure human aquatic potential yeah it is for me as well um yeah i mentioned dnf because i do almost entirely pool training i'm based in melbourne but uh yeah we don't have much depth around us um yeah thank you for the the correction but in terms of what that i don't know if how well you remember that dive but what was like how did you feel before that dive like how was it experientially like what was the interceptive or like internal awareness like as you were making that dive because i i always when i listen to the competitions before a free a free dive it seems like quite a stressful environment like i'm shouting like top time and it's quite there's a lot going on um so yeah i'm super i'm curious do you just get used to that you might you must to an extent and then what is the actual what is the dive like do get used to it but only to a certain extent there's always it's always a different environment to how we train for instance when we train it's just you and a handful of divers and it's very chill relax having the judges the cameras the media uh everyone else spectators around adds an extra element of pressure uh and pressure causes stress and stress accelerates the heart rate accelerates the nervous system so you burn oxygen more quickly which makes it more difficult so it's harder to perform in a record attempt or in a competition and what made this one particularly difficult was the fact that in 2014 I had done it was called in New Zealand the live dive they were broadcasting a world record attempt that I was doing back to breakfast TV and in New Zealand and it put a huge amount of pressure on me and ultimately not just because for that reason only but I was unsuccessful in 2014 and afterwards when I did the live interview back to New Zealand And I kind of stuck my foot in my mouth and said, because I was so overwhelmed by the, just the kind of the loyalty and the belief that the New Zealand public had shown in me.

17:20And wanted to, I guess, give something back for that. And so I said, you know, I'm going to be back, I'm going to break this record. And the next time I break it, it's going to be dedicated to all of you who are watching. And that was fine to say that then, but fast forward two years when the next attempt came around. And I was like, okay, well, I can't fail this time because that just wouldn't fit in the narrative, right? It has to be successful. So I had more pressure on me for that second attempt in 2016. And I really felt it. and the whole I'd say weeks out the last kind of like month or so as this date was coming up for the attempt it was just all about developing mental techniques in order to stay calm and not let that pressure affect me and afterwards I kind of sat down with a pen and paper and and wrote down all the techniques that I'd been using in that period.

18:22And there was seven different ones that I had, I guess, created specifically for that attempt. Like seven, not all of them were entirely new. Some of them were like variations of an original theme in terms of mental techniques, but they were all something different that I hadn't done before mentally in order to put me in the right place to attempt that record. and that was the biggest difficulty of that dive was just overcoming the pressure and being in complete control of the mind and all the monkeys on your back. Can you share any one of those mental techniques that like I wonder do you use like a mantra or?

19:09Yeah so one of them was a mantra and the mantra, like I've used many different mantras over the years, you kind of need to have an arsenal of them and for this particular attempt, the one that I kind of came across and seemed to help was now is all, so just reminding myself that there is only this present moment and to focus on what I'm doing in this moment, whether it's driving to the blue hole, putting my wetsuit on, relaxing on the platform, just do that and nothing else. Because we get sucked into, especially in these key moments, we get sucked into what I call scenario thinking, where we're thinking about what could happen, what would happen if I black out, if I'm unsuccessful again, if I let New Zealand down again, or what would happen if I'm successful?

20:06You know, like how cool would that be? And I would have the world record. And so you go down these rabbit holes of thinking about potential scenarios, potential futures, most of which won't happen. Like it will always be slightly different to how you can imagine it. And so essentially you are hallucinating. You're hallucinating about things that will never come to pass. and in that hallucination you are invariably affected by it physically and mentally like it changes your nervous system activation it changes your thoughts and so as soon as i recognize that i'm getting sucked into that kind of scenario thinking then i would just remind myself okay now is all just just this moment what are you doing right now you're putting your wetsuit on putting your lanyard on okay just do that concentrate on doing that now concentrate on breathing passive diaphragmatic breathing relax so just step by step all the way up to the last breath and then if i've if i've achieved that if i've only focused on what is in front of me for that entire half an hour or even that whole morning before the dive then the dive should be successful yeah amazing it's interesting you said that yeah you're hallucinating we had on uh shamil shandaria and uh ruben lauconan not too long ago and they talk about like predictive processing and how our brain is making predictions about reality um according to like past experience and how um essentially this will lead to what what the buddhist might call suffering or inaccuracies in our predictions about reality which create the kind of friction and unhappiness i wonder would you would you theorize like do you feel that it's it's causing tension in you when that happens or do you feel that it's actually the brain is using up um more oxygen or is it both a combination of two i think probably the science is still out on that but i'm curious what you what you would theorize?

22:17The brain might be using more oxygen, but I think probably the more critical effect of it is just the tension it creates and also the changes it makes to your nervous system and the hormones that are released because of that. So if you are thinking about a potential future that's negative, like a blackout or a failure, then that's going to cause cortisol production or maybe even adrenaline production. And that's going to activate also the sympathetic nervous system, fight or flight. Your heart rate's going to go up. So you're using more of your resources and then that nervous system activation will also influence you physically.

23:12So it will cause you to change the way that you're breathing. You're more likely to then over-breathe, which is a big danger in freediving. So breathing at a higher respiratory rate, which doesn't help you with more oxygen, but it does off-gas more CO2. And we need the CO2 in order to trigger the mammalian dive response in order to conserve oxygen. So there's this kind of like carry-on effect whereby, yeah, if you think a negative thought, have a reaction to that, activate the sympathetic nervous system, now you're breathing different, now you're off-gassing more CO2, now you're going to be less oxygen efficient in the diet itself.

23:59And there's multiple different pathways like that where the mental state can influence the actual physiology of the diet itself. Thank you so much for listening so far. I just wanted to take a quick moment to jump in and give you an update from the FitMind team. So we recently launched an incredible new course which is free in the app, which is the preferred approach and also on YouTube. It's called 30 days of meditation, science and bliss and this has combined what we feel is the most effective contemplative practices with what we feel is the most important, the science. Honestly I can't believe the course is free it's genuinely incredible and has changed my life also fit mine recently transitioned to an NGO so if there is any way that you can help us at all we now survive entirely off donations and even if you can't afford to help out financially if you could just give us a like or share this podcast or the pause with anyone that might help our goal here is simply just to help as many people as we can we thank you so much now back to the episode yeah i think that's a really important point that you raised because a lot of current breath work and a lot of the way i might see spear fishermen dive around me is they would do a kind of wim hof or they would be reducing their co2 which increases the risk of um of blackouts in my understanding so yeah i'm glad that you raised that and you mentioned the mammalian die reflex and for anyone that doesn't know what that is could we explore that a little bit yeah it's a set of uh reflexes a set of um physiological changes that happen in the body that all have the goal or the effect of conserving oxygen so the biggest the most important one is this concept of shifting the blood from your extremities into your core if you look at a muscle in your arm if you tie a tornake around your arm so there's no blood flow and hence no oxygen in that arm you can continue using your arm for probably depending on the level of activity like the the amount of force you're using minutes or more uh same with your leg so your muscles don't actually need oxygen all the time They can use anaerobic pathways, which creates lactic acid, and they can also use creatine.

26:33And so, yeah, oxygen isn't essential for your periphery, but it is essential for your core and for your brain. So your brain cannot survive, like, even a second. If you are able to push a carotid here and stop the blood flow to your brain, you black out instantly because your brain cannot cope with no blood flow and no oxygen. And so it makes sense for your body to conserve the oxygen for the organs that cannot survive, cannot cope without it. And so you get the shunt of all the blood being pushed by peripheral vasoconstriction, like shutting down the blood vessels, pushed into the core, into the lungs, the heart and the brain.

27:19And that means that you're conserving oxygen because your muscles are now not using oxygen as a like a what's the word, like the part that combusts in an energetic reaction. it's using anaerobiasis instead of aerobiasis so no oxygen is being consumed by the muscles so it's conserved for the the heart and the brain and that's just one piece of the mammalian dive reflex it's probably the most important one but you also have other stuff like bradycardia heart slows down the spleen contracts releases this like fresh onus of red blood cells into circulation the metabolism slows down um the bore effect which is where you can get access to the the oxygen that's stored in your red blood cells more readily so multiple different um components that all have this uh common effect of conserving oxygen for the brain basically and this is to my understanding this is the same this is the same process a dolphin or a whale would go through to the best of our knowledge is that correct it is yeah they have a much more enhanced um yeah much more to word um consumer uh dive reflex than we do so uh for instance like a blue whale i think they've measured their heart rates down to seven beats per minute uh and seals some of the seals will go down into the teens, 12, 15 beats a minute.

28:58The lowest I've ever measured, I've never measured it in a very deep dive, but I know it can go into the high 20s. Wow. But yeah, the seals in particular have an incredible amount of adaptations like myoglobin concentration in the muscles, a very strong shunt of the blood out of those muscles. so they're much better equipped and they can hold their breath for in some cases like over an hour under the water i think in the case of weddell seals and elephant seals they can manage like up to an hour and there's some whales that the cuvier's beaked whale i think has held its breath for a couple of hours and gone to like three two or three kilometers under the sea uh so yeah we're we're far behind but when you think that we've managed to i don't know go to 100 meters in the space of one lifetime whereas these animals have been evolving for millions of years then it does give us a little bit more cause for for um for feeling good about ourselves but yeah we're we're newbies in the water you mentioned the boar effect briefly briefly could you tell us a little bit more about that i understand that's like relatively at least there's been more evidence recently and correct me if i'm wrong yeah it's pretty pretty scientifically concrete now and it's one of the reasons why uh for instance yeah the wim hof method in terms of breath work isn't a good approach for holding your breath and And basically, it's the idea that the red blood cells, which carry the oxygen from your lungs to everywhere else in your body, they kind of are a little bit choosy about when to give up the oxygen that they're carrying.

31:01And it depends on the acidity, the pH of the environment that they find themselves in. So if it's very alkaline, they'll hang on to their oxygen. If it's very acidic, then they'll give it up. And this thing that determines the acidity, the pH of your blood is the carbon dioxide. The more CO2 you have dissolved in your blood, it dissolves with water and forms carbonic acid, which increases the acidity. and so the less if you've off-gassed all your co2 through hyperventilation or some kind of aggressive breath work then your blood will be very will be more alkaline and it won't reach the same levels of acidity during the breath hold and so you won't get access to all of the oxygen that's stored in your red blood cells so this is why in my courses and talks i talk about being about CO2 being your friend.

32:07Like CO2 is actually the gas, even though it's the off gas, the waste gas, and the gas that gives you the urge to breathe, it's also the gas that allows you to access your oxygen stores in your blood and that triggers the mammalian dive reflex. So CO2 in combination with the breath hold gives you all of that oxygen conservation and it gives you access to the blood, the oxygen in your blood so yeah it's really important the the tricky thing is that when you hold your breath as i said the co2 gives you that urge to breathe and so if you've gotten rid of it it feels easier to hold your breath it feels like i could do this forever and then you black out because you don't get the urge to breathe and because you haven't been able to access your oxygen stores so the more difficult route but the longer one in the long run but the one that will get you more better results in the long run is via kind of embracing the co2 so not over breathing not off gassing all that co2 and you'll feel the urge to breathe earlier but you will also go into oxygen conservation mode earlier and you'll be safer and you'll have access to all of the oxygen in your blood.

33:31So it's a case of kind of taking two or three steps back and then ultimately taking four or five or more forwards but it's a really important one especially at the beginning of freediving not going down that route of the shortcut with Wim Hof or hyperventilation. that it's very counterintuitive actually just you just kind of assume early on before any training that more more in like more oxygen so it's it's really yeah it's amazing to hear like that there is really in-depth science showing that that's not the case yeah the most the easiest way to dispel that kind of intuition is to think if anyone's ever if you've been to hospital they put the oxygen saturation meter clipped onto your finger.

34:26And unless you're really like critically ill with like serious COVID or something, then your oxygen saturation is going to be like 98, 99%. And that's when you're not doing anything. You're just lying there watching the TV or something. And so if you say to someone, okay, for all intents and purposes, your oxygen saturation is 100%, try and increase that. Like what can you do to increase that? and they might huff and puff and hyperventilate, but obviously 100 % is 100%. You cannot, it's like this bottle. If it's 100 % full, how much more water can you put into it? Nothing, right? Our blood is the same.

35:02Once it's saturated, you cannot go past 100 % saturation. And that's the key concept. There's no amount of breathing that is going to influence your oxygen saturation in your blood. And all it's going to do is reduce carbon dioxide. so don't think about breathing as oxygenating uh because that's not what it's doing like you can do that with the most minimal passive marginal breath all that the additional breathing it's doing is getting rid of the co2 for me there is no feeling like like free diving like because you are you are at least for me before a dive i would be quite excited but then as you've described the the physiological response is generally that your body your heart rate will slow and all of the other effects so during a dive you tend to get calmer even though there is some exertion and and um presence vibrancy and i think for me there's still like quite a lot of excitement does that does that translate for you i imagine you would have that happen even more particularly on a good dive yeah absolutely and i think that's testimony to the power of the dive reflex because it seems like the dive reflex trumps everything it trumps even the fight or flight reflex uh it trumps like if you've had a cup of strong coffee and you've got like a high heart rate you as soon as you start a diet it's gonna still drop just the same so anything else that's happening um the the dive reflex seems to be able to override that so if you are yeah agitated before it's obviously not a it's not optimum because there's other different reasons why um like we talked about before you don't want to be stressed or agitated before a dive but all the same uh the dive reflex will take that away during the dive itself uh so yeah that's that's a very common effect and even if something happens that's like i've had dives where at 100 meters i've collided with the bottom plate and like to the point where i've kind of gashed my head um but you stay calm in those situations like i'm coming up and my safety driver is looking at me strange because he can see the blood pouring down my face but um yeah and that in that moment you just you're kind of supremely calm and that overrides anything else that happens so it's it's yeah it's really um amazing to see that come out in the body it reminds me actually yeah even if i have quite a stressful like i still feel very uncomfortable with co2 um at least when i haven't been diving a lot and even if it's quite an uncomfortable dive and the effect afterwards would be or even during the kind of default that might take sometimes a few days on like a retreat to to quieten down the monkey mind as you as you mentioned before it tends to happen anyway even during a stressful what i would consider a stressful dive where it's quite challenging and there's a lot of noise the effect afterwards or during is still that and i remember i would drive home from the pool and listen to classical fm and it was such a peak experience i was just like lights were brighter everything was like actually a little bit more vibrant i found i i I asked a few people at the club about that, whether they experienced that.

38:50And a few people didn't. Well, most people said they didn't. Is that something you've ever experienced? It was at night and it was just like lights were just a little bit brighter. Yeah, I've definitely had those kind of experiences, especially early on in my freediving. I remember some sessions that I would do, for instance, like doing breath holds and pranayama work, which is kind of a form of yogic breath hold. and I'd be sitting on a deck, like looking out across the sea towards the sunrise and sunset. And when I finished the session, which I do pretty much with my eyes closed the whole time, after half an hour, I'd open my eyes and it just felt like everything was just kind of crystalline.

39:33There was so much more clarity, but also definition and just, yeah, different kind of visual experience as well as the smells and the feeling of the breeze and the skin, everything was so much more vivid. And that's one of the types of kind of enhanced or elevated experiences that I've had that I would attribute to freediving or freediving training. Interesting. I have had a similar-ish experience after about seven days on a retreat meditating 10 hours a day, but that was after like a one-and-a-half-hour session. So, yes, it's a really interesting effect. And in general, I feel like freediving is kind of like a hack or a cheat code that gets you to those states so much quicker than other practices.

40:29Whereas in a free dive, yeah, 30 seconds, a minute, and you can be right there and to a depth that exceeds what I've ever experienced, at least on the mat. So the possibilities for those kind of experiences and the ease with which they come and the repeatability and free diving is incredible. you've pushed your your body to the absolute limits of human endurance what has this taught you about like perceived limitations of the human body and and how much of it is a mental game and i'd love to touch on relaxation as well i know it's like a very core component of freediving yeah in terms of limits it's an interesting one because it's a it's the same thing that happens in every sport right like whenever someone imposes a limit on the sport or on themselves then there's someone else who comes along who who's gonna surpass that and i remember when i started freediving the record at the time and the discipline I specialize in was 60 meters and I kind of felt like the guy who who's had set that record he was a triathlete um but he'd only been training freediving for maybe two or three years uh in order to achieve that record and so So I thought, okay, well, if someone dedicated themselves for 10 years or longer, then surely with the same technique, they should be able to go significantly deeper.

42:15So I was already thinking that there was a potential for more. Back then, I was no one. I was just like a 30, 40-meter diver. But I set this goal for myself. Okay, I want to be able to dive to 250 feet, 76 meters by the time I'm 25. and I reached that goal but by then another freediver a very strong Czech freediver Martin Stepanek had done 80 meters and at that time everyone thought okay that's no way that record is going to be broken because he just like blasted it to smithereens but I looked at the video I was like hang on a second he doesn't have perfect technique here so if someone else trained as hard as he did uh and improved on his technique then surely more is possible and so then i set this idea okay i'm going to try and get to 300 feet by my 30th birthday um the idea of like 300 feet to their feet one breath of air and it was kind of like my my motivational mantra and yeah ultimately i i reached that goal so i broke his record and then got to um to 300 feet and carried on to 100 meters or 102.

43:32But if you'd told me back when the record was 60, 61, like what, if you'd asked me, what is the human limit in this discipline? Back then, even with fins, we hadn't gone past, I think, 86 meters or maybe 90. So the idea of 100 meters with no fins would have just been laughable. And we see that time and time again in freediving and in other sports and activities and so yeah a limit a limitation is only going to be an artificial boundary it's not written anywhere uh and obviously i mean there's just this kind of like there's black and white we know that we can do 102 meters uh we know that we can we'll never be able to dive to 200 meters no fins and i think there's you could probably even say that about like 120 130 meters those are black but there's this gray area between 103 to more that's just kind of increasingly more difficult increasingly less likely and it's our job to mine that gray area to try and extend as deep as possible as far as possible into that unknown zone so whenever i'm asked like what do you think the limit is i'll never give a number i'll just say okay there's this gray area that's beyond 102 and somewhere in there is a limit but we'll never we'll never know what it is where are you at now with your with your training are you are you currently looking to further that that depth i would like to and it needs kind of a few ducks to come in a row because uh for the last several years I've been kind of starting a family and that really does um upend your world in many different ways as well as that we've had COVID and because of COVID and the financial crisis I lost most of my sponsors and so there's been a lot that's gone down in the last four or five years and now I just feel like I've finally come back to a point where I'm able to dedicate myself a little more to training but I still have this responsibility of the of the family to provide for so I'm trying to find a way to set myself up so that I can concentrate fully on training and um and yeah it would require me to have at least kind of like a year a year and a half of clean time um to focus mostly on that in order to get back to those depths and and think about maybe extending them.

46:18And I'm conscious of my age now. I'm 45. And so I know that we don't have like another 10, 15 years of this. But I would like to really try and see what else isn't still in the bag and the tank in these last few years. What's the future of freediving science? Is there any new technologies or research areas that you're super excited about? Yeah, it's an interesting one because it's a sport that has a very complex science, but technology is fairly simple, especially in no fins. There's nothing. There's your wetsuit, and I feel like the walker suit that I wear now is pretty much the pinnacle of that technology.

47:07I can't think of any ways to improve on it, and that's the only thing that I use that influences performance. so it then all comes down to the technique of the dive and the training that you do and even there i feel like there's definitely still room for improvement i'm sure but we're training pretty smart these days and pretty and very hard and so well i think yeah we're not going to see huge jumps in the way that we have in the last 20 years I don't think um and maybe I'll eat my words with that but um at least we've definitely seen a slowdown uh in the last like if you think the last 10 years that the depth hasn't really improved at all and in no fins whereas the 10 years before that it improved from kind of uh 80 to to 100 uh so we've slowed down and we've slowed down in the other disciplines as well there may still be more gains to be had but um it's going to be more difficult i think to to add meters at this point yeah agreed i saw i'm not sure if you're familiar with it but i think it was in new zealand well the first part actually is just for some reason freediving every event or gathering i've been to has an abnormal amount of doctors or scientists i find so there is quite a passionate like scientific community uh that seems to do a lot of grassroots science almost like it's kind of unpaid at least from the bits that i've seen but there was and it might have been the boar effect where they had the divers at like down to 70 meters i think it was a lake in new zealand um and they were taking blood of a diver at each of the stops so they took blood at 70, which must be the deepest anyone's given blood before.

49:05Yeah, I'm very familiar with that team. I was actually on a call with them just a couple of days ago because we're going to repeat that experiment slightly deeper in the Caribbean and with more divers. But the subject of that experiment was Dave Mullins, who's another Kiwi, very competent freediver and has the depth record, I think, with the monofin, 125 meters, and set multiple records in the pool. So yeah, that was a really interesting research that they were doing in order to find out the concentrations of gases in the blood at depth. And the only way to really accurately do that was to take a sample.

49:52So he had like a catheter in his arm that he went down with, and then they drew a sample of blood at that depth. He came back up to the surface, and even before he took his first breath, they were taking another sample of blood on the surface. So, yeah, pretty invasive and intensive studies, but revealing a lot about the physiology of the sport. Could they measure blood oxygen after a dive like that? I'm curious what it does. Absolutely. So they're measuring, in that one they were measuring the oxygen, the pressure of oxygen in the blood and finding that i think that it did increase during the dive which was expected and from that they also started to ask a question about the concentrations of other gases and i think that's going to be the subject of new research in the future we mentioned earlier about um breath work a lot of our listeners will struggle with anxiety or high pressure situations what sort of what sort of techniques would you recommend for those people and yeah if there is a short practice we could do and that would be awesome as well absolutely so the the interesting thing about freediving as we touched on before is that it is this kind of test tube experiment in extreme stress management in other sports take boxing sprinting you can channel that stress or that adrenaline that nervousness the anxiety that you have you can channel it all into the performance itself because if you're getting fired up if you're getting a faster heart rate if you're getting more blood being pushed to your periphery to your muscles, that all benefits your performance, but not so in freediving and also not so in day to day life.

51:55Like if we're stressed in the boardroom, if we come home and we walk into an argument with the family, in these situations where we are under pressure in our day to day lives, it also doesn't help to have the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight, cortisol, adrenaline, these stress hormones to have that activated because it subdues the prefrontal cortex. You don't reason as well. It sends more blood to the amygdala, which is your emotive part of your brain and many other different effects. And so freediving is kind of a mirror for the way that we would want to respond to stress in our day-to-day lives.

52:46And the techniques that I kind of had to develop in order to be successful in freediving in a world record attempt or competition, they work so well also in these other versions of stress and pressure. And so basically what I've done is kind of transcribed these techniques, mental and physical, into a system that can be used by anyone without, you don't have to go in water or free dive or hold your breath even, but you can access the potential of the breath itself, in particular one breathing muscle and the mind, in order to stay, to remain in a place of calmness, what I call smiling into the abyss, like to look into that chaos, that inferno, and to stay inside calm, serene, and level-headed, essentially.