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…
How to record times during your dynamic sessions I used to think that recording times during training sessions was a very simple and very obvious thing. But boy, was I wrong. Ever since I started coaching people, due to my detail-oriented personality but also because it’s plain simple common sense, I always ask my “clients”…
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…
Dynamic training and all the stages of despair Not too long ago I wrote a post about staying in the moment, and I constantly speak about it to my students, but I can tell that the concept doesn’t often go through when it is explained in terms that are too abstract for people to grasp…
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…
I have a love-hate relationship with static. 3 years ago when I started training again, I had little access to a proper pool, so coach Bub from hell made me do a truckload of dry statics: co2 tables, max attempts, FRC sets, O2 sets, high HR statics, and all sorts of combinations of the above.…
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…
Why You Should Keep a Journal (and why you won’t) The most underrated (and invariably ignored) tip (or 3) I give people: 1- keep a training journal, 2- always update it in details and 3- go back to it especially when you feel your performance is plummeting and training feels harder than it should. You…
A few days ago I posted a video of a slow-mo DNF dynamic turn, which prompted some people to ask questions about different turn-styles and which one is the best for bifins, so I posted another video of the same turn done with bifins, just to illustrate its efficiency, since many think that this turn…
Once I told my coach Bub (short of Beelzebub) that he is the Goggings of freediving. Bub took offence, because he doesnt like Goggings, maybe because they have such different styles, but if you go beyond the surface and how they present, they have so much in common. Bub is the kind of person whose…
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…