How Long Can You Hold Your Breath While Snorkeling?

Your snorkel helps you to get air from above the surface of the water. However, it does not offer any benefits when it comes to holding your breath.

All snorkels come with a mask, a snorkel mouthpiece, and a snorkel tube attached to the mask. This tube projects over the surface of the water and allows the snorkeler to breathe with their face down in the water.

Snorkelers are also able to dive a few feet below the surface of the water, but in this case, the snorkel does not offer any breathing aid. When the snorkeler comes up to the surface of the water, they can expel the water from the tube with a hard blow and continue breathing without lifting their face from the water.

If you want to dive down into the ocean where your snorkel is fully submerged, how long you hold your breath will depend on your own lung capacity as well as other factors. An average person can hold their breath anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes so you have that much time to dive beneath the surface with a snorkel if you want to explore the aquatic world up close.

If you want to stay underwater with your snorkel fully submerged for longer, you can invest in a mini oxygen tank which will give you a limited supply of oxygen; however, you will still not be able to stay underwater as long as divers with SCUBA tanks.

Factors Affecting a Person’s Ability to Hold Their Breath

Several factors dictate how long you can hold your breath with a snorkel. All of them pertain to the rate you consume oxygen. They do not have anything to do with whether you are wearing or not wearing a snorkel.

Fitness Level

The amount of time you can hold your breath depends on your level of fitness. Swimming is a full-body exercise that will force you to use your arms, legs, and core, and will make you tire out quickly.

If you want to spend more time diving, then you should get yourself in good shape. Cardiovascular exercise can improve your breathing and allows your body to circulate oxygen in a much better way. You can also do a few laps in a pool before you decide to dive or snorkel to improve your fitness level.

Once you are physically fit, you will be able to hold your breath for much longer as well as enjoy the great view in front of your eyes.

Fighting Water Resistance

Water is hundreds of times denser than air and hence has a lot of resistance. Even when you tread water on the beach, you will feel resistance to your step. When submerging your whole body under the water, this resistance is much greater and will require more exertion from you.

Depending on what kind of water conditions there are, you may feel less exertion when gliding across calm waters or kicking against a strong current.

Lung Capacity

When preparing to dive, you take a large gulp of air and take in a specific amount of oxygen into your lungs. Some people have a greater lung capacity than others and can take deeper breaths and stay in the water for a longer time. People with low lung capacity will need to come up for air after a minute or so.

Water Temperature

How long you can hold your breath by snorkeling depends on the water temperature as well. If the water is nice and warm, it will allow you to swim comfortably and breathe more naturally.

However, if the water temperature is cold, your heart will start to pump much faster in order to generate heat. This will use up the oxygen in your body and you will not be able to hold your breath for a long time.

Experience

As you practice snorkeling, you will become accustomed to breathing through a snorkeling tube or holding your breath when diving. Pretty soon, you will see that your movement will become smoother and you will not need to kick your arms and legs that much to snorkel, which will also improve your ability to hold your breath.

How to Learn to Hold Your Breath for a Longer Time

Many snorkelers love to dive beneath the waves and spend as much time as possible with the fish with their snorkel fully submerged. If you want to maximize your experience with the fish, you need to learn how to hold your breath for a longer period of time.

Snorkeling is not done at great depths, so it is a safe way to improve your ability to stay underwater longer and hold your breath for longer periods of time.

By diving into the waters and practicing your breath once or twice a day, you should be able to increase your duration in a matter of weeks. For example, if you can hold your breath for 30 seconds only in the beginning, practice can help you hold it for 45 seconds in a few weeks.

The more you practice, the longer you will be able to hold your breath until you can do it for 9 seconds, two minutes, and sometimes even longer.

Taking deep and shallow breaths before you suck in a lungful of air and hold it in will help you to prepare for your dive. Performing slow and deep breaths will help your heartbeat at a steady rate as well.

When snorkeling, you should also try not to breathe quickly and shallowly. By breathing slowly and deeply, you will be able to calm down your body and heart rate and your body will be able to use oxygen much more efficiently.

Once you start practicing this breathing exercise every day, you will find that your lung capacity is expanding and you will be able to hold your breath for a longer period of time when snorkeling.

An easy way to increase your lung capacity is to hold your breath for a few seconds longer than you feel comfortable with. For example, if you can hold your breath comfortably for about one minute, try increasing it to about one minute and five seconds. Practice this about one or two times a day until you can hold your breath comfortably at one minute and five seconds.

To increase your lung capacity, even more, keep increasing the time you can comfortably hold your breath. Over time, you will steadily increase your lung capacity and swim along the ocean bed with the fish for much longer than what you originally started with.

The key to learning to hold your breath is to always stay calm and not rush it. After each dive, it is important that you catch your breath fully by taking long and deep breaths. This will slow down your heart rate until it is beating at a normal rate again. Once your heartbeat is steady, you can prepare to dive again.

When submerged in the water, it is important that you do not do any unnecessary movements as it will consume oxygen. If you are flailing your arms and legs like crazy underwater, you will exhaust your air supply in a few seconds so it is best to kick at a slow and steady pace. Keep your arms at your side and rely on the kicking motions of your legs to gently propel your forward.

You will also not frighten the fish away when you are swimming gently like that which is an added bonus!

If you feel like you are running out of breath, it is important that you surface, take a deep breath, and try again. Do not hold your breath overlong and risk your life in the water.

Do Scuba Divers Use Snorkels to Hold Their Breath Underwater?

As we mentioned above, snorkels do not offer you any sort of benefit if you are fully submerged. The snorkel tube will fill up with water when it is submerged, which means you will have to hold your breath or risk choking on a mouthful of seawater.

If you want to breathe underwater, you will need SCUBA gear, which consists of an oxygen tank and a respirator. However, you may have seen divers wearing snorkels as well. Does this mean snorkels provide some way for you to breathe underwater?

The answer is “no,” there is no way for you to magically extract air underwater. The only reason scuba divers wear a full face snorkel mask is that they want to conserve as much air as possible in their scuba tank because they will stay underwater to discover the underwater world. This means that when they are near the surface, they do not use the respirator for breathing. Instead, they will glide to the top of the water, allow their snorkel tubes to come out of the water, and breathe through it. They’ll cease using the snorkel when they dive underwater.

A scuba diver’s oxygen tank can hold only so much air and that is needed when the diver is swimming underwater.