Is there anytime holding a breath is needed?

Another advantage to holding your breath on a sprint is the air in your lungs causes you to ride higher in the water.

Less needed in sprints, but in distance an even pattern is best.

That is what the tech suits did for us, sigh ! I will miss my suit ! :badday:

Is have you ride high in the water always an advantage? I remember reading somewhere that one of the advantages of exhaling completely is that promotes better balance between the legs and the torso.

Is have you ride high in the water always an advantage? I remember reading somewhere that one of the advantages of exhaling completely is that promotes better balance between the legs and the torso. It depends on your body, the lungs are located forward of your center of mass (in a horizontal swimming position) so full lungs will tend to buoy up the front and sink the back. It does raise your body as a whole somewhat. In butterfly the extra buoyancy may help you bob your upper body back upwards after the hand entry.

The question is do lungs obtain more O2 when breath is held prior to exchange, or slowly exhaled if rate and volume are the same? My guess is slowly exhaling allows a greater proportion of O2 to come in contact with surfaces, but there's probably more variables. Must be an article on some kind of study relating to this.

Breathing, for the sake of this thread, is always related to C02 buildup in blood, which drives you to breathe more often or not. The control of this urge is purely mental and some can hold their breath longer. Oxygen does not enter the equation here, as Jim said. You WILL breathe before you need oxygen. The exception is a free diver (apneia) who is doing okay at depth but as he comes up his partial pressure of oxygen drops and the same oxygen that was sufficient at depth will not be so when he reaches around 6 feet and he will pass out right before he reaches the surface. So taking a breath before doing the turn or taking more breaths on the way back on the 50 will make you "feel" better, although the feeling is all in your mind, because your body will not benefit immediately from the breath. Your excess C02 is released into your alveoli from your blood and from there it exits through your breathing. If you hold your breath a little longer more C02 will leave the blood into the alveoli. If you exhale too fast, there will be less alveolar area to make the exchange. The amount of C02 in the lungs has no effect on your urge to breathe. Training with a snorkel would help you swim with more C02 in your blood because the snorkel makes your dead space (the space between your trachea and your mouth) bigger and that is why it feels funny to go fast with snorkels. But I digress. Here is the deal: suppose you are to do 25 meters or yards under water; if you go fast, you build up C02 and want to breathe, if you go slow you won't reach the other side, and will want to breathe. So you have to dose your effort over time to reach your goal. billy fanstone

Lindsay's right -- the primary drive to breathe is hypercapnea (elevated CO2) -- there is a hypoxic (low O2) drive to breathe as well but it is secondary. This is why the average healthy person with no lung disease can not hold his or her breath until the oxygen saturation falls (I have tried many times). The question about oxygen exchange during breath holding is complicated but I think a simple but reasonably accurate answer is that there is continued gas exchange between the alveoli and the pulmonary capillaries during a breath hold but that it becomes less efficient as the gradient between the alveolus and blood is reduced. (Reference West JB: Essentials of Respiratory Physiology) This doesn't answer the question about what helps you swim fastest, of course. I would not dream of giving advice on the most efficient way to breathe while sprinting.

I asked Paul Trevisan, a sprinter in my age group (55-59) who holds a number of world records, how many breaths he takes when swimming a 50. His answer: none. On the other hand, Dara Torres, who I interviewed a few years back, told me she breathes almost every stroke on a 50. I think the bottom line here is that a world class 50 happens in such little time that the oxygen you inhale during the swim is not going to reach your muscles in time to do any good whatsoever during the race (and in fact much of the energy fueling the swim is anaerobic anyhow, which means you don't really even need oxygen to contract your muscles.) Dara's stroke is so incredibly smooth that breathing doesn't seem to affect her speed negatively. Paul also has a really nice stroke, but he feels that any unnecessary head movements detract from his fastest performance, so he guts it out without air. Most sprinters subscribe to the latter philosophy, at least for 50s, and breathe as little as possible during a race. I try to go no breaths down, one breath back, but Jeff Roddin suggested sneaking a breath before the turn, which reduces the reflex "need" to take a breath off the wall. It works for me. Now I take one breath down, do the turn, take as many strokes as possible, maybe sneak in a breath, maybe not. Plenty of time to inhale when the race is over.

Although it doesn't directly answer your question you might find this wikipedia article interesting and informative: en.wikipedia.org/.../Breathing When carbon dioxide levels increase in the blood, it reacts with the water in blood, producing carbonic acid. Lactic acid produced by anaerobic exercise also lowers pH. The change in blood pH is what causes the sensation of needing air, not lack of oxygen. I don't have a citation but from personal experience I think that exhaling seems to lower the sense of needing to breath, i.e. it is easier to swim a length without breathing if you exhale as you swim than if you hold your breath in the whole way. On the other hand if you hold your breath part of the way before starting the exhale you may make it further with less sense of needing to breath. Hopefully someone can answer the specific question of whether the body actually continues to draw oxygen out of the air in your longs if you hold your breath in. Considering that you only use 4-5% of the oxygen in each breath I say probably not or we would be able to comforably lower our rate of breathing quite a bit. Perhaps those numbers change when exercising, hopefully someone knows.