How to use dry breath-hold training

Personal best

Every table is scaled from your dry personal best, a Max Static hold. The first time you open Train, the DRY home card asks for one: Run a Max Static now walks you through a 2:00 breathe-up and then one hold, as long as you can go. Already know your number? Enter it by hand instead. Until you have a real Max Static on file, a hand-entered number is provisional, and the first real Max Static you run always replaces it, even if it comes in shorter.

Your dry personal best is its own number, separate from a pool static held with your face in the water. The dive reflex makes a wet hold run longer than the same dry hold sitting in a chair, so the two are never mixed: using your pool number here would scale every table too hard from day one.

You can also set a Max Static on the watch, if you have one; it syncs to the phone the same way any other session does. See the inDepth Dry guide.

Coaching

The first time you open Train, a card asks Want coaching? Choose Yes to turn on a suggested dry plan and open Settings → Coaching, where you can turn it on or off, pick a training phase and set sessions per week. Choose No thanks if you'd rather set it up later. Either way the exercise library stays open, so you can start any exercise on your own without ever turning coaching on.

With coaching on and a personal best on file, the DRY home screen opens on a Today card: the session your plan says is next, drawn as a phase ribbon, with an Open button. The button reads Open, not Start, on purpose: it takes you to that exercise's own screen first, so the safety line and (for Empty Statics and Lung Vacuums) the acknowledgment gate are still in front of you.

Below it sits This week: a seven-day tape, one cell per weekday, lit where there's a session planned, so you can see the week at a glance; the planned sessions themselves; and a Plan row showing your current training phase and sessions per week (for example Base · 3 sessions a week), which opens as a sheet to change.

Training phases and sessions per week

Three training phases, Base, Specific and Peaking, change one exercise: Basic Reps, the one exercise the method periodizes by name.

• How often it comes around. Base schedules it every fourth session, Specific every third, Peaking once a week.
• How hard it runs. Each phase adds a few percentage points to whatever percentage of your PB your Basic Reps rung has already earned: nothing extra at Base, +8 at Specific, +15 at Peaking, and it never pushes past 80% of your PB.

Everything else in your week keeps its own designed progression. At three sessions a week or fewer, only the intensity moves, since there isn't room to schedule Basic Reps more than once.

Switching phase also updates the cross-training notes in the same sheet. Base points you at steady-state cardio, general strength and full-body stretching. Specific keeps the strength work but cuts its volume and adds strength-endurance intervals. Peaking drops the volume outright: light mobility only, and rest is the training. These are guidance for the rest of your week, not sessions the app schedules for you.

Exercise library

The exercises come from Nathan Vinski's Freedive Fitness Handbook, put in our own words with our own progressions worked out for the app, plus a couple of conventions freedivers expect. Most exercises scale from your Max Static PB, so until you have one, Max Static is the only one you can start. After that, most are open to start on your own, no plan needed: Empty Statics and Lung Vacuums ask for a one-time acknowledgment first, and The 3-Hold (Advanced) unlocks once you reach the top level of The 3-Hold.

Each library row shows what the exercise is for and the shape of the session it builds: tall bars for effort, short bars for rest, width for seconds. Open any exercise for the full guidance: how to do it, the one rule that changes what it trains, and how its levels progress.

Empty Statics and Lung Vacuums each require a one-time acknowledgment before their first use, since both carry a risk beyond a normal hold.

Empty Statics is done at residual volume, after a full exhale, which brings on the urge to breathe and hypoxic signs faster than a normal hold and with less warning. Always run it under direct supervision, and terminate if you approach LMC (loss of motor control).

Lung Vacuums is reverse packing at residual volume, a strong negative-pressure hold on an empty chest, and like Empty Statics it must always be run under direct supervision.

Running a session

Open a session and the runner walks you through breathe-up, holds and rests, cued by voice and haptics (turn either off in Settings → Training). The ribbon across the top shows where you are; the dial underneath counts down when a phase has a target and up, behind a dashed rim, when it doesn't, like a Max Static.

During a hold, tap Mark first contraction the moment you feel it: this only records the time, it doesn't stop the hold. Skip this one moves on from a timed hold without claiming a symptom you didn't have; it just won't count toward your next level. Three Stop buttons end the hold on the spot and record why: Contractions ends just that hold and the session carries on, while Light-headed and Panic end the whole session.

Mid-session you can Pause on a breathe-up or a rest and pick it back up later; there's no pause during a hold, since you can't pause a breath-hold.

Safety

Sit or lie down before you start. Never stand, never do this in or near water, and have someone nearby. Apnea Walks is the exception: you walk on the same breath, so pick a flat, clear, soft indoor route with no stairs, and have someone walk with you. Empty Statics and Lung Vacuums need a one-time acknowledgment of their specific risk before you can run them.

Light-headed and Panic both end the whole session on the spot, not just the hold, and that session can never earn a level or count as a personal best. Until you answer the report, the app won't start a new dry session; nothing you've already recorded is lost, and syncing carries on as normal. Contractions is different: it ends only that hold, and the session plays on.

You can answer a pending report right from the phone: tap Open on the DRY home tab, or Start on a blocked exercise. For panic, that's confirming you're ready to continue. For light-headedness or a blackout, it's confirming a qualified professional has cleared you. Neither is a medical check; it's just your own word, recorded.

Your watch does its own blocking too, with no phone nearby: it tells you what it's holding when you press START. Answering a report on the phone doesn't clear one the watch itself is holding; that one needs answering on the watch.

In the browser

Dry training also runs at app.in-depth.app, with the same exercise library. Sign in with the same Google or Apple account you use on the phone and your sessions follow you between the two. Two small differences: switching tabs mid-hold for more than a few seconds means that one hold doesn't get recorded (the rest of the session still saves), and spoken cues depend on your browser, so keep the tab up front for the full experience.