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michaelCODY
19th October 2002, 22:03
Opposed to our regular Thurs. night training, we had class at 8am this morning up in the mountains. There, we got to find out and discuss tracking, practice moving in the wooded areas, negotiating trees and rocks which was a blast, and then the difficult part which we had been awaiting nervously for a week. We went to a portion of the river where the current was fairly mild considering this being our first time training in a river. There, we had to strip down to a minimum so we wouldnt get too cold and then submerge beneath the water and breath through bamboo we hollowed out the previous night. Only four of us attended the class and we each had a different bamboo length and width. Anyhow, none of us made it past two minutes because of the cold, continously swallowing water, and I kept coming back up because Im light. I finally on my third attempt got under a rock and held out well until I slammed my knee against a sharper rock and had to come back up. Anyone have any experience that would help us all out?

kirigirisu
19th October 2002, 22:35
Try it out in a pool first. Gradually work your way to colder and colder temperatures. The all-or-nothing approach might be manly, but modern folk are slightly more delicate than our forebearers thanks to easy living.

Experiment with the length of the bamboo stick. The longer it is the more effort you need to put into breathing, and you might wind up hyperventilating. Same with the diameter.

Better yet, try using PVC piping, it's a bit sturdier than bamboo.

Even better than that, take up SCUBA. It'll give you a better perspective and good practice, though keep in mind the breathing bit will be a lot different.

John Lindsey
19th October 2002, 22:53
A tube can be too long and act to extend the deadspace you already have in your lungs. You cannot push the old air out and will have to surface.

BTW, smokers can generally hold their breath longer since they have supressed their chemo receptors. Ya see, its the build up of CO2 and not the lack of O2 that makes you start to gag for air. At least, that is what they told me in College...

To hold yourself down, grab a plant or root and place it in the small of your back as you arch it a little. So, you lay flat on the bottom of the stream, holding onto something, but centered on your body. If you grab something with your hands near your head, your legs will float up. Keep your anchor centered. Ok, too many secrets for now :).

John Lindsey
19th October 2002, 22:56
BTW, I used to work with an Ex Navy Seal. During lunch, he would take me to the pool and work on breath holds. We used a standard Scuba weight belt to hold onto. Of course, we had masks on and it was fun to watch all the female swimmers from underneath...


We also would WALK the length of the pool using the belt to hold us down.

I think I got my breath hold up to around 3 minutes and 20 seconds.

meat
20th October 2002, 02:52
Sorry to butt in, not being a ninjutsu student, but I thought I could help. Breathing thru a bamboo tube is fine, as long as it isn't too long. Someone here said to experiment on various lengths, but going any deeper than a couple of meters underwater and breathing through a tube isn't a smart thing to do. The air pressure on top of the surface is obviously less than what it is underwater, and if you go too deep, your lungs will be crushed because the outside pressure from the water will be far greater than the air inside your lungs. So if you're going to use a bamboo(or any kind) of tube, keep it no more than a metre long just for safetys sake. You may be able to go a bit longer, I'm not sure, best thing would be to consult a master scuba diver or a physicist at your local college or university.

pete lohstroh
21st October 2002, 04:41
PV=nRT

Troy McClure
24th October 2002, 15:28
I'd invest $5 in a snorkle. Ninja weren't lucky enough to have plastic, but we do. Swimming upside down is a big pain. The curve on the snorkle allows you to swim normal and not get water up your nose.

eco
1st November 2002, 23:49
Couldn't you just use something to hold air? Like maybe a big zip lock bag or something you could fill with air and breath from.

Bah, I can't describe what I'm thinking of.

michaelCODY
1st November 2002, 23:51
You're missing the point of the exercise... you're breathing strictly from bamboo reed and trying to endure the cold.

eco
1st November 2002, 23:59
Ahh, my mistake.

Hey, that's not so bad. Cold water is good for you. :)

hyaku
2nd November 2002, 01:36
As a master diver maybe I can answer a bit....

To put it simply the pressure is measured in ATM or atmospheres. A zero metre depth/surface is measured as one ATM. Ten metres down is 2 ATM. At this time the capacity is "halved". Twenty it triples etc.

Ok, so we are not talking about such extreme depths. But considering the halving factor at ten metres. Your lungs will proportionaly decrease in size even at the bottom of a pool.

Hold an inflated balloon as a representation of your lungs and take it underwater it will decrease in size. Now imagine that you have filled a balloon up while you were underwater. Bringing it up it will expand and maybe explode. So forget the plastic bag theory!

As you go down the air spaces in your body are compressed and it becomes uncomfortable and sometimes painful. If you dive down to bottom of a pool you can experience it. Its called "squeeze".

So.....the pressure inside an air space must be equal to the pressure outside that space. This is why divers that go down without equipment do not breath. They are self contained and in actual fact breath out as they come back up otherwise their lungs would explode. I do this as emergency procedure.

Breathing air from one atmosphere even if you are at one and quarter ATM is not advisable. I'm the guy that has to dive in and rescue people and would ask you not to mess about!

As for cold A small loss of body heat quickly leads to serious condition. How can it be avoided?

We know that the limbs lose body heat quickest. In actual fact survivors who have been in water for a considerably long time are the ones that did not move. Normally suits are recommended in water 25 degrees c or colder. I dragged out and administered first aid to a guy who was in the surf in tropical Bali two years ago. He was blue.

What sort of bamboo would you use anyway? Most of stuff I cut has knots in it. You would have to ream it out.

Hyakutake Colin

http://www.bunbun.ne.jp/~sword/

Richard Green
4th November 2002, 08:43
I am qualified as a commerical diver and am an avid spearfisher / breath-hold diver.

Something very important to remember when holding you breath under water:

The deeper you go the more the partial pressure of the oxygen in you body is at depth, this makes you feel like you can stay down longer, when you swim to the surface that partial pressure decreases rapidly into the minus range and you can have a shallow water black-out, many breath-hold divers have been killed by this.


A few training tips:

In a pool with SCUBA: try blacking out your mask and doing a task, during training I had to build a box out of six pieces of light wood and just enough nails, make sure the wood can float so you have to make a plan to keep it down. Needless to say my box came out looking like it was banged together by a five year old ;)

Relaxing and breathing correctly (on the surface before you go down or underwater with SCUBA) is ALL IMPORTANT (sound familiar?), being tense when breath-holding eats up oxygen, this gets harder when you are trying to wrestle a big crayfish out of its hole or you spear something like a marlin or you see a shark! ;) When diving with SCUBA you can hyperventilate quite easily if you are stressed.

You should be in a slightly meditative state when breath-holding, the masters at it are able to slow down their heart-beat dramatically (ever seen Big Blue?) and a minimal amount of blood gets pumped to the extremeties as most goes to the brain. For some interesting info on this see an article by a world champion free diver on the human aquatic potential: http://www.freediving.net/potencia.htm

Lastly, its fun to replace a black do-gi with a black wetsuit and a decent excuse to wear a black hood! ;) Heck, some booties even have the tabi split toe.

Richard, who has probably watched way to many 007 movies and read too many Clive Cussler books...

Baio
4th November 2002, 08:55
did anyone go to Dick Severence's water warrior weekend seminar or have the video from it. I saw on http://www.n-i-n.com that it had a lot of info about drown proofing, underwater taijutsu, canoeing and underwater breathing it looks really interesting, i was gonna buy it but i spent a whole bunch on his custom training tools.