WHOOP Podcast - 5 Breathwork Exercises For Stress: Regulate Your Nervous System with World Champion Freediver Alexey Molchanov

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

In this episode of the WHOOP Podcast, WHOOP Founder and CEO, Will Ahmed sits down with world-record-holding freediver Alexey Molchanov to explore the extraordinary physical and mental demands of freedriving and the importance of breath work for nervous system regulation. Alexey shares how he developed the ability to dive more than 130 meters in a single breath and the mindset required to remain calm under extreme pressure. He breaks down the breathing techniques, meditation practices, and training methods that help him lower his heart rate, improve recovery, and perform at the highest level. The conversation also covers resilience after failure, visualization, sleep, nervous system regulation, and practical breathwork exercises that anyone can use to manage stress, improve focus, and enhance recovery.(00:00) Get WHOOP FREE for 30 Days (00:32) Alexey Molchanov: World Record Holding Free Diver(03:08) Staying Present: Knowing Your Depth During A Free Dive(04:21) What Happens To the Body During A Free Dive?(06:37) Controlling Your Mind 14 Atmospheres Below Water(09:37) Managing Panic: Staying Present When Things Get Intense(13:13) Alexey’s Guide to Regulating The Nervous System (15:12) The Important Role of Breathwork For Mental Strength(16:45) Breathwork Exercise #1: Strengthening Your Lungs (Inhale Focussed)(17:48) Breathwork Exercise #2: Stretching Your Lungs (Exhale Focussed)(18:59) Breathwork Exercise #3: Increasing Your Mobility(21:11) Breathwork Exercise #4: Calming Your Nervous System(24:45) Breathwork Exercise #5: How To Reset Your Nervous System (FAST)(27:05) Why Is Technique Important For Breathwork?(29:15) Sign Up For WHOOP Advanced Labs Specialized Panels(29:49) How To Use Breathwork In Your Daily Life (and Why You Should)(41:02) Inside The Data: What Alexey Is Tracking Right Now with WHOOP(43:23) Effective Sleep Techniques For Sleep Performance(44:51) Diving Deep: Alexey’s Longest Breath Hold(49:29) Underwater Safety: How Alexey Avoids Blackout & Panic Under Water(53:27) Thanks For Listening: Get Your Exclusive WHOOP OfferSupport the showFollow WHOOP:Sign up for WHOOP Advanced LabsTrial WHOOP for Freewww.whoop.comInstagramTikTokYouTubeXFacebookLinkedInFollow Will Ahmed:InstagramXLinkedInFollow Kristen Holmes:InstagramLinkedInFollow Emily Capodilupo:LinkedIn 

What's up, folks? If you care about health, performance, fitness, you may really enjoy getting a whoop. That's right. You can check out whoop at whoop.com. It measures everything around sleep, recovery, strain. And you can now sign up for free for 30 days. So you'll literally get the high performance wearable in the mail for free. You get to try it for 30 days, see whether you want to be a member. And that is just at whoop.com. Back to the guests. Alexei, welcome to the Woo Podcast. Thank you, Will. I've been excited to do this. I've admired you from a distance and everything you've done to train your nervous system and become this extraordinary athlete. Why don't we just start with what is free diving?

Sure. Free diving is breathhold diving. You hold your breath. You don't have any scuba tank. You just hold your breath and dive. And you can dive depth. That's my specialty. Or you can hold your breath for as long as possible.

or it can do distance in the pool. And will you wear anything on your body when you do it? Wet suit, fins. It can be with fins, it can be without fins. So there are different disciplines. Some are with traditional bifans, then monofin, then there is one without fins. And that's pretty much it.

That's a list of competitive disciplines. But then there is a free diving, which is not a sport. And a lot of free divers, I think 90% plus or 99% of people doing free diving for adventures. And then there's mermaids and there's all sorts of activities you can do underwater. What do you specialize in? Depth. It's depth with monofin. Currentate is 136 meters.

And bifans, 127 meters. That's the current world record. Wow. How did you get into this? initially it was with my family with my mother and she was my coach since I was three years old in swimming and I remember my first trip was when I was five years old and it was to the sea we did some dives in free diving mode I did some dives with scuba as well back then but I just remember enjoying adventures looking at the fishes looking at the reefs and then when I was five six seven years old

as a kid, we would travel every year to dive. And I think this memory, this adventures, that made me do free diving later when I was already a teenager, 17, 18 years old. And then I started free diving, like, competing, doing professionally. And when you were learning this as a kid, did you just find yourself trying to go push yourself to go deeper and deeper naturally? Or did you just like being in the water and like seeing your mom do it? I just like to be in the water.

I remember my mom would ask me to do some breath holds, and she would do safety for me, of course. And it was a challenge that she enjoyed. So she was showing me an example. And I just was following my mom. I don't think I was aiming to do records when I was a kid. I enjoyed being in the water in the first place. When you're descending to do these free dives, like, can you almost tell how far you've gone in your mind? you know, like you can, how you have a sense for where is too far?

Like, how do you keep track of it? I have a computer. There is a dive gauge and it can give signals. With experience, I do have a sense of depth roughly, maybe plus, minus, a couple of meters. But in general, sometimes it's hard to know. At the deepest part of the dive, when I'm below 100 meters, let's say below 300 feet or 400 feet, it's really hard to tell where are you like because then you are in this meditative state

very relaxed and there is no way to tell actually where you are when we do the record dives the rope is limited so when I'm free-folding there is a bottom plate and I'm stopped by this bottom plate because I'm just so relaxed in a meditative state

and so you know not to go past that yeah I have their safety lanyard, it's a little one-meter-long leash and it stops me and then I know I'm approaching their bottom plate. And what's happening inside of your body when you approach like the very deep depths? Compression, the lung compression is one. If you look at the physics, every 10 meters, every 30 feet, there is an extra atmosphere, extra one atmosphere of pressure. So when you reach 10 meters, your lung compresses, your lung compresses, two times. When you reach 20 meters, like 60 feet, your lung compress three times. When I reach

100 meters, 300 feet, lung will be compressed like almost 10 times, 11 times. At some point, they stop compression is not happening anymore because they're already compressed to the mugs. But the lungs are really, really small. They're like the size, really tiny size. That's first. That's why we train our lungs to be flexible and to be able to adapt to this pressure. And that's the reason we do breathwork and breathing exercises, et cetera. Then we have to equalize the pressure in the ears. If you ever try diving, you know there is a pressure which affects your airspace, not only lungs, but also your ears. And then we have to pitch the nose, accolize our ears. And if it's all done correctly, there is no pain. It should be pain free when you dive.

If something is incorrect in terms of technique, then you have pain in the ears. Have you ever had that pain or no? I had, I had. But I'm pretty natural. At this point you know. With equalization, some people have to do a lot of exercises to progress with their equalization and be comfortable with it. I think I was natural with that. Your resting heart gets to 41 beats per minute when you go down? Even less.

So 40, that's during the sleep. I have 40, 41, sometimes even 35, 36 during the sleep. But during the dive, it can go down to 20, 25, like below 30. Wow. And why is that? because of body's adaptation ability. Like when I'm there, body, there are a lot of things happening. There's a blood shift.

Mama and dada reflex happens. The blood is pushed from extremities, from arms and legs to their heart, to the lung, to the brain. Like things are shutting down. Shut it down. And body preserves oxygen and energy. And that's why a heart slows down as well. And that's on physiology level. On their mental side of things, when you're down there, it's really deep meditation.

So it's a meditation where you have some additional challenging parts of the diet where it can be fear, it can be far away from the surface. So it's hard to stay calm, but you must stay calm because otherwise if you become anxious and tense underwater at the depth of 300 feet or 400 feet, then it's dangerous. So you basically want to preserve this meditative state and make sure it's very stable. And you create it before the dive with a very shallow breathing, tidal breathing, and then you want to preserve it during the dive. And that's the way how you make those days happen. How do you preserve it during the dive?

It's focusing on their present and not allowing yourself to think about the future, about the past. focusing on what's happening right now, how do I swim? Being as efficient as possible with the kicks. Being mindful about the body position. So you're just trying to be hyper-present. Hyper-present, relaxed, making sure when I kick or swim, there is no unnecessary effort, et cetera. So being hyper-present, focused,

and following some of their... some of the movements to help the meditative state. Like when I kick, the kicking helps. Because when I kick, I can just count the kicks. And instead of thinking how far is it to the surface, I can just focus on the kicks like one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, three, four, and then it becomes this meditation. It's interesting in the reference to meditation because I meditate.

And when I meditate, I often have lots of thoughts come in and I'm, you know, organizing them and pushing them along or focusing on them. It sounds almost like you're in a state. beyond meditated, which is like a flow state of sorts, where your mind's very clear or it's very present. But I get the sense that you're not thinking about, oh, what time is dinner tonight and that sort of thing while you're going down, right? Yeah, it's only like full focus on the present moment.

And while have some additional elements like urge to breathe, fatigue, lactate. So it's staying in this moment, in the present moment. in a meditative state while it's hard because of other additional elements. Like when you meditate on land, it's easy because you breathe and you relax and you don't do a lot of, like you don't get lactate in the legs. When you dive, you get that and you still want to stay in this meditative state. So it's like meditation, but with like additional resistance, you know, like elastic bands. Yeah, it's hard.

Wow. And have you ever felt like a lot of fear? or danger in doing one? Or is it just something over time where you just kept getting better? Like, essentially, have you had a bad episode or a bad dive? I have plenty of those, of course.

Like, I had a lot of, like, even though I have currently 40, 42 world records, but over 20 years, I do this for 20 years. I have hundreds of fail dives, and some of them were with deeper blackouts, some would be with shallow blackouts, like on the surface. What does a deeper blackout mean?

It would be somewhere depth of 20 meters or 30 meters, 100 feet. But it only happens at competition where I know I can push my limits safely. And of course it's something I don't want to happen and nobody wants to happen from athletes. But something they just misjudge your abilities and maybe you're not ready and maybe something else happening like weather or a bit of sickness or something like something is off. and that's where actually whoop will help me sometimes to understand like okay like do I feel ready today do I feel like 100% or not

and it's an interesting topic we can dive into this later but like it's sometimes you think you're ready and then you dive and only at the bottom you realize okay like shit it's not gonna I'm not going to surface I'm not going to

able to finish the dive so sometimes you can just pull on the rope and quit but often I still try to make the dive work and sometimes it helps, sometimes it's not and then you learn. That's where a fail dive is actually a lot of the time there would be much more

useful for the future progress than successful dive. When there's a successful dive, you don't analyze your dive a lot. You celebrate, you enjoy it, and you don't think about, okay, what can I improve? And if there's a fail dive, then there is a lot of analysis,

there is a lot of reflection. And like, okay, like I have to change my recovery in this way. I have to change my technique, like maybe a little bit, like 5%, 10% change in frequency, in speed, like some fine-tuning happens. Like how quickly you go down, for example. Yeah, they're way down, they're breathe up before the dive, like how many warm-ups you do, etc., and et cetera. Yeah, the warm-up, of course, is probably a big one.

Yeah, sometimes, yeah, you want to warm up a bit more, sometimes less. So after fail dives, that's something that gives me a lot of energy to actually make my preparation better. For some people, it's hard. For some people, fail dives would be like a lot of... Because you also could have that like recurring feeling of a failed dive. Or it's like, you go down, you go down, you do it down, you remember the, oh, I blacked out at this place before and then... Exactly. For some people, it's hard to forget about those things.

and for me it's easier and you always step down you take a step back you like if I had a problem at a hundred minute dive I would then go back and dive 60 meters or 70 meters so I would start shallower and do a lot of exercises

and you almost build this trust again you need to trust your abilities when you fail there is like you don't trust your own abilities anymore you can feel like okay I cannot make it and then you need to sort of rebuild it. And that's the whole process for elite athletes. Like, can you rebuild this trust?

Can you rebuild it fast? Can you dive one month later to the same depth as you failed like one month ago and be confident you can finish dive? So let's talk a little bit about how you actually train for this. You've got a very high HRV, 118. So WOOP members will appreciate that, which means you've got a very adaptable, nervous system.

What have you been doing to train yourself to stay calm under these kinds of pressures? Well, HRV, I think, 118 would be probably average during the last five, six months. Actually, through their main competition phase of the season, sometimes it goes to 160, 170. Wow. And that's when you're primed. That's when I'm primed. So last September, I had my HRV at 100, almost 70, and the highest was 182, 180 something.

Nice. And I think it's because we do breathing and breathwork all the time, and we have a lot of activity with a very slow heart rate. And when the heart rate is slower, the HRV is higher. So if you can make your heart rate at night down to 40 beats per minute, likely your HRV will be higher, right? Because it's like, because it's just longer, pause between the heartbeats. So in free diving, our sport is with a slow heart rate. We calm down, relax before the dive, and then we try to stay as long as possible in this slow heart rate stage. Then when there is urge to breathe, when I get lactate, and you're really like struggle a little bit, and then the heart rate will go up.

But you want to extend this phase of the very slow heartbeat, and sometimes it goes down to 30 or 20 plus underwater. And then you swim, and when I go up from the bottom, it doesn't go up immediately. So I can kick my fins, but the heart rate stays low. So that's a pretty interesting situation when you swim and you actually swim fast, but then the heart rate doesn't go up for quite a while. So you're training your body to stay in the same state even as you're exerting energy. Yeah, yeah. So that's the sport.

And then I prepare for those dives with a breath holes, with breathwork, training breathing muscles, and then alternating between full inhale with a high-pressure situation. and full exhale, empty lungs, the vacuum when you suck your belly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have these alternations, full lungs, empty lungs. So you'll do this right before a dive? I'll do this as a warm-up, and then I will do this as training on some other days. Can you show us what you'll do?

Sure, I can. Okay. And I'll have you, do you want to try this? Yeah, I'll check. Let's do it. Okay. So there is, if you talk about breathwork and how to prepare for the dive, there are exercises which will train your breathing muscles, so become more aware of those. and then when you become, when a technique become better, then you can calm down faster.

Like, it's harder to downregulate your nervous system when you don't do basic exercises. So the basic exhale will be training full inhale, training full exhale, empty lungs, and vacuum. So we'll do that first. Okay, let's do full inhale starting from your low part of the lung. You inflate, try to inflate your belly. You'll try to push your belly forward without the chest first. and then the chest, but think about your back part of their ribcage. Don't try to push your chest forward.

Try to think about expansion of your ribcage in the back between the shoulder blades. So that's first part, belly, second part, and think about the back. And relax your neck, relax the shoulders. Relax. And I will try to train these breathing muscles and you inhale and we'll do top ups. And even though you cannot really inhale anymore, we'll try to make those muscles a bit more strong. Okay, inhale. Second part, chest.

Relax your neck. And do the top up and relax. Don't exhale. Top up. And relax. And one more top up. And exhale. So here you train your technique.

How do you inflate your lungs as much as possible? but without the tension in the neck, tension in the shoulders, so you make it better. It's interesting that when you do those extra inhales, you feel like I almost got sweaty immediately from doing that, you know? Yeah, we don't really train those muscles

to really do full inhale and at the same time stay relaxed. It definitely activates your nervous system. It does. So it's sympathetic, right? It is sympathetic. So let's do there another one, exhales. Exhale all the way. push all the air out, hold your breath.

And while you hold your breath, opening a rib cage again and feel that you have a bit of vacuum in your lungs. And you can massage your belly leg. Good. And then relax and recover. And now we'll do two exhales. We'll do the first one, pull the diaphragm, and then do another exhale and pull the diaphragm. Then you'll have a bit of extra exhale. Exhale, hold your breath, open your rib cage, and try to push a little bit more.

And stretch again. Relax and recover. So that's the part to train your breathing muscles. Full inhale, full exhale. And the third one, the last one will do is mobility. Without the breath holds, we'll just inhale and we'll do arms, shoulder rotation. We'll open our chest on inhale. lift our shoulders to top up our lungs and then you roll your shoulders forward to exhale

and finish the exhale. And you exhale with your nose. With the nose. You always try to excel with your nose. As a free driver, I have this habit sometimes doing it through the lips because when you have mask, then you cannot. But in general, we always do it through the nose unless we need to recover faster. Okay.

So inhale, and we open our chest, shoulders up, exhale. up and rest a little bit. It's more about the body movement. So when we inhale, stretching the front part of our lungs and exhale, stretching the back part of the lungs, and we do in opposite direction as well. Let's do inhale shoulders forward, top up, and exhale. And one more rotation. Inhale shoulders forward and exhale.

So you want to train this RIP's mobility. I definitely feel more like core engagement from that too. And you will have just training this, you'll get larger lung volume. So that's the foundation. That's a few exercises. We did three. You can do more. But this is the ones to train.

And how many times will you go through that routine? Maybe five minutes or ten minutes. It depends on how much time you have. As a warm up, it can be ten minutes. So you might go through, you know, each of the things that we just did for ten, twenty, ten times maybe. Ten times, ten repetitions. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. That's exercises to build the foundation, to become more aware of the muscles. Because when you want to downregulate your nervous system on demand, like before the dive, then you have to be in control of those muscles. Like it's hard to really calm down your nervous system when you don't do, when you don't have good awareness of those muscles. So that's the reason to do those. And then before the dive, there is a few techniques you can do to calm down.

There is a standard box breathing. It works really well, five seconds in a five seconds. seconds pause, five exhale, five pause. So this one you know. I know it well. Do you want to show it for our audience? Let's do it. Let's do it. And I'll put metronome. So actually we can do five. Will you always use your nose again?

Yeah. You can use your nose throughout all the redrocks. Okay. Exhale. Inhale. It doesn't have to be full inhale, comfortable inhale. Hold. When you hold, you relax your shoulders, relax your neck. Exhale. Pause. Relax.

Inhale. Pause. Shoulders, neck relaxation. Exhale. Pause. And one more. Inhale. Hold.

Exhale. Hold. Okay. That's it. That's it. That's box breathing. Yeah. Two more that will help you to downregulate.

Just on box breathing for people listening. Box breathing is also, I think, good if you're doing something where you're a little bit uncomfortable. So, for example, when people are learning how to do, you know, sauna and cold plunge, I find that doing box breathing and the cold punch can get them to not think about the cold because they're so focused on one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five, and things like that. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

It's something that will balance your nervous system. and will keep your attention on something else. And box breathing also has been shown to increase heart rate variability, just for people who are listening and want to understand that. And then there's a way to make it harder. You can do instead of 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5. You can do 6 for each side, 7, 8, 9, 10. If you do 10, 10, 10, 10, that's 40 seconds.

And then if you do a longer cycle, you can inhale full lungs. Now it is comfortable lung volume, not 100%. But if you do 100%, and then when you do full exhale, like force everything out, then you have an even higher heart rate variability and change because there is a moment of high pressure, a low pressure. It's harder, but that's how you slowly progress. Will you ever look at it on the stress monitor? On whoop?

Because you can actually see in real time a measurement essentially of your heart rate variability in the stress monitor. So stress will show the heart. I didn't check that. I'll do that. I'll do that. And there is breathwork. I saw the breathwork and I saw free diving in the activities.

Yeah, we added that. We did that. Yeah, I remember when we talked last year, it was not here at that, there yet. But then I think it was added after. I was wondering if it was added after our conversation with the team. No, I think it was because you said that it wasn't in the app. And so I said, oh, we got to add. Awesome, awesome.

Yeah, yeah, of course. You have 42 world records. We pay attention. Thanks. thing. So that's the box breathing. And let's do two more. There is one that is really can reset your nervous system fast and it's very deep inhale. It can be, even with a top up. I know there is a technique like where

it's called in internet like physiological sigh. Yeah. And I tried it. So I didn't test it before but then I saw it and I tried it. And I like it. It's a nice way to also alternate between high pressure when you top up you are in a situation of high pressure in the lungs. And long exhale, and you can make it even stronger effect on your nervous system with a little pause after exhale. So it's an inhale, top up, and then long exhale. You can do humming if you can, if there's no one, like if you don't care, you're going to

do a humming and pause and exhale. And if you do three of those, that will reset the nervous system really well. And if you have the ability to hold while you have, while you're empty lungs, for longer, you can do that too. So inhale, top up, longer exhale. And if you do vacuum, if you push everything out, hold your breath and do vacuum for five seconds, then it's even more intense. Let's do another one, third one. Inhale, top up, long exhale. And vacuum.

And relax your neck, relax your shoulders. It is relaxing, too. And it's very fast. You can do three of those. It takes 30 seconds, one minute, and you reset. So someone who's dealing with some kind of anxiety or, you know, they feel stressed before a presentation at work. They could do that, right? And it would be helpful.

They can do that as a fast reset. They can do box breathing. Box breathing is better if you have five minutes. If you have five minutes long. You can do also. But if you need to do something quick, I think that's very. very good. This one will be very good. Also, long inhale and exhale, 10 seconds in, 10 seconds out, without breath holes, will be also very, very good, without pause. What do you say to someone who says, I have trouble inhaling and exhaling for that long? Is it just that they haven't built up the lung capacity or some of it technique?

It's likely technique. They need to try and just start with five seconds. And then after a week of practice, they'll be able to do six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Let's do ten ten. Let's try ten ten. And C, when you do 1010, you always try to start slowly. You have a problem if you inflate your lungs too fast. Yeah. And then you struggle at the end. You already feel your lungs, but you sort of stay tense in the last couple of seconds. So start slow. And don't try to inhale to 100% of your capacity.

Think about, okay, I'll do this 10 seconds, but I'll try to only inhale like 80% or 70% of my lung volume. Okay. Exhale. Slow inhale. Five more seconds. Keep it slow. Relax your neck, relax your shoulders. Exhale. And do it slow too. Five more seconds. And finish your exhale. Inhale slowly with the low part of the lung. Start with the belly. Three, two, one, finish. Exhale. Three, two, one, finish. And one more. Inhale, three, two, one, relax your shoulders, and exhale. Three, two, one.

That's it. So it's almost simpler than box breathing, but it's a bit harder to hold down. I find it requires a little more focus for me, but they're both good. Yeah, and you want to learn both of those exercises. You're invited to join the waitlist for WOOP Advanced Labs. Advanced Labs delivers clinician reviewed lab results right into your WOOP app for the most complete view of your biomarkers and biometrics and the most comprehensive understanding of your health. Unlike other tests, WOOP integrates your lab results with your WOOP data.

See how your habits and behaviors influence your biomarkers and get clear guidance on what to change to improve your results. To join the wait list, visit our website or the Health tab in the Woop app. Tell me again how you like to use the WIP. different exercises. So we've gone over three or four different exercises. How will you work those in? So the training one, the one to train the muscles, it'll be something I do in the morning, something I can do, like, as a warm up to stretch my breathing muscles before the dive to become ready for compression. And also for the full inhale, because as a free diver, when I inhale, I also pack, and I get extra 20% of air in my lungs. You do what? It's called packing. So I can go beyond my

full lung capacity. And... How do you do that? Add extra 20%. And it's done with their mouth, with their tongue. Because you're holding, you're holding air in there. Yeah. But I can't inhale anymore with the breathing muscles. And I will show how I do it. Yeah, I'm excited to see this. But to be able to pack and to be compressed when I'm underwater, I have to train my breathing muscles and warm up.

But it starts with a full inhale. I'm relaxing. So each portion is. That was badass. 100, maybe 100. But if you train this too early, being not prepared, then you might get dizzy. It's quite a lot of pressure on your heart, on your blood vessels. So it's something that is done only like when you're ready.

So the idea was you did a full inhale. And then you were also using your mouth, I noticed. You weren't using your nose. Yeah, yeah. To pack, you can use packing. You can do nose packing, but it's not something you will do in the water because you have your mask. But what you just did is what you would do right before you die. Exactly.

So I'll pack it because I need extra air to do. to dive longer and to dive deeper. So you do an inhale. Inhale. Relax, hold your breath. Relax your shoulders. And then you try to see a small portion of air in the mouth, not in the lungs. Not in the lungs.

You see you try to inhale. Don't try to inhale. Pull it in your mouth only. You have resistance now, a lot of resistance in the lungs. Excel. And when I do this, it's through relaxation. It's inhale. Yeah, that's cool.

And the same for reverse packing. So it's a way to get below residual volume because we cannot exhale everything. What's reverse packing? When we exhale, we still have about a liter or one, a half liter of air in the lungs. We cannot exhale everything, right? And then there's no way with a normal technique. You cannot exhale more. But in free diving, we train these reverse packs.

I will show that to, again, to train diaphragm, flexibility and just to get adapted for depth. It's exhale. Hold, relax. So it's pulling the air from the lungs with my, with a vacuum in the mouth. Amazing. To create the vacuum. What a great image too. Like I can see in your mind you're picturing a vacuum, like sucking the air out of your body.

You probably suck it. And then this technique is very useful for equalization because at depth, when you have no air to acquies your ears, then you need to get the air somehow from the lungs. And this is the technique. You'll do that while you're underwater. Yep. You dive and you get air and then you equalize your ears. Oh my gosh. Amazing. Well, the other thing I noticed as you were doing it, because you reach into your diaphragm area,

and as you were pulling air out, you could reach deeper into your rib cage. Yeah, and you can massage your fingertips. You can do the massage. Do you pay a lot of attention to your weight? I do, but not to... I don't need to be a really low-fat percentage. I prefer to be somewhere below 15, 14. like 12, 13 will be the best, but it's not that important.

So you're not trying to optimize for like some crazy low percentage or something? No, no. If I would be... It might actually make it harder, right? It might make it harder. You get colder faster in the water. So I have a best suit, but I mean, we have some free divers who are super skinny. So it's more like a preference, you know, something like...

But in the water, you can dive really well with a bit higher, a friend percentage or lower. It's not that critical. So everything that you've showed us just now with the different breathing technique, Is there a good place for people to look those up if they want to research it? There is a breathwork training program for free divers. And we adapted also for non-free divers as well. Great. So if anyone is curious about all these exercises, they can just start this program.

There's one last one I want to show you, which I do right before the dive. Oh, yeah. Let's do this. We did their practice one. We did their nervous system down regulation one and with the box breathing, et cetera. But before the dive, to calm down as much as possible, It's not easy, but you try to breathe with the smallest portion of air possible. It can be 20% of lung volume, it can be even less, but you try to breathe, almost stop your breathing. And that's the way how I prepare for my dives.

And I don't try to ventilate, I don't try to get more oxygen, because you cannot really get more oxygen in your body. That's a myth. You already at almost all the time, you're at 96%, 98% of oxygen in your bloodstream. So there is no point in hyperventilating and active breathing. During this, you'll just get rid of CO2, get rid of carbon dioxide, and that it's going to be bad for your dive and more dangerous as well. So what I do is I breathe really slowly only with my belly and try to almost enjoy this dissolved breathing.

I almost get rid of like I don't breathe and I enjoy this smallest portion. and that can be actually a little bit hard because you might get a bit of extra CO2 in the system but that'll make you very, very focused. Let's try doing three seconds inhale, three seconds exhale and three seconds pause. So you made three, three, three, and a pause will be on exhale. Okay.

And that's the exact same technique I use for the dive. And how long will you do this before your dive? I will do it for five minutes at least, five to ten minutes? And will you do it with your phone like this or you do it without? No, I will do it without. already know like and it can be it can be two to two as well three three is easier to start but it can be two two two two two three like somewhere in this range okay sigh exhale and inhale exhale pause inhale inhale exhale try to make your

breathing almost inaudible you want to hear you breathing in out pause in out pause in and try to make it as shallow as possible out pause in and it's so uh-huh pause in out pause and one more time in out pause okay that's it that was actually quite calming too it is very calming because it's so uh it feels so subtle Like you're really trying to really control your nervous system. And you try to reduce the volume a lot. And for some people, it's really hard to actually start breathing with a small lung volume. And if you can, then you can go down to 10% of long volume.

Try to make it really, really small cycles. Have you ever tried to measure it or you kind of at this point just know how much volume you're bringing in and out? I didn't measure this one, but it's below, if you think about our breathing volume for everyday activity. Like when you sit, you usually breathe with their 500, 400 millimeters of air. So here you try to push it even less. Like maybe it's 300 millimeters of 200, like very, very small portion. And how will you know you're ready to dive? It will, um, that's an interesting one, because you almost want, if you think you'll be ready to dive when you, when you prepare for the

with breathing, with ventilation, then you will never be ready for dive. Like you'll be feeling, okay, I want to do one more inhale and another one and another one. And there's never going to be a magical moment when you're ready to dive. You want to prepare for the dive with this breathing and when you feel like you don't want to breathe, you feel absolutely calm and low heart rate, then it's the moment when you're ready to dive. So it's when you stop wanting to breathe before the dive. In doing the three-second, three-second. Yes.

We call it tidal breathing. In free diving, it's a tidal breathing. Is that what everyone does? Pretty much. It's standard right now. 10 years ago, it wasn't. Like 15 years ago, it wasn't. Free divers would breathe longer with a deeper inhales.

And the idea been they're expanding their capacity or something? Yeah. And it's just easier mentally because when you breathe shallow before the dive, it's almost scary. I need to dive, so I have to ventilate my lungs. But through experimentation, I try. this, then my friend from France, Guillaume, tried that. And we felt we are less hypoxic and we actually have better dives after this shallow breathing. And so you would do it for five minutes and then boom, you're diving.

And then I will do one, two, three deeper inhales. Oh, you do the exercise we did before? And I'll do the packing, yeah. So I'll finish the tidal breathing, then do a couple of soft, deeper inhales, and then the packing. There's an important one. Before the dive, there should be a moment of relaxation. Because after inhale, it's a tension of breathing muscles. So every inhale is tension and your heartache goes up.

So there is in, even if I very relaxed, I need to spend a few seconds to relax my breathing muscles and then I dive. And a lot of time people rush into the dive while being tense. Well, one thing that's obvious from this conversation is how much, how connected you are to your breathing muscles. You know, if you ask someone to flex their bicep, you know, most people can do this. If you have someone to flex your breathing muscles, I think a lot of people would be like, it's hard. You don't feel all the parts of the lung, like front part, back part, the straddle between the shoulder blades.

And I think it should be their basic set of exercises for everyone. Basic gym class, yeah. Exactly. Outside of the breath work, what have you found has helped you perform optimally? And I know you track a lot of things in the whoop journal around air travel and device in bed, your Zone 2 cardio, working late, air travel. breathwork, protein, jet lag, sickness. You know, late meal, what are some of the things that you find are keeping you optimal? Not having late meal will help.

Yeah, that's huge, by the way. Eating earlier, consistent with sleeping, that helps a lot. But with my travel, sometimes, like, you change your time zone, like 10 hours or then the consistency goes down. But I think for me, working out, like, combined. combining cardio, combining strength. Even though my main sport is free diving, I still do strength, I do cardio, I do swimming, I do a lot of activities to balance my system.

And then if I'm changing time zone, for example, then I would still do a recovery cardio to have a better sleep. And then I feel like I can switch to the new time zone much faster, for example. Yeah, I've found that personally too, where exercise gets you on the right time zone quickly. So with your exercise, is that where you're trying. to build aerobic capacity, or do you find that the key thing is really just the breathwork that you do as it pertains to aerobic capacity? The key for free diving would be breathwork.

So that's the main form. And swimming. Having better technique will help, of course. Yeah, the better you are swimming down. Better efficiency. But I still do aerobic exercises for recovery. And I do strength. And I do pilata sometimes for core.

muscles and strength for some of those. Pilates, yeah, I can see that being good. You've got a much younger whoop age, surprisingly, close to six years younger. But I know where I can do more years. Actually, I'm working on this right now. So I don't, sometimes I don't put all my exercises into their, I don't know all my exercises and I just sometimes forget. I track maybe like 60, 70% of my exercises and I don't track some others.

And I think if I track more of those, then it will help me with my oopage for sure. Yeah. Well, you're going to get even younger then. So sleep is your biggest recovery driver. What are some of your sleep techniques? Well, with sleep, a lot of basics, just consistency, hours. I would aim for seven plus hours, seven and a half, ideal eight. It's not eating would be the main thing which helps the sleep.

And the dark room, the temperature, et cetera. and if I feel like I'm still late, I'm still energized and I, like, I need to go to bed, I would do their box breathing as an example or some tidal breathing exercise, like five minutes, 10 minutes. That helps me a lot to go to bed. That's a good point for people. It's like some of the breathing exercises that we did can help you fall asleep if you have trouble sleeping.

Yes, yeah. I think it's a lot of tension from the day or a lot of. of like thinking about something else, like resetting. Even short breath holes will help. Like we did breath work. We did like slow breathing and et cetera. But if you hold your breath with passive exhale for 10, 20, 30 seconds, not for long. When you hold your breath, your body will adapt to the breath hold and it will change your brain activity. There are some studies which show that during the breath hold, your body goes into adaptation mode and naturally like everything else becomes less important because your body like tells you, okay, like now let's

adapt to the situation. So a few breath holds, easy ones help as well. So sometimes breath work, sometimes breath holds. How long can you hold your breath for? My longest was nine minutes. Wow. I can do longer with a bit of diet because if I want to do 10 minutes plus or something, I would need to lose my muscle mass. Because that will... Because that takes oxygen. It takes oxygen. But if I lose my muscle mass, I might not be able to dive as deep. So for me, this is the balance. Like, I don't really want to have the longest breath hold.

I want to be fit to dive deep. And how long does it take? Like, what's your top world record or the one that you're most proud of? The deepest now is monofin record with one fin. It's 136 meters, 400. Wow. What is it? 30, 40 feet.

That is amazing. And so you went 400 feet down. And how long did it take for you to hold your? breath? It's almost five minutes, four minutes, 45, while moving. Right, so while moving. So to your point, maybe nine minutes still is good enough to be able to accomplish that. Pretty much double. You double. If you move efficiently, you can move half the time of your breath hold. Wow. That's intense, though. Is there anything you do from a visualization standpoint? point, you know, I've talked to athletes who picture everything they're going to do before it

happens and they have some vision of, I'm at the, you know, maybe I'm at the bottom of the water and it's going to get dark, but I still see my feet, you know, do you do any of that or not really? I do that. If you talk about all the mental techniques we use, visualization is part of it. It's very powerful technique. And I don't do the whole dive. Some of the guys who have some fears or more beginners, they would benefit a lot from visualization of the whole dive, starting from their surface all the way to the bottom. I would only focus on some elements that I think would be the most important, like on the technique.

I would visualize their kick frequency and the kick amplitude, for example. And I was like, okay, this is going to be my style, my technique. And I will visualize that. And then I will just dive and repeat it when I'm diving. So some elements, not the whole dive. But besides visualization, there is attention deconcentration technique. That's even more helpful to downregulate the nervous system. So that's something where you

stop focusing on the objects and you pay more attention to the peripheral vision and you don't focus, like for example, I'm not focusing on their glass or on the table. I would pay more attention to their periphery, the side part of my vision, their upper and low part of my vision. And I'll defocus everything else. So now I don't really have focus on the objects. And then when I do that, I can pay more attention to my body

and to my inner state. So this attention, due concentration, in defocusing, that's something I do, like five minutes before the dive, and then I will keep the same state during the dive.

And this way, I'm not distracted by objects. So there can be a lot of action going on around, like judges, cameras, et cetera, but I would just like stay in this zone and this, you memorize this eye position, you memorize this focus position and then you can still move in the right direction and in free diving there is no idea

I need to precisely and do something I need to just follow the rope and then it's not that important for me to be focused on something and being de-focus helps to calm down. It's interesting you bring up the peripheral because I was thinking about the times where I've really like pushed myself to the edge

so for example we used to do a beep test in college, you know the beep test? where you have to get from here, like it's, I think 15 feet apart or 15 yards apart, I forget. And it goes beep, and then you have to get to the next cone before the next beep. And there's all these rounds of it, but essentially just keeps slowly increasing in speed. And by the end of it, you're just sprinting back and forth. But what you feel when you do it properly is you feel your peripheral vision actually go away. And it gets very narrow.

People maybe have experienced this with a VO2 max test, where you're on a treadmill. and the pace keeps going up and you have to chase it. But it makes sense to me that you would do an exercise that actually gives you the opposite feeling. Because when your body's under a lot of pressure, you lose that peripheral feeling. Yeah, and that's one of the signals that you're very close to blackout underwater.

I dive and when you lose your peripheral and it's a tunnel vision. Oh, yeah. And that happens fast. Then you need to be really careful because it might be not just blackout soon. your adaptation abilities just become less. So if you're about to black out, how would you prevent that? You need to service ASAP.

And in the pool, it's easy. But if you're in the competition and you feel like you're right on the edge of winning this thing or getting your record, will you abort or will you see what happens? That's a very hard call. I personally, a lot of time, I would try to make the dive because I know there are safety divers. If I do, there's no way I would try to do something dangerous alone. For everyone listening, in water breath holes, always should be done with a partner, with a coach, with the safety, etc. So that's important.

So if I'm in competitions, there are like five or ten safety divers, and then I'll try to finish the dive. It was very, very few times when I aborted. I still did that. And then one time I aborted the dive because of the current. There was a bit of current pushing me. And then because of the current, I spent more energy. And it's a really hard decision to abort the dive. and I was diving without fins, breaststroke to 90 meters,

and I think I turned it 85 meters, five meters short. And I won the World Championship back then because everyone else dove deeper and they blacked out because of the current. So it was very interesting. It was like, I almost like, I almost thought I lost because I abort the dive, but then everybody else didn't.

You didn't go as deep as you normally would. Yes. Yeah, yeah. But you finished. I finished. But it's like a very hard decision and it's very hard for your ego to abort, right? And like, you always try to finish it. What are, what are a couple ways that you've used WOOP?

Mainly for recovery and to see if I'm fully recovered, if I'm my sleep schedule, especially before the World Championships. I want my sleep as close to 100% as possible. Yeah. So I do that and I look at the recovery. Sometimes even with their, it was interesting. Sometimes on the next day after a really hard dive, my recovery actually goes up. My HRV goes up.

Because your HRVs out. But then on the day after that, it goes down. My HIV could be lower, it crashes, but overall I feel good. So I think there are some nuances with the HRV as a like free diver. It goes in an interesting. Well, your HRV probably has a wider spectrum than most people. Yeah. So even sometimes it shows that I'm not as ready, like maybe in the range of 70% or 80% in

my recovery. That's good. I still can go and do a world record. So I'm looking at those numbers. And I think I'm finding this balance between, like, looking at those as trends, like, okay, I'm recovering better now during this competition season. But at the same time, if it shows me low recovery, I'm not so worried. And I think that's an important habit, like, not to be sometimes too worried about lower recovery.

Like, I was able to do some, like, world record dives even in 60s of recovery. Okay. Well, not in the red, though. Not in the red, no, no. Red would be something. I only get red. I'm never getting red. in normal life, it's only when I'm getting sick or there was a fever or something.

Yeah, and you probably don't do, you don't drink alcohol or... No, no. Yeah, you're like... No. I never liked it, actually. Okay. Well, look, this has been, it's been awesome spending time with you. I could talk to you for hours about the breath work especially, but your whole career

has been extraordinary. And I think that's an amazing example for how all of us as humans can get more out of our bodies, which I think is an amazing, amazing message to have for the world. Thank you. Thank you. And yeah, I hope those exercises we did will help to viewers as well. And if anyone wants to learn more about free diving, there was a movie recently done by Paramount and Picture Start and Skydance and it's a free diver movie. Free diver. Is that the name of it? It's the name of it and you can find it on airplanes as well. I'm going to watch that because I'm fascinated by the routine and the preparation. Yeah, I'll send you the link and it's on Amazon and it's Apple TV and if you fly an airplane.

we find it too. Awesome. Thank you, Alexi. Thank you, Will. If you enjoyed this episode of the Woop podcast, please leave a rating or review. Check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. If you have a question to us answered on the podcast, email us podcast to WOOP.com. Call us 508-44349.2. If you think about joining Woop, you can visit Woop.com. Sign up for a free 30-day trial membership. New members to use the code Will, W-I-L-L, to get a $60 credit on W-U-A-Sestries when you enter the code at checkout. That's a wrap, folks. Thank you all for listening. We'll catch you next week on the Woof podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green.