Dynamic Apnea: Buoyancy Blunders and Other Sinful Mistakes (This one is not a funny one, I’m sorry. While writing this I identified with one (or all) my old school teachers and my sense of humour temporarily left my body. Apologies. If you are reading my blog, you are probably someone who has watched at least…
Freediving is a sport full of depth but with shallow coverage. These last 2 days I spent several hours watching the CMAS Pool World Championship: with each new big comp comes the Diveye streaming and with it a very boring and unprofessional commentary. So I took matters in my own hands and started posting an alternative commentary…
Comfortable vs Familiar – A ramble I was just recently listening to a podcast; nothing to do with freediving, in fact it was about running, but many concepts resonate with my ideas of training in freediving. This one was about training plans for running, and the conversation touched on to different workout’s training intensity…
New year resolution: What I will change during the next training season. The list is long! 1- Not preparing for a particular event 2- Fixing my equalisation (by fixing my head) 3- Fixing my pre-dive fixations (strictly connected to point n.2) 4- Doing at least 1 “deep” dive per week all throughout the winter 5-…
Which FIM start do you prefer? There are different ways to breathe-up before a dive, which will consequently influence your “starting” technique. The 3 main breathe-ups are: – Through a snorkel (which is not very common for deep diving mainly because it makes packing more difficult to do) – In a vertical position with your…
The importance of building habit. As in the RIGHT HABIT, not any stupid habit (as you will see). During last year world championship in Roatan, I missed a podium for my CNF dive because I missed the line when I surfaced. Here’s the details if you are interested in the technical stuff (and mistakes to…
The importance of having a correct buoyancy is crucial for dynamic. It’s shocking to see how few people get this right; of course I expect beginners and relatively new freedivers to get it wrong, but I see too many competition level freedivers who do max dynamics having the wrong buoyancy. Wrong weighting means that you…
VISUALISATION VS THINKALISATION Every time I talk about visualisation with a student we get trapped into a cycle of misunderstandings. I realised that is because visualisation is totally the wrong word to use for what I’m trying to teach them. The word visualisation involves images above all. But that bears almost no relevance to what…
How to Mess Up Your Competition Plan Step by Step My biggest revelation of 2024: Having a plan doesn’t help you if you don’t follow it. So I just recently come back from Poland, where I went to take part to the Deepspot Challenge. They should call it “This challenge is a bitch” so that…
I’ve been thinking a lot about the subject of doping in freediving ever since the bubble burst last July, and I often get entangled in sometimes constructive and some other times absurd conversations with different people about the subject. The most common (and dumb) argument I encountered is “Who is to say what’s doping and…
Competition strategy for dummies Since I got back into competing 2 years ago I have had the same conversation many times over, so I’m making this little post so I can direct freedivers there next time I get asked! Many freedivers who are not so experienced and are quite new in the competition world, don’t…
Yes, you will suck at your first competition. And that’s totally ok. Preamble: If I could have 1 euro for every time I heard a first timer saying “I will only start competing when I can dive to X meters/break that record”, I would be equally poor but less triggered. I used to try talking…
Finally competition season is over and I can get my life back! (Meaning straight back to the pool !) Why did I go to yet another comp just to do 80ish meters dives? I’m not sure I have a real answer to that, but I can try. But first: ⚠TRIGGER WARNING ⚠ If you are…
Whenever I do a poopy dive (which usually means I turned earlier due to an equalisation SNAFU) I go home and then ignore my coach Bub messages all day, which is very hard because he won’t leave me alone until I talk to him. Since he knows me well enough, at this point he will…
So far I did 26 dives (yes I counted them) between 90 and 99m but only recently I started having problems with narcosis. In fact until last month I only had a couple of slower dives where I asked myself ” did I just have a little narcosis?” but I wasn’t 100% positive that it…