Skill Building in Freediving as an Example of Embodied Culture
Authors: Greg Downey
DOI / Source: https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2023.0150
Date: 02 April 2024
Reading level: Intermediate
Why This Matters for Freedivers
This paper explains something freedivers feel but rarely put into words: your “ability” isn’t just lungs or mindset—it’s your whole body being reshaped by practice, coaching, habits, and the culture around the sport. It’s great for instructors and self-coached divers because it frames training as a long-term process of building reflexes, tolerance, and skills (like equalisation and staying calm in contractions) rather than chasing quick hacks.
Synopsis
Freediving looks like a simple act—hold your breath and go underwater—but this article argues it’s actually a perfect example of how human skill is built through a tight braid of biology and culture. Not culture as “ideas,” but culture as patterned practice: what divers repeatedly do, how they train, what they value, what coaches teach, and what the community treats as “normal.”
The author’s main claim is that skilled freediving is not just technique layered on top of a fixed body. Instead, divers gradually change their bodies and attention in ways that become partly automatic. Over time, training can reinforce the diving response (stronger bradycardia and blood-shunting), build tolerance to rising CO₂ (so the urge-to-breathe becomes more manageable), and help the body cope with pressure at depth (through flexibility, equalisation skills, and adaptations that reduce damage risk).
A big part of the story is the freediving “community of practice.” Even though diving is an individual performance, skill is socially scaffolded: divers swap tips, borrow methods from other disciplines (like yoga breathing and stretching), and pass down practical knowledge about what sensations mean and what is safe. This matters because some of the most important bodily processes are partly “black box”—you can’t directly control vasoconstriction or spleen contraction, for example, but you can influence them indirectly through preparation routines, relaxation, and repeated exposure.
The paper breaks down a few concrete examples of how this biocultural shaping happens:
- The dive response can be trained. Novices sometimes have a stress-style response (heart rate rising), while experienced divers often show faster, deeper bradycardia and stronger oxygen-saving patterns. Training isn’t just “getting used to it”—it’s teaching the nervous system what to do under water.
- The struggle phase becomes a learned skill. The onset of contractions and the urge-to-breathe are described as a gateway where coaching and interpretation matter. Divers learn to reframe contractions, stay calm, and keep control—an “executive decision” layered on top of reflex drives.
- CO₂ tolerance is a form of perceptual learning. Freedivers don’t necessarily become “superhuman”; they often become less reactive to internal alarms, meaning higher CO₂ can feel less threatening and more manageable.
- Equalisation is a hidden, embodied technique. Because you can’t easily “watch” someone equalise, it has to be taught explicitly. Small biomechanical skills (Frenzel, Valsalva, tubal opening) become deeply embodied through repetition.
- Gross anatomy and capacity can shift over time. The paper discusses spleen contraction as an oxygen-boosting mechanism (and why warm-up apneas are culturally common), plus changes in lung capacity and the use of packing/reverse packing—along with the idea that the boundary between “adaptation” and “damage” is shaped by training goals and risk tolerance.
Overall, it’s a smart, readable bridge between science and the lived reality of training. It frames freediving progress as a developmental spiral: better technique and calmer attention let you stay down longer; longer dives expose you to deeper physiological challenges; those challenges (over time) produce further adaptation—guided by what the community teaches and rewards.
Abstract
Skilled activity is a complex mix of automatized action, changed attention patterns, cognitive strategies and physiological adaptations developed within a community of practice. Drawing on physiological and ethnographic research on freediving, this article argues that skill acquisition demonstrates the variety of mechanisms that link biological and cultural processes to produce culturally shaped forms of embodiment. In particular, apneists alter phenotypic expression through patterned practices that canalize development, exaggerating the dive response, developing resistance to elevated carbon dioxide levels (hypercapnia) and accommodating hydrostatic pressure at depth. The community of divers provides technical advice and helps to orient individuals’ motivations. Some biological processes are phenomenologically accessible, but others are sub-aware and must be accessed indirectly through behaviour or altered interactions with the environment. The close analysis of embodied skills like freediving illustrates how phenotypic plasticity is inflected by culturally patterned behaviours. Divers do developmental work on bodily traits like the dive response to achieve more dramatic performance, even if they cannot directly control all elements of the neurological and physiological responses. The example of expert freediving illustrates the imbrication of biology and culture in embodiment.