Manual of Freediving- Underwater on a Single Breath (Freediving) Description:

Manual of Freediving: Underwater on a Single Breath (Freediving) review:
4 stars (Freediving) - The intent of this book is to help you become a better freediver. It contains excellent teaching to help improve your freediving skills. There is practical advice to help you relax and learn to be in tune with your body. This book will help you to reach new levels of performance, dive deeper, stay longer, with more comfort and ease.



However, you will have to sift trough some pseudo-scientific explanations and descriptions before you get to more practical helps. There are plenty of references to evolutionary development. Some people still accept the science of Stanley Miller's experiments in 1953 or Ernst Haeckels creative fictional drawings as fact. The writers of this book accept many of these types of theories as fact. If you can overlook these references and get to the more practical sections you will find helpful materials.
4 stars (Very usefull, it's like a personnal coach!) - I've been practicing Freediving a lot over the last 3 years. This book covers it all, from history to physiology. It is well explained, and almost every aspects of the sport is covered. I especialy felt in love with the yearly training program at the end of the book. It's bee 2 months now and I realy did improve my statics and dynamics. The book was writen by a profesionnal freediver, and a profesionnal sport educator, so you'll learn all you need to practice and improve yourself.The only reason why I don't give it a 5, it's because it's even too complete... there are sometimes way too many details, so it gets long and heavy to read. Anyhow, the first and perfect freediving bible for anyone.
1 stars (For this beginner, worthless) - It's always difficult for a beginner to review a textbook, because there's always the chance that your reactions are entirely offbase. It is possible that some people, trying to learn to hold their breath longer while underwater will value 360 pages of advice as "Getting Dressed. Start by putting on the trousers: insert the legs, first one then the other," and "We complete the scaling of the existential levels by passing to the colour violet, where we stabilise a contact with our most intimate reality, that which we call the spiritual dimension," while foregoing any significant discussion of strategies for dealing with the sensations of holding your breath.



To me, this book is infuriatingly short of relevant information. Not only do you get advice on how to put on pants, there are sections that seem relevant (the 2.5 pages on the circulatory system, say), that jump between streams of grade-school exposition ("The heart is a hollow muscle that has the capacity to function like a pump; expanding and contracting, it sucks blood that is delivered continuously by the veins and pushes it to the peripheries of the body through the arteries....") and trivia ("...[blood] is propagated by their elastic walls at a velocity of 9 meters per second. However in the arterioles of the periphery the velocity drops to one millimetre per second....") without actually introducing any relevant facts (does blood velocity have something to do with freediving? Maybe. I wouldn't know it after reading this book. And the book is packed with clearly irrelevant information, such as 2 pages on the Beaufort wind scale).



To reconcile my reaction with the 5 star reviews from those who can do statics of 5+ minutes and so forth, I can only say that perhaps they skipped the trivia, don't need practical advice on breath holding, and valued specific advice on, say, finning technique.



The 30 pages of chapter 11 "Training for Apnea" will _possibly_ take less time to read than finding equivalent advice on the Web, but are hardly worth $40. For me, this book was an utter waste of money.