It really is simple: Just forget about breathing

I am a certified scuba diver, and before I ever tried freediving, I was convinced the two styles were little different to one another. In fact, if anything, I thought freediving would probably be a lot easier. After all, you don't have the hassle of having to assemble and operate the scuba equipment if all you put on, apart from you swimming gear, is a mask and fins.

When a freediver friend kept telling me how amazing freediving was, I was skeptical. When I dive with scuba equipment I can stay underwater for 30 to 45 minutes exploring the depths, but if I freedive, I can stay there for only two minutes at most, so what exactly am I going to see?

With all these reservations I traveled to Phuket, Thailand, during the recent mid-Autumn festival. My mission: to find out what the big deal over freediving is.

I registered on a three-day beginner course with We Freedive, a freediving school near Chalong pier run by Richard Wonka, a German, and Sarah Whitcher, a Briton.

The first thing I thought I would learn was how to dive into the water, but on the first day Wonka sat down with me in a classroom talking about breathing.

"Why do you think you want to breathe?" he asked.

"Well, isn't that because we need the oxygen?" I shot back, assuming it to be logical.

Then Wonka put on my finger a sensor that reads the oxygen saturation of one's blood. "Normal people's oxygen saturation is about 95-99 percent," he said.

He let me inhale and exhale, and the figure never dropped below 95 even when I held my breath for a while.

Wonka said that the urge to breathe comes from the brain's response to the rise of CO2 level in the body, and we can train ourselves to get used to high CO2 levels and use body reactions to gauge when we really need to get more oxygen.

"For most people, breathing is something that just happens; for freedivers, breathing is something we choose to do or not to do."

After the classroom session, Whitcher took me to a swimming pool to try out static apnea, meaning to hold the breath still in water. Relaxed in water, I took a full final breath, put my head into the water, and closed my eyes.