by Watching David Blaine’s TED talk “How I Held my Breath for 17 minutes”, I was inspired to look into this. David Blaine got the world record in the static apnea with supplemental pure oxygen. He was the allowed to pre-breathe 100% oxygen (as opposed to regular air that is 21% oxygen) for up to 30 minutes prior to breathe-holding. He no longer has the record but for the sake of this post here are the current static apnea records for both with and without pure oxygen supplementation.
With pure oxygen
| 23:01 | Goran Čolak | 20 June 2014 | Vir, Croatia | Guinness |
Without pure oxygen
| 11:54† [2] | Branko Petrović | 7 October 2014 | Dubai, UAE |
Humans can hold their breath almost twice as long with pure oxygen! So I did my research…and here’s what I found.
Q1: Do other sports use pure oxygen?
A1: Yes, if you watch NFL you will see football players breathing pure oxygen on the sidelines between plays.
Q2: Is it easy to obtain pure oxygen?
You can obtain canisters on amazon that are 95% oxygen for about 10$.
Q3: Is it effective?
After going through a few papers it seems they all agree that there is no benefit in breathing pure oxygen.
Q4: Why do they do it?
Not entirely sure. Possibly a placebo effect.
It seems that for athletic performance, ridding the body of CO2 is more important than increasing the body with O2. Furthermore the hemoglobin in your body can only hold so much oxygen at a time. The only possible scenario where pure oxygen may help, is if you have a swim meet in high altitude, but I don’t think most people need to worry about this.