Swim Free Confidence Course

How to be happy here

Durbs local John McCarthy is running a Swim Free course which is essentially aimed at surfers wanting to improve their breathe hold capacity in real-life surfing situations. Better breathe hold means you can get out there into bigger surf. John talks us through the course:

So what goes into the Swim Free Confidence Underwater Workshop?

I developed this course purely because I wanted to be comfortable surfing bigger waves and know that I could handle the hold downs. 

The increased capacity did lead to me becoming interested in free diving, which I now also love, but the two activities are very different when it comes to managing your breath hold.

In free diving your breath is rarely adrenalised or hypoxic and depth is usually a primary objective. In surfing you are both hypoxic and adrenalised and depth is is not so much an objective as is surviving the beating. 

Lets face it in surfing you are only holding your breath when something has gone wrong. It doesn’t matter if your comfort zone is 2ft or 20ft this course will help you relax in the surf because it will make you more confident in what you are able to handle. 

In this course I teach people to approach and manage their breath hold so that they can vastly increase their capacity in and under the water. 

You DO NOT have to be a big wave surfer or extreme athlete to benefit from this.  The average increase in just 5 hrs is around 100%.

The course has four fundamental pillars and takes approximately 5 hours to run. The cost is R750pp.

It covers:

1. Discovering your mammalian dive reflex and learning how to use it. 

2. Conscious breathing. Breath up, the breath and recovery breath. Remember a lot of this in surfing is hypoxic and adrenalised, which is very different to free diving. 

3. Efficiency underwater. We speak a different language down there and the smallest things underwater can make a massive difference. Slow is Pro! When transitioning from above to below the surface we have to learn to press the ‘reset’ button. I run several drills that deal specifically with wipeout and caught inside scenarios as well as how to behave underwater when this happens. 

5. Safety. We always do waterwork with a buddy, be conservative, understand contractions and C02, never hyperventilate, understand the difference between blackout (your mammalian dive reflex preventing you from drowning) and drowning by breathing in water. Understand and share deepwater resuscitation , it could save your life!

John is thinking about coming to PE on either the 18th or 19th of March to run the course - is anyone keen? Drop a note in the comments or choon ML via FB