Fixing Equalisation Problems _ How to Equalise Head Down

Hello freediving family! Today we're going to talk about solving equalization problems and especially helping divers to be able to equalize upside down or head down. I won't have time for it today, we have too much to cover, but tomorrow I'm going to put up a video about sinuses. How to care for your sinuses, what can go wrong with your sinuses, what to do if you burst a blood vessel in your sinuses, which is why some divers come up and they're bleeding from their nose. This equalization tutorial is by far the most requested video that I've had because so many people do have equalization issues and so many people do have issues being able to equalize upside down or head down. So if you are one of those people you are not alone and we're gonna help you. Okay so why do people have issues equalizing? Equalization issues can be broken up into two categories. Mechanical issues and physiological issues. A mechanical issue is a problem with the way that a person actually equalizes. An issue with their actual equalization skills, their coordination, the way that they move their muscles to equalize their ears. In this video I will assume that you have a basic understanding of how to equalize. So if you haven't seen my video on how to frenzel equalize then I suggest you watch the whole thing first. A physiological issue is something caused by your actual body. The shape of your nasal cavity, your eustachian tubes, how much mucus that you produce. Really quickly how the hell do you pronounce this word? I've pronounced it so many different ways over the years. Eustachian tube. Eustachian tube. Eustachian tube. On the weekend I had a physiologist on one of my freediving courses and I asked him how to pronounce it. He said that he pronounces it eustachian tube. So I'm gonna pronounce it in this video just like that. Eustachian. So physiological issues. Let's start with physiological issues. To equalize the middle ear you need to create enough pressure in the nasal cavity to push open the eustachian tubes and equalize the middle ear. But many people do have stiff or less flexible tubes and this does make it harder to equalize them. Sometimes one ear is harder to equalize than the other. One ear equalizes slowly. One ear requires more force to be able to equalize. One tube is stiff and the other one isn't. If you do have stiff tubes or a stiff tube. There are so many inappropriate jokes I could make right now. I wouldn't worry too much because you can easily increase their flexibility. But how do you actually know if you have stiff tubes or not? Well often when you equalize a stiff tube you won't hear a nice clean pop in your ears. But rather the air will squeak in or crackle in or it will like hiss into your ears. And typically a stiff tubed ear or an ear with stiff eustachian tubes is harder to equalize or it takes longer to equalize. Keep in mind that if you have been diving recently and you haven't been equalizing often enough or you haven't been equalizing properly that you will have agitated and inflamed the tissues surrounding your eustachian tubes and they may even hurt right now. If your eustachian tubes stretch too much because you're not equalizing often enough then what will happen is those inflamed tissues will swell shut and not allow you to equalize at all. So in this video please don't confuse your ears feeling sore or inflamed with the symptoms of having a naturally tight tube. So the simple way to increase the flexibility of your tubes is to just equalize more often. But here's a specific exercise for it. So for 10 minutes every day you're going to sit down and do a sequence of five equalizations. The first one will be very soft, the second one just a little bit harder and just a little bit longer, third one more so, the fourth one will be relatively strong and the fifth one you're going to do very strong in fact as hard as you can without being in any kind of discomfort and you're going to hold it open for five to ten seconds. This may make you a little bit light-headed. So simply move through the exercise one two three four five have a little rest one two three four five for 10 minutes a day and also please if you feel any kind of discomfort or pain or soreness stop immediately. So the other main physiological issue that can stop us from being able to equalize is a sinus issue really to do with how much mucus your sinuses produce. Fun fact! Dairy products do not at all stimulate mucus production. Lactose on its own doesn't do this. It just so happens that most of the world to some extent or another is intolerant to dairy or to lactose and it's those people's intolerance that causes them to stimulate mucus production not the lactose itself. There are people who can drink liters of milk and it doesn't do anything for their body's mucus production. So our sinuses produce mucus. When you're healthy you can produce up to one liter of mucus per day. You are all disgusting. If you have a cold or a flu then your sinuses will produce even more than that and it will block up your entire nasal cavity and that makes it almost impossible to equalize. Also if you work in a dusty environment that dust and those particles will clog up your sinuses. They'll clog up your nasal cavity and make it really really hard for you to equalize. Tomorrow I'm going to put up a video about how to actually deal with your sinuses. How to flush them out if you do get clogged sinuses. So once I make that video I'll put it up tomorrow. I'll put the link in the description down below. Okay now for mechanical issues. Issues with our actual equalization skill and coordination. Some of this stuff actually is a little bit difficult to communicate online. I will do my best but really the best way to get someone over their equalization issues is to work with them in the water giving them real-time feedback. So if any of who is the current men's world record holder with fins 129 meters. A teaching an eight day free diving course for all levels. We're doing this in Bali from the 4th of November till the 11th of November. I'll put the details for that as well in the description below. Sorry guys the sun came out so I changed the camera angle. We are in a very professional studio right now. Now it's much easier to equalize when you're descending head up or descending feet first than when you're descending inverted or with your head down. There are a few reasons for this. Because the air will always want to travel to the area of lesser pressure. If your head down it will want to travel away from your ears. If your head up it will want to travel towards your ears. Also descending head down tends to hold your equalization muscles in a position which does make it actually harder to equalize. But we are going to talk a lot about that shortly. And finally as my man Mikey Fresh in the Philippines pointed out the other day. When we are inverted we increase the blood pressure in our heads. Which means we're going to have more blood in our blood vessels and in our veins. And that doesn't give as much room or as much space to our eustachian tubes to be able to actually move and part to let the air through it. One of the easiest ways for you to just know if you do have a mechanical issue or a physiological issue is whether you can easily equalize descending with your head up or descending down feet first. If you can equalize head up with no squeaking or hissing or difficulty then most likely you simply have a mechanical issue. If your ears still hiss or squeak or they're challenging to equalize then most likely you do have a physiological issue or you have a combination of the two. Sometimes this all seems like a complicated topic but it's really just because we can't see most of the time what's going on inside our mouths when we're diving. But really once we've established that we don't have tight tubes or that we're not over producing mucus or working in a dusty or congestive environment. There are only a few things that can really mechanically go wrong. In most cases divers with mechanical issues are blocking off access to their nasal cavity with some part of their mouth. To equalize the middle ear all we have to do is put enough pressure in the nasal cavity to push open the eustachian tubes. Now you remember from my how to frenzel equalize video that we spoke a lot about the soft palate. How the soft palate can get stuck up against the back of the mouth and block off access to the nasal cavity. Now this can happen for a few reasons. The first place the diver usually gets stressed is in the muscles around their neck and their throat. This then causes them to tense up or lock up the muscles in their oral cavity which then doesn't allow the air to pass from their oral cavity into their nasal cavity. Now all the habits in our mouths come from a combination of our breathing, our eating and our speaking habits. And some people unfortunately just don't have habits that are conducive to good equalizing. It is also a really normal thing to lock up your mouth, to lock up your tongue, to lock up your soft palate when you're in the water as part of your body's mechanism for not wanting to inhale water. So many people even people who want nothing more than to just dive find themselves limited by their body's subconscious desire to lock up the muscles in your oral and nasal cavity so that you can't inhale water through your mouth or through your nose. So through tension or just our body's natural position we can hold our soft palates in a closed or locked position or through tension we can engage our tongues so that they push our soft palates up against the back of our throat or our mouth and then also lock the soft palate. And if this sounds like you then it's all very normal and there are ways to get around it. Now those with soft palate issues will often find it really difficult to develop the awareness that their soft palate is actually closed because for those people that is the natural that is the normal position that they hold their mouths in. To do anything else would feel abnormal it would feel strange and when they dive all that they want to do is revert back to that original so that natural normal position in their mouths even if that position is stopping them from being able to equalize even if that position is not helping them at all. That's a bit of a metaphor for life. So to get around soft palate issues we're going to go through a little exercise that will teach you what it feels like when you're holding your soft palate open. You're going to inflate a balloon then you're going to put this balloon into your mouth and the goal is for the air in the balloon to pass into your mouth and then out of your nasal cavity or out of your nose. One of the tricks to being able to do this is to be able to drop your tongue pull your tongue down don't block off the air from passing into nasal cavity by pushing your tongue up against the roof of the mouth let the air pass through. One of the most normal things in the body is to stop foreign objects from going down your throat so the tongue will often smash itself up to the roof of your mouth to stop this from happening. Now while you keep practicing this exercise you're also going to go through all the exercises that I outlined in my how to phrenzel equalize video. By learning how to phrenzel or by improving your phrenzel and learning how to keep your soft palate open you are going to develop a deeper awareness for what it feels like in your mouth and what's moving when you equalize. A little trick to open up your soft palate while you're diving is to do what Andrea Zuccari calls the N charge. When we hum the letter N our tongue goes into a T position or similar to a T position and we direct air out of our nasal cavity. If you pinch your nose and hum the letter N then eventually you're going to equalize. So practice this on land a few times and if you are diving and your soft palate gets stuck hum the letter N or do an N charge until your ears equalize. It's a sound and a mouth position which almost everyone will be able to make intuitively that does force the soft palate to open. What I would typically do with divers now at this stage is to take them diving on a line for a few days where they're diving down feet first. With your head up all the air will naturally want to travel up to your ears and gravity will often hold down and therefore keep open your soft palate. I would typically keep a diver in this position diving up and down the line feet first for a few days because what I want is for that diver to develop completely new equalization habits. The air will travel up and gravity will hold their soft palate in an open position and what we want is over the few days for that position to ingrain itself in that person's muscle memory so it becomes normal. The new normal. The longer a diver stays diving feet first like this the more success that they're going to have when they flip over and start diving head first again. Be patient. Take your time. Diving is something that you can do for your entire life so don't rush it. When you do start diving head first again go down at angles and then as the weeks go on as the months go on start increasing how steep those angles are until eventually you can then dive down and equalize vertically. Also when you put a mask on it becomes a part of your nasal cavity because it is attached or connected to your nasal cavity. So to equalize the middle ear you need to put enough pressure in the nasal cavity to push open the eustachian tubes right? That's very hard to do when you haven't equalized your mask properly and you have negative pressure building up inside your mask. So don't let the pressure build up inside the mask. Equalize your mask often just like you equalize your ears often. Tomorrow I'll put up a video about sinuses, how to equalize the sinuses, sinus issues and sinus care. Remember guys if you're new here and this video was helpful then subscribe. If you want to help me create a stronger global freediving community then share the video around. Make sure your dive buddies see it. I have heaps of other freediving tutorials to check them out. Click or tap here or click or tap here. As always I'll be answering all questions in the comments. I'll see you in the water somewhere. I'm Adam Stern. I hold my breath and dive really deep.