Get in the Water

If the last posting whetted your appetite for things World Championship-related, then you can read more in the February editions of Sport Diver and Diver magazine. Not to mention my brief summary of proceedings on the BFA website. On the subject of Diver magazine, you can now read online about our top Angel Laura Storm, and her ‘Buddy of the Year 2006’ trip to St. Kitts.

If the bad weather and winter blues are setting in, and you’re not getting in as much freediving training as you’d like, perhaps you can consider a couple of performance boosts. Firstly your hydration. If you think that summer heat is the only seasonal factor to dehydration, think again. Cold weather is also dehydrating, and overwarm central heating systems don’t help either. Dehydration has a big impact on apnea performance. Get drinking!

Boost no. 2 is of the ethereal kind. We all have our pre-apnea ‘chill-out’ methods, and you could do worse than consider meditation as one of them. OK, traditionally this is something we associate with religion, and not all of us are of that persuasion. Paul Wilson has cherry-picked a number of techniques from various religious sources, de-mystified and simplified them, and compiled them into his new book, The Quiet. If you pick up a copy of this book, you do need to go into it with an open mind. You can’t totally disassociate the spiritualist element from meditation, but then I’m not sure many of us can do that with freediving either. This book allows you to have your own beliefs, whatever they are, it’s just that you are expected to have a belief of some sort in order to get a reasonable benefit. My belief? That it might improve my statics. And it did.