How to Start Freediving: A Beginner’s Guide
Updated: 3 days ago
In this guide
You have probably already held your breath underwater. Or at least wondered what it would feel like to stay there a little longer.
Maybe you have dived down while snorkeling to look at a reef, only to be stopped by uncomfortable pressure in your ears. Maybe you discovered that being underwater feels unusually peaceful, but only for a short while. And then, perhaps, you saw someone disappear effortlessly below the surface on a single breath and wondered: How do people actually do that?
If you ended up on this page, you are probably not satisfied with the simplest possible answer to how to start freediving, which would be “Take a course!”.
Fair enough.
A proper freediving course is still one of the best ways to start, but there is plenty worth understanding before you get to one. Online learning cannot replace supervision, practical instruction and feedback in the water, but it can help you understand what freediving actually involves, what you need to begin, what you definitely do not need, and which skills are likely to become your first challenges.
So let us draw you a map, based on our own teaching experience.
What is freediving?
Freediving is diving underwater on a single breath, but it is not just breath-holding.
It is a combination of technique, physiology, equalization, water skills, safety, body awareness, staying calm and making good decisions.
Breath-holding is only one part of it, and the condition under which all of these other skills have to work.
Don’t be alarmed by the list. We are laying out the components because we want to be honest about what learning freediving actually involves. This is a guide, after all, not another sales article.
A person with a naturally long breath-hold may struggle with equalization. A strong swimmer may use far more energy than necessary. Someone with fairly average breath-hold ability but good technique and water awareness may find the beginning surprisingly comfortable.
Your first objective therefore should not be to stay underwater as long as possible or reach a particular depth.
It should be to understand what your body is doing underwater and learn how to work with it.
Do you need to know how to swim to start freediving?
You do not need to be a strong or technically accomplished swimmer to start learning freediving. You do need basic swimming ability and enough comfort in the water to participate safely.
Freediving does not require you to swim particularly fast, but you should be comfortable enough to move through the water, stay afloat and manage yourself without immediately depending on another person. If you are not there yet, it does not mean that freediving is off the table. Your first step may simply happen a little earlier.
You can learn basic swimming first, become comfortable swimming with a mask, snorkel and fins, or take a few private preparatory sessions before joining a regular beginner freediving course. Different freediving courses also have different swimming prerequisites, so it is worth checking the requirements of the course you are considering.
There is no advantage in pretending to be more comfortable in the water than you actually are. Starting from the right level usually makes learning easier, not slower.
What freediving equipment do beginners need?
Probably less than you think. You do not need to buy a full freediving setup before learning how to freedive.
Freedivers commonly use:
a low-volume mask
a snorkel
freediving fins
a wetsuit or other exposure protection
a weight belt and weights when appropriate
and specific safety equipment for line diving
The exact setup depends on where you are diving, the water temperature, the type of training and your own body. For a beginner, fit and suitability matter much more than owning the most advanced version of every item.
There are, however, two pieces of equipment that are quite reasonable to buy even before your first course: a mask and a snorkel.
Both are very personal pieces of gear. The mask sits directly on your face and the snorkel goes into your mouth, so many people simply prefer having their own for hygiene and comfort.
There is a wide choice of masks designed specifically for freediving, and a good physical dive shop should be able to help you check whether a particular mask actually fits your face. That matters much more than the logo printed on it: a fancy pro-mask that does not seal properly on your face is still a bad mask for you. Even if you eventually decide that freediving is not your thing, a comfortable mask remains useful for snorkeling whenever you travel.
A snorkel is an even easier purchase. Freediving snorkels usually have a very simple design, and most basic models designed for freediving will do their job perfectly well during a beginner course. Again, it is not something that becomes useless if your freediving career lasts exactly one weekend. A mask and snorkel can stay in your travel bag for years.
What about a wetsuit? Having your own is lovely. It fits your body, nobody else has been wearing it, and many people understandably prefer having something personal when it sits directly against the skin.
But choosing a wetsuit is considerably more complicated than choosing a snorkel. Thickness, material, fit and design depend on the water temperature, environment and type of diving you expect to do. Before your first course, you may not know enough yet to make that choice well. Renting one first is perfectly reasonable. If hygiene is a concern, ask the school or dive centre how their rental wetsuits are cleaned between users.
A little experience will make your first serious equipment purchases much easier.
There is no prize for arriving at your first course looking like you have already sponsored yourself.
Do you need to be good at holding your breath to start freediving?
No.
People arrive at freediving with very different starting abilities. Someone may have a naturally comfortable breath-hold but poor equalization. Another person may feel completely relaxed in the water but find their first breath-holds surprisingly uncomfortable. A strong swimmer may discover that trying to overpower every movement works against them. A scuba diver may feel exceptionally comfortable underwater while needing to relearn habits that work differently when there is no regulator in their mouth.
Your first breath-hold simply tells you where you are starting. It does not tell you whether you are “good at freediving”. And you certainly do not need to train yourself until you can hold your breath for several minutes before you are allowed to begin.
That does not mean you cannot explore breath-holding before your first course. Simple dry breath-hold exercises can help you become familiar with the sensations of apnea, notice how the urge to breathe develops and experiment with staying calm instead of immediately reacting to discomfort.
Freedivers also use dry breath-hold exercises as a form of breathwork and body-awareness practice. Even if you never end up becoming a freediver, exploring your breathing and the sensations associated with holding it can be interesting in its own right. You do not need to chase a record, you can simply become curious about what happens.
There is one very important distinction, though:
Dry breath-hold exploration and underwater breath-hold practice are not the same thing.
We will come back to that when we talk about safety.
Why do relaxation and staying calm matter in freediving?
Sometimes freediving feels peaceful, meditative and calming. Sometimes, during a static breath-hold, you are lying face down in the water thinking: “Why am I doing this to myself?” Both can be freediving.
A breath-hold is still a physiological stressor. Carbon dioxide rises. Oxygen eventually falls. Pressure changes with depth. You may experience contractions, discomfort, uncertainty and a strong urge to breathe.
The skill is not necessarily to make all of those sensations disappear. It is to learn what they mean and stay calm enough to work with them. And here it is useful to separate two concepts that often get bundled together under the word relaxation:
1. Physical relaxation
n static apnea, physical relaxation matters enormously.
You are not trying to go anywhere, so unnecessary muscular tension is simply spending energy for no useful reason. You can notice your jaw, shoulders, your hands, your legs, heavy eyelids, and gradually learn to let go of tension that does not need to be there.
2. Staying calm
During an actual dive, complete physical relaxation is impossible. You are swimming, equalizing, turning, finning, and pulling on a line. So your muscles need to work.
The objective is therefore not to become physically limp underwater. It is to use the amount of muscular effort the task actually requires while remaining mentally calm.
Staying calm is not the absence of stress. It is the ability to experience stress without adding unnecessary tension and reaction on top of it.
That distinction becomes more important the deeper you get into freediving.
Something you can try right now: a body scan. You do not need freediving equipment for this one. Most meditation apps contain some version of a guided body scan. And body scanning is genuinely useful in freediving.
Lie down, follow a guided body scan and simply pay attention to different parts of the body one by one. Where are you holding tension? Can you notice it before deliberately trying to change it? Can you release a little of it? That awareness translates remarkably well into freediving later.
And if you are merely curious about freediving but have not decided whether you want to take a course yet, this is one simple part of the practice you can explore safely without going anywhere near deep water.
What breathing techniques are used in freediving?
There is a persistent idea that freedivers prepare for a dive by performing some secret breathing technique. In reality, one of the most important things to learn is considerably less dramatic: how to breathe normally.
That sounds ridiculously simple until somebody actually asks you to do so. Suddenly nothing about your breathing feels normal anymore: your inhale becomes suspicious, your exhale becomes suspicious, you start wondering whether you are breathing too deeply, too quietly, or too slowly. Anyone who has ever had a doctor put a stethoscope on their back and say “just breathe normally” probably knows the phenomenon.
Learning to observe your breathing without constantly interfering with it takes some practice.
If you have already searched for freediving breathing techniques, you have probably encountered the word hyperventilation. In simple terms, hyperventilation means breathing more than your body currently needs for normal gas exchange. One important consequence is that it lowers carbon dioxide levels.
Carbon dioxide plays a major role in creating the urge to breathe. So if you lower it beforehand, that urge can arrive later. Historically, this made hyperventilation attractive to breath-hold divers: you feel comfortable for longer.
But here is the catch: delaying the warning does not stop your body from consuming oxygen.
You can therefore postpone the sensation that tells you to breathe without creating the safety margin you may think you have created. For recreational freediving, deliberately hyperventilating before prolonged breath-holds is therefore something to avoid.
If you follow competitive freediving, you may occasionally see experienced athletes using breathing patterns that look different from what you are taught as a beginner. Elite performance is a different context, involving athletes who know their own physiology and training extremely well. You do not need to imitate it.
Beginners naturally pay most of their attention to what happens before the breath-hold. But what happens after it is equally important. Learning how to breathe effectively after surfacing, commonly called recovery breathing, is part of basic freediving safety.
So breathing education in freediving is not really about discovering one magical technique. It is about learning how to prepare calmly, avoid unnecessary over-breathing, take the breath you need, and recover properly afterward.
How do you equalize your ears when freediving?
For many new freedivers, it is not the breath-hold that turns out to be the limiting factor. It is equalization: as you descend, increasing ambient pressure creates an unpleasant sensation on your eardrums, which you need to actively compensate to continue descending comfortably. This is what freedivers call equalization.
If you have snorkeled before, you may already have discovered some form of it by pinching your nose and making your ears pop. But the fact that you can equalize right below the surface does not automatically mean that your current technique will remain easy while descending head-down underwater.
So let us first find out what your starting point looks like. Try this simple equalization self-check:
Stand in front of a mirror or open the front camera on your phone
Gently pinch your nose
Now try to make your ears pop
Do not force it
First, pay attention to what happens in your ears:
Does the sound become slightly muffled?
Do you notice a small change in your hearing or a sensation around the ears?
If so, most likely you are equalizing.
Now pay attention to how you are doing it:
Does it happen easily, or do you need to push quite hard?
Does your nose visibly inflate?
Does your throat expand?
Can you see your chest moving as you create pressure?
Does your belly move?
Finally, can you repeat the movement and send air toward your nose several times without much effort?
This simple self-check cannot tell you exactly which equalization technique you are using, but it can give you useful clues.
If nothing happens when you try to equalize
Do not immediately conclude that there is something wrong with your ears. Most of the time, this is simply a coordination problem. Equalization uses movements that many people have never consciously tried to control before. You may not yet understand which muscles to use, what you are supposed to feel or what kind of effort should actually be required.
With proper instruction, these problems are very often resolved. In all our years of teaching, we have encountered only a handful of people whose inability to equalize turned out to be mainly connected to individual anatomical features rather than technique.
So statistically speaking from our own teaching room, “I just haven't figured out how to do it yet” is a much better starting assumption than “my ears must be built wrong.”
If you can equalize, but need to push hard
You may be using Valsalva.
Other clues include throat expansion, visible chest or belly movement, and difficulty equalizing repeatedly in quick succession. It can work perfectly well in shallow water. But in freediving, particularly when descending head-down, it often becomes increasingly difficult after the first few metres.
Remember what we said earlier about learning patterns? If Valsalva becomes your automatic way of equalizing, learning another technique later may involve both learning something new and persuading your body to stop automatically doing what it already knows.
The earlier you develop a technique that is suitable for freediving, the easier that process tends to be.
Our instructors have extensive experience teaching equalization, and the first assessment can often be done remotely. If you are unsure what technique you are currently using, get in touch and we can help you identify your starting point.
If you can equalize easily and repeatedly
You may already be using a technique closer to Frenzel.
Frenzel uses the tongue and throat air space to create pressure rather than pushing air all the way up from the lungs. That makes it considerably more suitable for freediving and for continuing beyond the first few metres. One useful clue from your dry self-check is whether you can perform several gentle equalizations in a row without pushing from your chest or belly.
If you can, there is a good chance that you already have some of the required coordination. That does not mean your equalization education is finished. Timing, body position, relaxation and depth still change what happens underwater.
But it is a very useful starting point.
What if you can equalize without pinching your nose?
This is usually referred to as hands-free equalization.
Some people can naturally open their Eustachian tubes and manage the pressure without closing the nose with their fingers. That can be a lovely advantage. But hands-free equalization still requires timing, awareness and control as depth increases.
And it should not be confused with simply swallowing. Swallowing may help in very shallow water, but it usually does not provide everything a freediver needs as pressure continues to increase.
What should good equalization feel like?
Easy.
That is the standard we want you to remember. Not merely “it doesn't hurt yet.”
Equalization should feel gentle, repeatable and low-effort. If every attempt requires a hard push, significant tension or a battle with your ears, something deserves attention.
Is freediving safe?
Freediving has real risks.
You are holding your breath underwater, sometimes under increasing pressure, and hypoxic loss of consciousness is possible. Loss of consciousness in water can obviously have serious consequences.
This is why there is one rule that should be established:
Never practice underwater breath-holding alone.
Not in the sea, not in a swimming pool. Not because you are staying shallow, and not because you can stand on the bottom.
A proper freediving buddy is also not simply another human being somewhere in the vicinity. They need to understand what they are watching for, where they should be positioned, how to accompany a diver and what to do if something goes wrong.
This is where the distinction we made earlier becomes important: exploring an appropriate breath-hold on dry land is one thing, and experimenting with breath-holds underwater on your own is another.
No activity performed in water can honestly be described as 100% risk-free.
The objective of freediving education is not to pretend that risk disappears. It is to understand the risks, reduce them where possible and learn the skills and procedures necessary to manage them.
And this brings us, finally, back to the slightly annoying answer from the beginning.
What is the best way to start freediving?
Take a proper beginner freediving course with a qualified instructor.
Yes. We made you read this far just to arrive back at the answer you already knew. But hopefully now you’ll look at it differently.
It is not because you need a certification card before you are allowed to put your face underwater, but because many of the skills we have just discussed are difficult to assess from inside your own body.
You may think you are relaxed while your shoulders are practically touching your ears. Or you may believe your finning is efficient while most of the movement is coming from your knees.
You may understand Frenzel perfectly while performing something completely different underwater. Or you may feel that your breathing is calm while unconsciously over-breathing.
And most importantly, you cannot teach yourself proper buddying and safety procedures by being your own buddy.
Feedback matters so much in the beginning because the patterns you learn first tend to stick. Ideally, you want to form useful ones. Relearning an inefficient duck dive or a habitual “bicycle” kick is a little like moving the light switch in your bedroom: you know perfectly well where the new switch is, but for a while, your hand still reaches automatically toward the old spot on the wall.
This is where constructive feedback from an instructor becomes particularly useful. Mistakes can be identified while the patterns are still being formed.
At Deep Division, we don’t sell certification cards. We teach freediving.
Passing requirements and becoming a competent freediver are not necessarily the same thing. A certification should confirm that you have demonstrated a defined level of knowledge and skill.
It should be a milestone in your education. Not the purpose of it.
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