How long can you hold your breath?

[Astronuc]

My brother and I used to do breath holding contests, and I used to swim laps underwater. In my best conditioned state, my pulse rate would drop into the 40 bpm give or take.

 

[Chi Meson]

the thread on Blaine talks about the previous record being about 16 minutes.

Blaine and other brain-damaged people don't count.

 

[binzing]

While practicing rolling my kayak in the pool lately, I've been able to get off upto 5-6 roll attempts on one breath, and that includes the setup, so probably around 1.5-2.5 mins

 

[jostpuur]

Could it be that people who are good at holding their breath were more likely to vote in the poll, while those who were not so good, were more likely to skip voting? I thought I'm elite when I can hold 2-3mins, but now I seem to be average only!

 

[berkeman]

Could it be that people who are good at holding their breath were more likely to vote in the poll, while those who were not so good, were more likely to skip voting? I thought I'm elite when I can hold 2-3mins, but now I seem to be average only!

I think you're probably right about the skew. But just think, you're average among the elite!

 

[Moonbear]

The longest I ever held my breath was in third grade (and as the neighbors told my parents, I had a pretty good set of lungs in me ). It was slightly over a minute. I did a lot of swimming underwater trying to race my sister or compete who could stay under longest all summer long, then my third grade teacher tried telling the class that people couldn't hold their breath a whole minute, and when a friend and I challenged her on that, our reading group (yeah, this was for reading class) all ended up holding our breaths to see how long we could really hold them for. My friend ended up just under a minute, and I went a few seconds over (I was probably turning blue by then, but I wasn't going to let my teacher be right on that ...wasn't I a sweet child? ). So, I put 1-2 min, but it was MUCH closer to 1 than 2 min.