The Art of Freediving

Freediving is an extreme sport where people dive without any equipment (except fins). Freedivers stay underwater for as long as their trained lungs let them. The official breath-hold record is 11 minutes 35 seconds an the record for the deepest breath-hold dive is 214 metres. This may sound scary, but suprisingly freediving is all about being calm and relaxed, because thats when your body uses the least oxygen. Learning to hold your breath for such a long time requires a lot of training and dedication. Of course natural predispositions like lung capacity, weight etc. can help a lot but what matters the most in every sport is how much are we able to sacrifice for the sake of being the best.

When holding our breath for some time we start to feel the urge to breathe in. Most people think that it is because of lack of oxygen in our body but it's actually our CO2 levels rising. Even when you think that you have to take a breath, it's wrong - You still have a lot of oxygen in your muscles, tissues and blood. The actual when holding breath discomfort comes from the CO2 piling up and the need to ged rid of carbon dioxide from our body. That's why freediving focuses mostly on learning to tolerate the high levels of CO2 in our body.

Read the full article, it's actually very interesting and probably a little bit better than mine.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/the-swimming-blog/2013/sep/16/freediving-body-capabilities-swimming

Sorry for the delay :(