Training for freediving with the Moxy muscle oxygen monitor
The MOXY can be used to measure the oxygen levels in your muscles during exercise

Training for freediving with the Moxy muscle oxygen monitor

This post goes with a webinar that I gave on data collected with the Moxy Muscle oxygen monitor. In the webinar I test some specific exercises and try to speculate on myoglobin desaturation and training to increase myoglobin stores.

I want to use this post to give some extra thought to some keypoints, and to make the webinar a bit more understandable. But first, keep these things in mind:

  • The Moxy measures oxygen in the muscles. I put it on my left Vastus Lateralis (quadriceps).
  • The Moxy gives you one number for total SmO2 (muscle oxygen). This number is a weighted average of myoglobin and hemoglobin.
  • Everything I tested only relates to me and my (left) quad. The numbers will be different for you. The squats that work for me may not work for you. The apnea walks that don’t work for me may work for you.
  • On all the graphs in the presentation, the x axis = time in seconds. The left y axis is for heart rate, muscle oxygen and SaO2. The right y axis pertains to Thb and is a measure of blood flow to the muscles.

Ok now you can watch:

I used the Moxy to test a series of exercises. What do these exercises actually do?

Apnea walks

For example, the apnea walks that I described here actually did not train my muscles to perform under hypoxia at all. The body has a fantastic set of feedback mechanisms in place to make sure that oxygen is delivered where it is needed, and without the vasoconstriction and blood shift during a dive that oxygen will go right into your muscles. Apnea walks debunked. Sorry everyone.

It didn’t matter whether I did them on an exhale or inhale.  I think that apnea walks on an inhale probably don’t work for anyone. On an exhale, they may work for some people, but I doubt it.

What about holding your breath until contractions and then starting exercise? Same thing. The muscles actually never get hypoxic. In fact, even doing this with a more strenuous exercise like a wall sit the muscles never dipped below ~35 %.

Doing a wall sit or even one-leg stand with breath did not help either. You can do a wall sit until failure, but there will be plenty of oxygen in your quads. It’s not a lack of oxygen that causes your muscles to fail, it’s the accumulation of waste.

RV squats

The only exercise that I found effective was a set of isometric squats with short recovery intervals, done after a forceful exhale. Using these squats and tinkering with the variables (length of recovery, initial static, and squat) I was able to consistently let SmO2 dip below 10%.

Now before you all start doing a 150 kg squat on breath hold, remember that if you do this with too much resistance you might simply be training for fast twitch muscle. If I focus on slow twitch muscle I try to stick to no higher than 30% of my personal max resistance.

How do you know this works? Are you increasing myoglobin in the muscles?

I don’t know if this works. But here is my rationale. In order to get the body to generate hemoglobin (red blood cells) you need to desaturate the blood of oxygen. This is why being at altitude increases your red blood cell count. The body will automatically create more red blood cells once it realizes it does not have enough of them to efficiently bring oxygen to where it is needed.

Along the same lines of logic, we need to desaturate myoglobin of oxygen in order to tell the body to create more of it. This happens naturally on some deeper or longer dives thanks to vasoconstriction and blood shift, but is hard to achieve when cross training.

I can’t promise you that by lowering SmO2 you will cause more myoglobin to be generated. I do think it is a sound hypothesis. Keep SaO2 high, and decrease SmO2. This is what naturally happens in our bodies during a dive, and one of the things to aim for during cross training.

The in-water method of training for myoglobin is called the Foundational Training and described in Eric Fattah’s book Holistic Freediving.

Jaap

Jaap is a geologist by trade and a freediver by passion. Jaap wrote the book Longer and Deeper in 2018. His book teaches how to train for freediving and spearfishing on land.

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