Then it plateaus.
At some point — usually around the time a spearo starts getting consistent shots at fish in 25–35 ft of water — the limits stop being technique and start being capacity. You can't stay down long enough to wait out a wary white seabass. Your finning gets sloppy by mid-day. The fifth dive of the session is half as productive as the first. The fish that move into deeper water during summer months are simply out of reach.
This is where cross-training matters. The approach below is adapted from Jaap Verbaas's Longer and Deeper: Cross-Training for Freediving and Spearfishing (2019), calibrated for the kelp-and-canyon environment of Southern California spearfishing.
If you haven't yet read our companion piece on why spearfishers should get AIDA certified, start there. This post assumes you've already addressed the safety baseline.
What spearfishing actually demands
The mistake most spearos make in their training is treating spearfishing like static freediving — the goal is a longer breath hold. That's wrong. Spearfishing is closer to interval training in deep water. The demands are:
- Repeated submaximal dives. Most spearfishing sessions involve 60–120 dives in 2–4 hours, with surface intervals of 1–3 minutes between each. Total bottom time is what matters, not max breath hold.
- Working dives, not floating ones. You're aiming, tracking, swimming, and shooting. Oxygen consumption is 2–3x what it is in a still static.
- Surface recovery under load. You surface, recover, swap your shot fish, reset, and go again. Recovery efficiency matters more than max capacity.
- Cumulative fatigue. Dive 80 of the day is much harder than dive 1, even if the depth is identical. Mental focus erodes faster than physical capacity.
- Mental focus while moving and looking. You're not relaxing on a line — you're hunting. Your nervous system is in a different mode.
A training plan that addresses these specific demands is what closes the plateau gap. Generic freediving training does some of the work but leaves the rest.
Pillar 1: Aerobic base
Spearfishing days are long. A six-hour session at the right intensity for fish-finding requires aerobic capacity — not the peak fitness of a competition freediver, but a sustainable engine that holds up across hours.
What to train
- Long, slow swims in open water or pool. 30–45 minutes at conversational pace, twice a week. Free strokes with snorkel if outside, free or breaststroke if pool. The goal is comfortable Zone 2 cardio.
- Easy cycling or running. Cross-training works fine here. The point is mitochondrial capacity, which builds at any modality.
- One harder session per week. Intervals — 8x 30-second sprints with 90-second rest, or hill repeats. Pushes the top end of your aerobic system.
This isn't sexy training. It's the boring base that everything else sits on. Skip it and the rest of your training compounds slower.
Pillar 2: Breath-hold capacity for working dives
For spearfishing, you want a static breath hold of around 3:00 — that gives you comfortable margin for 1:00–1:30 working dives. You don't need 4:00, and chasing it past a point of diminishing returns wastes training time better spent elsewhere.
What to train
- CO2 tables, 3x per week. See our CO2 tolerance training guide and the 4-minute breath hold progression for protocols. For spearos, the CO2 tables are more important than O2 tables — they directly train the early-mid dive sensation you'll feel while waiting on the bottom.
- Dynamic apnea swims, 1x per week. 25m underwater swims in a pool with bi-fins. 8 repetitions with 1:30 surface recovery between each. This trains exactly the dive profile you use spearfishing.
- One max static per week. Optional. Mostly mental rehearsal of staying relaxed through contractions.
What you're not training is max breath hold. A 5-minute static doesn't help you spearfish.
Pillar 3: Surface recovery efficiency
This is the single most underrated training area. The faster you recover between dives, the more dives you make per hour, and the more fish you see. A spearo with great surface recovery makes 30% more dives in a day than one with poor recovery — and the difference is mostly nervous-system trained, not lung-trained.
What to train
- Hook breath sequences. The standard recovery breath protocol — 3–5 quick deep breaths through pursed lips, focusing on the exhale being more emphatic than the inhale. Practice these on dry land until they're reflex.
- Heart-rate variability work. Box breathing (4 in, 4 hold, 4 out, 4 hold) for 5 minutes a day trains the vagal tone you need for fast surface recovery. There's research on this in performance settings — see Patrician (2021) on autonomic regulation in apnea divers.
- Cold exposure. Cold showers, brief ocean immersion. Trains the same parasympathetic response. Three minutes a day.
The combined effect is that you surface, take three breaths, and your heart rate is already settled. That's the goal.
Pillar 4: Strength and mobility for the gun and the dive
Carrying a loaded gun on the dive, fighting fish on the surface, and swimming with a heavy stringer all require strength that generic freediving doesn't develop. The mobility work matters too — a spearo with limited shoulder mobility shoots inaccurately.
What to train
- Pull-ups and rows. 2x per week. Builds the back strength for shooting, reloading, and stringer carrying.
- Push-ups and presses. Counterbalances the pulling. 2x per week.
- Core work. Hollow holds, planks. Stabilizes the dive position and the shooting position.
- Shoulder mobility. Open book stretches, sleeper stretches, banded external rotation. Daily. Spearos have notoriously tight shoulders from years of reaching forward in a horizontal position.
- Hip mobility. Couch stretches, pigeon pose. Daily. Tight hips kill finning efficiency on the long swim back.
This is general gym work — nothing exotic. The discipline of doing it consistently matters more than the specific exercises.
Pillar 5: Mental focus and decision quality under load
Late in a spearfishing day, dives 60–100 of the session, the failure mode isn't physical — it's cognitive. You take a worse line on the descent. You shoot when you should wait. You misread a fish's body language. You miss the small movement that would have given you the shot.
This is trainable, but not through more spearfishing volume. The training comes from practicing decision quality under fatigue in other contexts.
What to train
- End-of-workout focused practice. After your hardest training session of the week, do something cognitively demanding — chess puzzles, reading complex material, music practice. Trains executive function under fatigue.
- Breath-hold cognition drills. Hold your breath while solving simple problems. Counts in twos backwards from 100. Adds in small increments. Forces you to maintain cognition during the CO2 buildup.
- Body scanning during dives. On every dive, run a mental scan from toes to head. Catches tension before it costs you. The Buddhist meditation tradition has refined this technique for 2,500 years — we covered the parallels in what Buddhist monks and freedivers have in common.
A sample week for an intermediate spearo
| Day | AM | PM |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | 30-min easy swim | CO2 table + pulling strength |
| Tuesday | Hip + shoulder mobility (20 min) | Surface recovery + box breathing |
| Wednesday | Cycling/running (45 min) | Dynamic apnea pool session |
| Thursday | Mobility (20 min) | Pushing strength + core |
| Friday | CO2 table | Cold exposure |
| Saturday | Spearfishing day — 4–6 hours, real-world practice | |
| Sunday | Rest or easy yoga / stretching | |
Total time commitment: ~6 hours/week of training, plus your spearfishing day. Spread across short sessions. Adjust as life requires — consistency over months matters more than perfection in any given week.
The San Diego specifics
Most San Diego spearfishing happens in 15–40 ft of water, in kelp, around structures like the Marine Room or the canyon edges off La Jolla. The seasonal pattern dictates what you target:
- Spring (Mar–May). Lobster opener in October, but white seabass season starts now. Water is cold (55–60°F), vis can be poor.
- Summer (Jun–Aug). Warmest water, best vis. Yellowtail come in during runs. Halibut on the sand.
- Fall (Sep–Nov). Lobster season opens early October. Calmer conditions overall.
- Winter (Dec–Feb). Cold, often choppy. Sand bass and the occasional opportunistic shot at a lingcod. Many spearos take this season off for training.
Use the cold winter months for cross-training. The warm summer months for testing in the water.
The case for joining LJFC Saturday Sessions
One of the highest-leverage things a spearo can do is dive in a non-spearfishing context. Our Saturday ocean sessions at La Jolla Shores are open to certified freedivers and run as line-and-buoy training, not hunting. You work on depth, technique, and rescue scenarios with safety divers on every drop.
The benefit for spearfishers is twofold: you build skills you can't develop while hunting (because attention is split), and you stay sharp on safety protocols that you may not have practiced since your AIDA course.
Sources and further reading
- Verbaas, Jaap. Longer and Deeper: Cross-Training for Freediving and Spearfishing. 2019. The book this approach is adapted from.
- Pelizzari, Umberto. Specific Training for Freediving: Deep, Static and Dynamic Apnea. 2019.
- Patrician, A., et al. (2021). On autonomic regulation in apnea divers.
- LJFC: Why Spearfishers Should Get AIDA Certified — the safety baseline before this training matters.
- LJFC: Building a 4-Minute Breath Hold
- LJFC: CO2 Tolerance Training Guide
- AIDA International
