Sick of breathing? We get it. If you’re working through a freediving course, or you’ve already finished one and want to build on it, these five tips are for you. Your breath is the clock that decides how long you get to spend underwater, so learning how to increase your breath-hold safely is one of the most valuable skills you can build as a beginner freediver.
What’s the fastest way to increase your breath-hold?
The fastest way to increase your breath-hold is a mix of coaching, breath-hold zone management, relaxation training, and CO2 tolerance work. Beginners who combine these four areas with a structured, consistent training plan typically add 30 to 60 seconds to their static breath-hold within a few weeks.
1. Get a coach
There are hundreds of blog posts, breath-hold apps, YouTube videos, and people like us giving generic advice online.
Why generic advice falls short
None of that information accounts for your personal situation: your diving level, your fears, your anxieties, and your strengths. After more than a decade of teaching, we’ve learned that no two divers are the same. Everyone needs to be coached differently. Some people respond well to being pushed, others need to take it slow, and the only way to get the approach that suits you is to work with a coach who actually knows you.
Why coaching wins
- Technical refinement: small adjustments to your technique that aren’t visible to you but make a big difference to your performance
- Personalised feedback: guidance built around your physiology and how you personally respond to breath-holding
- Safety oversight: expert monitoring that stops you exceeding safe limits while still challenging your capabilities
- Community connection: a network of fellow divers for motivation, training partners, and shared knowledge
Finding a coach
Get in touch with a freediving school, ideally the one where you completed your beginner course. If you’ve already finished a course, reach out to the instructor who taught you. A good coach will help with training tips, structured programming, and general advice as you progress through your freediving courses.
2. Always in the green, never in the red
At Freediving Central, we teach the green, yellow, and red zone concept to explain what happens during a breath-hold.
When you start a breath hold, you should feel calm and comfortable, with everything relaxed and steady. This is the green zone.
After some time, carbon dioxide starts to build up, and you feel a little uncomfortable. Freedivers call this the urge to breathe. Early in the hold, it should feel challenging but manageable. This is the yellow zone.
Push through the yellow zone, and things get hard fast. Your chest tightens, your brain races, and you really want to breathe. This can tip into panic. This is the red zone.
Our advice is simple: spend 80% of your time in the green zone, 20% in the yellow zone, and 0% in the red zone.
The green zone is where you fall in love with freediving, because everything feels good. The yellow zone is where you start to challenge yourself and build a training effect, similar to lifting weights at the gym. The red zone is where you create trauma and start to resent diving.
This might sound counterintuitive, especially if you’ve grown up being told to push harder. I played rugby and lifted weights for years, and the message was always the same: push yourself to get stronger. That approach worked for rugby, but it doesn’t work for freediving. Push into the red zone on every dive, and your brain starts triggering fight-or-flight earlier and earlier in the hold. After training too hard for too long, I found myself feeling panic after just 20 seconds.
Every professional freediver we know has made this mistake at some point. Push hard, get a better breath-hold, right? It’s a common fallacy, and it simply isn’t true. Break the pattern, train conservatively and consistently, and spend your time in the green and yellow zones instead.
If you want a coach to help you find your own green, yellow, and red zones, our beginner freediving course is a great place to start.
3. Improve your relaxation
Relaxation is the number one tool for diving deeper and for longer. During a relaxed state, your heart rate slows, your blood pressure drops, and your metabolic rate falls, all of which reduce how much oxygen you use. This is closely linked to the mammalian dive reflex, the same physiological response that lets marine mammals hold their breath for extended periods.
My own resting heart rate sits around 60 to 70 beats per minute. During a relaxed breath hold, it drops to around 38 beats per minute. Evan, our director of education at Freediving Central, can get his heart rate down to similar levels without even holding his breath.
Relaxation is a skill, and like any skill, it can be trained. Get better at it, and you’ll increase your breath-hold without having to work any harder.
Practical relaxation techniques
- Body scan: before diving, work through your muscles from head to toe and consciously relax each one. This saves oxygen and gives your brain something to focus on
- Visualisation: picture somewhere that helps you relax. This is different for everyone, so experiment until you find what works for you
- Breath awareness: pay close attention to your breathing pattern. Some divers focus on their exhale, others count the time it takes to breathe in and out, and some notice where their belly or chest moves
- Pre-dive ritual: build a consistent routine before every dive that signals to your body it’s time to switch into a calm state
4. Improve your CO2 tolerance
Most beginners focus on building oxygen capacity, but experienced freedivers know that carbon dioxide tolerance matters just as much. The urge to breathe you feel in the yellow and red zones is triggered by rising CO2, not by a lack of oxygen. Build your CO2 tolerance, and you’ll spend more time in the green zone. Research into freediving physiology shows this is as much a brain and nervous system adaptation as it is a lung one.
Training your CO2 tolerance
- CO2 tables: a structured session where your hold time stays the same each round while your recovery time gradually shortens, exposing you to CO2 in a slow, controlled way. Keep every round in the green or yellow zone, and stop if you tip into red
- Incremental training: increase your hold times slightly each week while keeping recovery periods steady. Progress isn’t linear; some sessions will feel easy and others hard. If the overall trend is upward over several weeks, it’s working
- Consistency over intensity: short, regular sessions beat occasional marathon efforts. Aim for two to three sessions a week once you get started, and build up from there as it becomes part of your routine
For a closer look at how to structure a table safely, this guide to CO2 and O2 training tables is a solid starting point, though we’d always recommend running your first few tables with a coach.
5. Build a training program
Once you’ve got the basics down, the next step is pulling everything together into a structured training program.
Foundations of an effective program
- Assessment: start by measuring your baseline for different types of holds, such as resting, dynamic, and depth
- Periodisation: structure your training into four- to six-week blocks, each with a specific focus such as relaxation, CO2 tolerance, or O2 efficiency
- Progressive overload: gradually increase the challenge while giving yourself enough recovery time between sessions
Sample weekly schedule
- Monday: dry training with CO2 tables, 30 to 45 minutes
- Tuesday: pool session focusing on relaxation during static holds
- Wednesday: recovery day with light stretching and visualisation
- Thursday: dry training with O2 tables, 30 to 45 minutes
- Friday: dynamic training in the pool with a distance focus
- Saturday: open water session applying your techniques, always with a buddy
- Sunday: complete rest and recovery
Track your progress
Keep a log of every session, including times, distances, and how you felt. Note your stress levels and any physical responses too. This record helps you spot patterns over time, refine your approach, and see exactly what’s helping you increase your breath hold.
About the author
I’m Dan Parsons, owner of Freediving Central, Sydney’s longest-running freediving school. I’ve spent more than 12 years teaching freediving and working as a professional safety diver, including as National Geographic’s Head Safety Diving Consultant on Secrets of the Whales alongside filmmaker Brian Skerry. I’m also Australia’s deepest hands-free equalisation freediver, having reached 62 metres using this technique. Everything in this guide comes from what I’ve taught hundreds of students, and from what has and hasn’t worked in my own training.
Ready to increase your breath hold?
The fastest way to put these tips into practice is with a coach in the water beside you. Book a freediving course with us and start training the right way from day one, or get in touch if you’ve got questions about your training.