Is it harder to exhale while swimming in open water?
I do laps at the pool quite often and when I do front crawl I breathe out with my face in the water.
I tried to do the same at a lake (it was quite warm actually but choppy conditions) but found it quite a bit harder to force air out of my mouth and nearly impossible to breathe out of my nose (which I prefer in the pool).
Is there anything about open water that would make this harder? Or was it psychological?
I didn't notice myself feeling tense (I was close to shore) - but I wondered if small currents from the chop, relative to a pool made the difference?
This post was sourced from https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/q/17034. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
I can only answer this based on my own experience and my theory based on that. That is, that exhaling used to be difficult for me in conditions where inhaling is uncertain. When doing the crawl your mouth is very close to the water surface when inhaling, so in choppy conditions the wavelets will sometimes cover your mouth while you are in the inhaling cycle. If you are used to swimming in flat calm water, your body is conditioned to rely on being able to breathe whenever you are in the inhaling position. When exhaling, your body will sink deeper into the water. Your subconsciousness knows this and fights against this, as this will make access to air even more difficult.
If you keep practising in choppy water you will re-condition yourself and exhaling will become as natural as in flat water over time. The progress will be quicker if you learn how to avoid inhaling water in these conditions of course. It's basically about teaching your inner animal that exhaling and giving up the extra buoyancy is safe.
This post was sourced from https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/a/17210. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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