The Ultra Performance Musician: Lessons for Musicians from Freediving Champion Claire Paris-Limouzy

Photo credit: Daan Verhoeven

If you came here to learn more about clarinet and instead found a post about an amazing oceanographer and freediver, read on! You are in the right spot. This article is the first in a series of blog posts for my upcoming project, The Ultra Performance Musician: how we can train smarter and healthier to perform better.

Classical musicians perform under high pressure situations and physical stress for careers that often span 60-70 years. Though we are executing extremely precise physical motions in a very public setting, our pedagogy doesn’t stress the importance of mental and physical conditioning. Wind instrumentalists face the challenge of air support, with jobs that demand a high level of inspiratory and expiratory finesse.

Though what we do is physically demanding, we receive little support and education for our health and wellness. As classical musicians, we have a tradition of learning from a long line of teachers specifically trained in our particular instruments. As a clarinetist, I can trace my education through a line of teachers all the way back to the earliest and most pivotal figures in clarinet. Our education as musicians doesn’t tend to traditionally include those from outside the field, from whom we might learn many other lessons. This project will highlight lessons from endurance athletes and medical professionals for musician conditioning and air support. Through interviews with pulmonologists, respiratory therapists, endurance athletes, climbers, hang glider pilots, freedivers, and other accomplished professionals that deal with extreme conditions, we can learn to become more effective and healthy musicians.

Photo credit: Daan Verhoeven

I was fortunate to talk by Zoom with Dr. Claire Paris-Limouzy, award-winning scientist and record-breaking freediver. It was in the midst of the Covid 19 pandemic and I was in Colorado on sabbatical and Paris-Limouzy was in her beautiful plant filled Miami home. Behind her I could see the warmth and greenery of Florida, even as Colorado was cold and bitter, and remembered thinking that I could almost smell the sea breeze flowing in around her.

Equally elegant as she was warm and generous; Paris-Limouzy spent over an hour collaborating and making fascinating correlations between what it takes to be a world class freediver and a classical musician. Paris-Limouzy had the calm of a Buddha and the physical energy of a woman half her age. As she spoke, her love of the ocean and freediving suffused every sentence. She described the feeling of the ocean so perfectly, that I felt that I had also held my breath alone in the ocean for minutes on end; descending quietly into the darkness of the sea.

Paris-Limouzy described every sensation of the ocean and how she could hear what was happening around her in such a particular way as she went into the depths. She described knowing the health of the waters around her and the animals that were present just based on sound and sensation alone. Hearing about the peace, yet also the connection that she experienced on these dives, has accompanied me on multiple performances ever since then.

What is freediving?

Freediving is underwater diving in which the diver holds their breath at great depths instead of relying on artificial sources of air. This practice derives from ancient methods of fishing, pearl collecting, and even historical warfare. In modern times, freediving has become a competitive sport, taking humans to the very limits of breath holding and challenges with underwater pressure. In addition to diving there are also apnea events in pools in which swimmers hold their breath in a pool. Paris-Limouzy adds, “to be clear, the goal of pool dynamics is the longer distance, not time. The discipline of pool static involves holding the breath as long as possible.”

Some freedivers can hold their breath for over ten minutes through specific training exercises and techniques. This is astounding considering that most people can only hold their breath comfortably for thirty seconds.

Who is Claire Paris-Limouzy?

Claire Paris-Limouzy is an esteemed biological oceanographer and professor at the University of Miami, where she leads the Physical-Biological Interactions Lab. She designs numerical models and collection methods to study life and also pollutants in the ocean. You can read her biography here.

She became a competitive freediver in 2013 and quickly became a leader in the field, breaking nine USA and two continental records at the time of writing this article. Between 2024 and 2025, she broke 11 world records in the Master’s category during world championships. According to Paris-Limouzy’s website, “freediving has helped Paris-Limouzy keep a special connection with the ocean. She balances her scientific career with freediving training for underwater research.”

Paris-Limouzy is able to hold her breath for over 6 minutes and her dives in the ocean have gone beyond 240 feet without air. These remarkable feats have placed her amongst the top 20 freedivers on the planet. She started applying freediving to science while on a research trip, giving her more ability to do research in the ocean without air tanks in remote areas. Fascinated with the physiological effect of freediving on humans, she started competitive freediving soon after.

The reason that I picked Paris-Limouzy for this project is because, beyond her countless accolades and achievements, she embodies the spirit of interdisciplinary research and endeavors. Her freediving and work as an oceanographer are intrinsically interconnected, as is her physical health and well-being. She sees the connections between the music and oceans; the rhythms and the pulse of life intertwined with her own heartbeat.

Photo credit: Allie Reilly

What does this have to do with musicians?

When I decided to interview Claire for this project, I was immediately taken with the connection between freedivers and wind players regarding air support. Though we discussed the mechanics of breathing and Paris-Limouzy had some suggestions for better use of air; I also discovered so many more connections through our conversations. The ultimate multi-disciplinarian, Claire’s life and work incorporates mindfulness, listening, and physical prowess. Though her freediving takes her physically to the edge of human ability, she finds joy and peace on her incredible dives. 

Intention

One of the first things that Claire describes was what so many other experts that I interviewed had mentioned: a moment of intent and complete focus. For freedivers, much of this is focused on the last breath before a big dive. After all of the exercises and preparation, there would ultimately always have to be a last inhalation. The stillness and presence in that important moment matches when a weight lifter has a moment of perfect intent before a big lift, a baseball player swings the bat, or a hang glider’s feet leave the ground. This correlates with that moment of stillness and perfection that we find as musicians in a still concert hall, in that delicious moment of expectation right before we play a big solo. After all of our diligence and preparation, it will always come down to that last big breath.

So much of this moment of intent relates to preparation, mental attitude, perfection of breath, and what all that does for us physiologically. How do we train for that to be our most optimal moment after all of the training? The key to optimizing this moment physically and mentally relates in part to the effectiveness of breathing.

 Photo credit: Ricardo Paris

Breathing

Paris-Limouzy discusses preparing for this big moment in a routine that could be employed across a wide range of endeavors,

Routine is essential for the mental part of the dive. If you do it repeatedly, then your body and mind will recognize that you are ready. The most challenging moment is when you go down…like when will I cut myself from the surface and decide to dive? This is a difficult decision to make. But if you have a routine, you don’t have to choose when; you follow the steps. It’s good to have a routine. Before diving, I sit on the platform, look at the water, and smile. Smiling is good for the vagus nerve and helps relax. I feel grateful and thank the ocean for accepting me, I thank my body, my lungs, and I’m happy.

When I hear the five-minute countdown, I gently move myself to the water, using diaphragm breathing to keep my heart rate low. Once you hold your breath, you activate the mammalian dive reflex, which causes the shunting of blood towards the core organs, including the heart, brain, lungs, and spleen, resulting in contraction and an increase in hemoglobin. You have all of this happening. However, before the immersion, your heartbeat may increase due to anxiety or breathing forcefully. Every movement that I do from that point on, from sitting on the platform to going down in the water, is gentle and it’s smiling. And it’s being within myself, defocused from the external world. I’m not looking at people in the eyes, I’m not looking at what is happening around me, I’m just looking within. I slide into the water and grab the dive line, immersing my face and making a sort of whale-like sound. Nose breathing is essential at this point. When you breathe through your nose, you produce more nitric oxide, which improves blood circulation and oxygen delivery, the mood, and important functions. If you are nervous, you tend to breathe quickly through your mouth, as if you are out of air. Nasal breathing is much more efficient since it is a more laminar flow (less turbulent).

So, I start breathing just through my nose. (She makes a whale sound with her vocal chords) I put my face in the water and blow bubbles, making that whale sound again. I do this a couple of times. At the three-minute countdown, I start counting seven or eight breaths, gently inhaling through the nose and slowly exhalaing through the mouth, as if slowly exhalaing through a straw. Once I am done, I know it is the last minute before the immersion and I'm ready to go.

She continues,

I put my nose clip in at the one-minute countdown, and gently exhale a couple of times. Since I have my nose clip, I inhale and exhale through my mouth with soft breathing. I then do a passive exhale before taking a last breath, called a peak inhale, I use my diaphragm to pull the air down into my belly and up into my chest, I lift my shoulders to fill up my airways and start packing my cheeks-like taking air through a straw. I literally fill my lungs like a flexible balloon that gets bigger. I pack about ten tmes, relax, take ten more packs, then I’m ready to go down.

She also suggests “deep slow breathing with the diaphragm. It’s what we call tidal breathing, slow and deep, from the belly.” Wind players always talk about building lung capacity in our playing, but tend to use misleading terminology. Paris-Limouzy is referring to our ability to increase our CO₂ threshold.

Paris-Limouzy also talks about the mammalian diving reflex. When submerged in cold water, all mammals will have the same response where our heart rates lower and the blood vessels in the extremities will constrict to conserve oxygen. The spleen will actually contract to create more red blood cells and oxygenate the body to preserve the heart and the brain. When we get to a certain depth, Paris-Limouzy explains, the volume of the air in our lungs decreases with the higher hydrostatic pressure to the point that our bodies become negatively buoyant, and we can descend much easier.

She also says,

A very cool advantage of depth diving is that the partial pressure of gases increases with hydrostatic pressure (including, of course, O₂, which is about 20-21% of air while CO₂ is only 1% or less) so that the urge to breathe disappears for the rest of the descent. This is in contrast with freediving in the pool where you always have a strong urge to breathe since you swim near the surface. For this reason, pool training is useful for deep diving, providing mental strength and self-confidence in your breath-hold.

Paris-Limouzy has a useful link for breathing technique from champion freediver Alexey Molchanov, filmed when he was giving a talk at University of Miami:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CzPxZwLO6oR/

Though a wind player is obviously not able to emulate Paris-Limouzy’ routine completely before a big solo, there are many points that can be utilized:

1.     Incorporating nasal breathing in practice and even performance. Breath by James Nestor is also a great read for wind playing and general health, and explores the benefits of nasal breathing in relation to nitric oxide.

2.     Emptying old air out of the lungs completely before an inhalation for a big solo.

3.     Working on packing air in practicing. You can become comfortable with taking more air into the lungs.

4.     Relaxation and happiness as essential tools for optimal performance, emphasizing the importance of alleviating stress through breath and mindfulness. Limouzy-Paris says a “gentle smile always helps with the vagus nerve.”

5.     Belly tidal breathing and diaphragmatic breathing.

6.     Mental flow state for optimal relaxation. Repeated stress with performance anxiety taxes the body and mind in a long career. Learning to be at peace with the mechanisms of performing leads to better health outcomes in the long term.

 Photo credit: Daan Verhoeven

Physical conditioning

Musicians often overlook physical conditioning, even though what we do is quite athletic. Paris-Limouzy has several suggestions for training to optimize performance.

[Do] some cardio, run while exhaling. Don’t do it alone! Run for four minutes at normal pace, breathing only with your nose…see how many steps after four minutes that you can do with just a passive exhale and hold. After a few steps, depending on your condition, your legs will feel heavy. Run now for one minute, breathing through your nose, and do it again. Do this a couple of times a week, and then you will feel much better. When you are used to having higher levels of CO₂, you don’t panic, you have adapted to hypercapnia. Because you always have enough oxygen. So that also allows you to get more into your residual volume. You can tap more into it if you can handle the CO₂. You can go longer and tolerate those CO₂ levels.

What we can glean from Paris-Limouzy’s conditioning, besides the obvious benefit of swimming, is the emphasis on cardiovascular training. This is essential to musician health, especially wind players. We should make our time on stage easier by making our training harder. Get out there and run, walk, or climb a flight of stairs.

In addition to physical conditioning improving our performing, there is no doubt that it’s also essential to our general well-being and health outcomes. What if becoming a better musician didn’t just emphasize a contest of how many hours we were willing to stay isolated and sedentary; locked in a windowless room “hunched over a hot clarinet,” as virtuoso clarinetist David Krakauer once said?

Photo credit: Daan Verhoeven

Stretching

An important aspect of Paris-Limouzy’ training is an emphasis on stretching. Increasing the flexibility of intercostal muscles, located between the ribs, will allow for more expansion of the lungs. She works daily on yoga and breathing exercises to maximize her ability to hold her breath longer. Paris-Limouzy says,

This comes with a lot of stretching exercises for the thoracic cage. Marine animals have a very flexible thoracic cage. You can’t pack twenty packs (breaths) right away. Start with a few packs and increase other weeks. There are a lot of exercises that you can do to increase the flexibility of your thoracic cage. Kind of twisting and stretching, take the wall and twist around the wall. [I do] plenty of exercises to expand the thoracic cage.

Stretching for general health should be a central tenet of all wind player’s daily routine. Musicians tend to drive many miles, sit a lot, and often hold uncomfortable positions for hours on end. Our pedagogy should include education on injury avoidance and musician health that incorporates flexibility and air support. Below I have listed several stretches to work on rib cage expansion:

1. Lay on your back with arms out like a cross on the floor beside you. Put a pillow or blocks under your upper back and allow yourself to completely relax and breathe into your belly. If you are confused as to where you are breathing, put your hand on your stomach and make sure that you take a low pitched “Darth Vader” breath. Do this slowly 10-15 times.

2.   Arm rolls and shoulder rolls

3.     Back and chest expansion exercises

Visualization

Visualization is a vital exercise for musicians and free divers alike. By imagining a successful and positive performance or audition, our bodies will react with positivity and effectiveness in important moments. Work as a musician can also be a lifelong process, so visualization will not only enhance performance, but lead to lowered negative outcomes of repeated cortisol release on the body.

Paris-Limouzy describes her approach to visualization:

When you leave for the theater to perform, you have to visualize your performance. You lay down in a yoga pose, savasana, closing your eyes. Put one hand on your clavicle and one hand on your belly or you can just have your hands open and then you see yourself from every single step you take. I see when I’m in the water by the line and I’m taking my breathing technique, but before that I close my eyes and visualize myself in my happy place and then I start with the dive. I visualize the dive. I visualize how many breaths I’m going to take. [I take a] big inhalation and then I know exactly everything I’m going to go through on the dive.

She then goes through every detail of what she will do; how it will feel to take the breath, the negative buoyancy, and her mantra. She says, “If you have an hour performance, don’t visualize the whole thing but all the steps.” At the end she visualizes coming up, the steps at the end of the dive.

In our interview, Paris-Limouzy stops to relish the next statement. “Visualize smiling.” She pauses and really emphasizes this moment. She imagines after the dive, “looking at the judges and waiting for the white card and then hearing everyone being happy and cheering.” About visualization she says, “you train your brain to go through the process so that it’s muscle memory.”

Listening

One of the beautiful connections between music and diving is the importance and pleasure of listening. Paris-Limouzy talks about the relation of free diving to sound and the sound of the vibrations. As an oceanographer, she is able to learn about the sea on her dives. She hears,

The sand falling in the blue hole and that creates a vibration sound. What we can hear is sound from the flow, from the wind near the surface, from raindrops. Closer to the surface you can hear the wind and the rain as you go deeper, the amplitude of the sound is lower and it’s quieter. You can hear the snapping shrimp, a lot of invertebrates make high frequency sounds. As you go down you can hear lower frequency sounds like the grouper. And then it becomes really quiet. The deeper [you go] it’s just maybe the sound of your movement through the water that creates flow sounds that are soft and feel good.

 Video credt: Claire Paris-Limouzy

Paris-Limouzy has a unique understanding of how listening to underwater sounds relates to her work as an oceanographer. In an Instagram post from 2023 she explains,

Blue holes are marine sinkholes. They are hot spots of biodiversity and potentially réfugia for many marine species during our climate crisis. But we know so little about them. At Dean's Blue Hole, one of the deepest blue holes on Earth, we have been recording the soundscape over a decade. This dataset is unique and will provide insight into the ecological importance of blue holes in the ocean. The videos taken by @rickytahi show coral colonies at the rim of the Dean’s Blue Hole, before diving into the shaft located at 18 meters (60 ft) from the surface. You can see a full circle of this first ledge, going around the bluehole, where the @loggerheadinstruments hydrophone from the Paris-Limouzy Lab @miamirosenstiel is set to monitor all the blue hole sounds passively —whether they come from fish vocalisation, hurricane winds, or sand falling into the bluehole. The ledge is at the top of the narrow shaft that ends around 47 meters (154 ft), before the cavern opens in a larger room down to 202 m (663 ft).

What Paris-Limouzy describes so beautifully, is the art of listening. One of my most significant epiphanies from this conversation was the similar beauty and stillness that can be found in music. Anytime that I feel tension during a performance, I think of Paris-Limouzy gliding silently down through the depths, flowing and listening around her in the depths.

Sometimes as musicians, we can get caught up in the details of our instruments and our own physical and psychological limitations. Listening plays such an important part, not just in our music making, but also in our ability to relax and glide through performances.

When Paris-Limouzy is diving is there a rhythm to what she’s doing? She says, “absolutely there is a rhythm, you have to save energy.” This calm and efficiency of motion can also help us to be better musicians, saving our efforts for efficiency instead of worrying. Paris-Limouzy describes the importance of rhythm and an almost musical relationship to the ocean

You have to save energy and glide better and be more hydro dynamic. Swim for a few strokes and glide. When you feel like you are slowing down then you go again. If you have that rhythm in the movement then it helps you to stay in the moment as well. Because like everything else, if you repeat and repeat, you don’t have to think about it. You don’t have to think about it without your body having to count. It comes naturally because of the repetition.

Paris-Limouzy finds music in what she is doing; she can even tell the health of the ecosytems around her from the sounds on a dive. “It’s repetitive but you can listen to it. I don’t know if anyone has thought about creating music from that.” Paris-Limouzy goes on to say, “there are other sounds, the high frequency sounds are not pleasant, almost like a crackle.” She mentions software where she can remove some of the frequencies and we talk about projects that could arise with this technology. I leave this discussion astounded by the possibilities of future collaborations between our disciplines.

Photo credit: Daan Verhoeven

Mindfulness

One of Paris-Limouzy’s interests are blue holes, which are large underwater sinkholes. While discussing Dean's Blue Hole, one of the most famous of these formations, Paris-Limouzy gave me a deep awareness of the mindfulness of diving and music. She says, “music is a form of meditation…connecting brain to body and spirit.”

Claire talks in depth about the need for staying present in free diving. I ask her what she felt when diving 75 meters at the Blue Hole, what was going through her head? She says, "I listen to the natural soundscape of the water and to the flow and to feelings. It’s all about natural feelings. I just try to be in the moment, I’m not thinking if you will, it’s not like a thought process…just forget about what happened in the past and what will happen, you just have to be there.”

This mindful principle is epitomized when she says,

You have no choice, you can only hold your breath and you can only be in the moment. It’s like a meditation practice, you may have a prayer or a mantra. And then you have thoughts coming in and out. It’s the same when you dive. It can bring visions. I don’t go down with googles, I really want to be in the environment…before I dive, I think about staying in the moment. Because I’m catholic, I do a lot of rosary prayer. When I recite it, it’s just like a mantra. This gives me a rhythm. Once you go down even the mantra disappears, it’s just like a magic moment. It’s just like being reborn.

This feeling of being in the moment, of losing yourself in the dive or the music, can obviously only come about after assiduous preparation. But once you do all that you have prepared all that you can, it’s important to let go and be in the moment. She says, “the minute you start thinking you lose the process.”

While many of us might see being under water this long as terrifying, Paris-Limouzy describes it as freedom, “when you go underwater no one is watching you, you don’t have that audience or that judgement, it’s just how you perceive yourself in that environment.”

I had so many personal and musical epiphanies from this interview, especially about the ease of gliding through the water, the peace in performance, the joy of just listening to the music, and how she learns something about the ocean on every dive. The implications of what musicians can learn from freedivers are incredible and can take our breathing and mindfulness to the next level. By employing Paris-Limouzy's mental and physical tips in our performing, we can become relaxed and efficient performers, more fully connected to the music and the world around us.

For more resources about Claire Paris-Limouzy click here and also download the pdf below:

DAN Freediving for Science.pdf

Download PDF • 968KB

 Photo credit: Daan Verhoeven