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10 Scuba Tech Tips to Improve Your Diving Air Consumption

If you continue reading you will access 10 technical diving tips to reduce air consumption during your dives. 10 points of advice with proven effectiveness, given by our Technical Diving Course Director, Víctor Córdoba. Lengthen your dives naturally with these simple tips.

“The more you dive, the better your air consumption will be” How many times have you heard divers say this? Many times, haven’t you? There is no doubt that practice makes perfect. However, in the following lines, we will give you some specific scuba tech tips for you to know exactly which important skills to practice. Are you ready to reduce air consumption while diving?

Scuba Tech Tips: Breathing To Dive.

It is obvious you know how to breathe. However, how breathing works is not as known. The cells of the human body need oxygen to live, we get this oxygen when we inhale. At the same time, you need to remove the CO2 particles and we do this when we exhale. If we do not eliminate these particles at the same speed our body produces them, the brain will demand our lungs to breath faster. We can affirm then; CO2 is the main reason for making us breathe.

1) It is time for the first of the scuba tech tips. It is quite simple: Never hold your breath. If you did, you would just accumulate carbon dioxide in your body and your brain would not allow this. In that case, it would order your lungs to breath faster and we do not want that to happen.

2) There are different causes that increase CO2 particles in the body. The most important ones are muscle movements, being cold and stress. Therefore, our scuba tech tips to improve your diving air consumption are: relax, reduce movements and wear the correct exposure suit, It’s that simple.

3) Putting under control your buoyancy, position and propulsion, is very important to reduce movement and the production of carbon dioxide. With good buoyancy control, your breathing will be relaxed and you will improve your diving air consumption. Fantastic! Isn’t it?

scuba tech tips - goggles

4) If in addition to this, if we get our breathing to be deeper and slower, we will get a better renewal of the air in our lungs and need fewer inhalations, improving our diving air consumption. How do we do this? With the fourth of our scuba tech tips: Practice abdominal breathing or yoga breathing. This technique prevents your chest from moving when inhaling, your abdomen will do the job.

Scuba Tech Tips: Manage Your Equipment Correctly.

5) As much as it seems obvious, proper maintenance of your equipment will prevent you from losing air. So, Repair any small leak (O-rings, jacket fiber breaks, octopus malfunction, etc.)

6) Follow the hydrodynamics principles. The more elements of your equipment cause friction with the water, the greater the resistance to displacement and stronger the physical effort you will make. We have already seen above that this is counterproductive.

scuba tech tips - wreck dive

7) Put under control the Venturi effect. This physical phenomenon is explained when a fluid moving in a closed duct passes through a narrower area. Then the speed at which it flows increases and the pressure decreases. This happens when we breathe through the regulator. Therefore, if we have the Venturi effect lever open during the dive, the regulator will allow us to breathe more easily. This will prevent us from getting tired. Our body will produce less CO2, improving our diving air consumption. Of course, remember to put your octopus’ Venturi’s effect level in closed position or you will be losing air through that stage.

8) If you have your own equipment and use a compensated regulator for your dives, you must take into account the adjustment knob. The breathing effort needed to start the airflow is called opening effort. In regulators without adjustment knob, we have no control over this effort, but in the latest generation regulators, we have. When you open the knob, you weaken the resistance of the spring that allows the air to pass from the regulator to your lungs. In this way, you will work less to open the valve with each breath.

Scuba Tech Tips: Organize Your Dive.

Perhaps the best of the scuba tech tips we can give you to improve your diving air consumption is to be conservative. Perform the first check at 15 minutes after to start, the second at 10 minutes later and recheck air every 5 minutes. So, you will know if you are fulfilling the dive program expectations.

Shallower dives give us more air time from our cylinders than deeper ones, but we are divers and this is cold comfort.

However, we can implement some scuba tech tips. For example:

9) Returning at a lower depth than you went. So, you will save air and see another part of the reef.

10) Another good option is to do drift dives. When you are carried along by a current, in addition to having the feeling of flying, you avoid physical effort to move around. Also, you won’t have to fight the current on the way out. The only drawback will be when you stop to observe marine life.

You already know some of the best scuba tech tips to reduce your diving air consumption during your dives. Do you know any other? Share it with us.