Club Highlight - H2O Fitness

This week, I chatted with Paul Holze from H2O Fitness, a hybrid training program that uses apnea workouts to help people all over the world stay fit and confident in the water. Based in San Diego, Hawaii and Australia, H2O harnesses the power of water and your breath to improve calmness, capacity and performance under pressure.

Alex Pelling (Host), joined by Paul Holze, H2O Fitness.

Check them out at h2ofitness.com, or on Instagram via @h2o.fitness !

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Alex: First question, if anyone doesn't know, tell us about H2O Fitness - what is it?

Paul: H2O Fitness offers what we call hybrid apnea workouts. To break that down one by one, we're doing hybrid training on land and in the water. Some of it's at the pool, some of it's at the ocean, some of it's at the beach, some of it's at the park.

And the second component of that, apnea, means we're applying breath hold movements to the workouts. So when you're underwater, of course, that makes perfect sense that you’re holding your breath. But we also found there's a certain magic to training how to breathe, how to regulate, how to deal with a build up of CO2, how to train the same stress response on land that we develop in the water. So, hybrid apnea training is a play on both the hybrid nature of moving in and out of the water during workouts and our ability to use breath holds on land as we do in the water.

Alex: Fantastic. And as an extension of that - If I was a beginner, if I joined one of your sessions, what would that look like? What could I expect?

Paul: At our pool sessions, you would expect to primarily be doing CO2 tolerance training. With that comes the added benefits of dealing with your stress response. So anytime you have that urge to breathe kick up, you are then battling that sympathetic system kicking in, telling yourself, hey, you know, you're in danger. But really it’s just discomfort. So you’re learning to calm your response, calm your heart rate, calm your mind, and be able to adapt to that CO2 build up through the design of the workouts…that alone is what you could come to expect in a session.

Now, of course, with the workouts in the water also comes water conditioning, swim training, mindset training, as well as the overall added benefits of low impact training.

All these added benefits center around showing up to the pool, doing breath work together on land to get started, diving in and warming up in the water, then being guided through three or four workouts.

Alex: Fantastic. Okay. So it all sounds brilliant. Tough, but really good stuff. How did H2O start? How did it come to be originally?

Paul: Our roots are really everywhere - in the military, in swimming, in freediving, in surfing, in yoga, in breath work. All of our coaches are coming from all these different disciplines, and that to me is what's made H2O Fitness unique and different. It’s that we're integrating these different disciplines.

Some of them directly relate, like we're taking cues from Molchanov and how they're doing safety recovery breathing coming up from a breath hold. We're using yoga in terms of working on mobility and flexibility with the breaststroke kick. We're pulling from surfing, from the unpredictability in nature. We're drawing from the military in terms of resilience training under fatigue. We're pulling from the world of neuroscience in terms of stress response training, learning about the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system, how we can regulate or rewire the body.

Our coaches are what informed our beginnings, but it's a never ending process. Every coach who comes onto the team is helping to guide us forward and to evolve the training. I think that's one of the really beautiful things about H2O Fitness.

Alex: Fantastic. I really like the idea that it draws from different disciplines to make this really nice, embedded system for people. It's pretty interesting.

Paul: At one point, I thought it was a weakness that we weren't just all freedivers. We weren't all just military. We're not just from one world. We're from all these different worlds, and it's come to be a huge draw to people training in that they can either identify and relate, or if they're wanting to get into a new field, we have the resources and connections to guide them there. The diversity has become the heart of our training, our methodology, and our safety. Our ability to push into performance is coming from all different walks of life. In that way, the training has not remained static and continues to evolve.

Alex: Brilliant. I see you have more conventional level classes that anyone can get involved with, and you also have more advanced stuff. What is the difference there?

Paul: In our traditional classes, what we call our all-levels classes, someone can come in as a beginner and work with a dedicated coach to be guided through an orientation. We walk them through our methodology, movements, and our approach to training. If desired, they then have that one-on-one kind of coach available throughout the session Everyone else is working with the lead coach through a three to four workout progression primarily focused on the CO2 tolerance work spoken about earlier.

We also run tactical training. This tactical training is a lot of fun because, one, it caters towards mil prep, towards candidates heading into the fire academies or other first responder career pathways. But we've also invited the community in as a whole…those who are looking to do hard things, not because they've got a career they're preparing for but because that's the type of challenge they're looking for. We've mixed in veterans, active duty, advanced freedivers, big wave surfers, and advanced practitioners with those that are on the flip side - those that are starting their journey into the water world, applying it towards their careers, and they get to be challenged by and learn from the community around them.

That tactical class takes CO2 tolerance training and adds a more physical demanding workload. So we're doing additional higher heart rate work and more land work, designed to give more exposure to performing under fatigue and stress.

We've also developed a new style, what we call our hybrid classes, and those have erg machines, skiers and rowers, poolside with heavy bags. So now we're pairing our breath control at the pool with strength and high output on land. The challenge is: can you regulate your system? Can you move between the high and low heart rate systems within your body and still perform?

And then beyond the pool, we've developed what we call a beach x breath workout. We have the pleasure of currently running sessions in Australia, Hawaii and San Diego, thus the integration of the beach. But it could easily be done at a park where we're applying that apnea breath work to on-land training.

Alex: Amazing. I don't think we have such nice beaches in the UK, haha! And you kind of answered this, but also what do you feel like the benefits are of incorporating breath work and apnea, as opposed to say, just doing normal cardio or weights / strength training?

Paul: There are many benefits, but the primary one is the stress response training. I am a believer that all of us could use a good return to baseline, whether that's on a daily or weekly basis to calm your nervous system. Programmed properly, water can be a very calming environment. It can also be a very stressful environment. We leverage that contrast by using breath holds in the water as a controlled form of stress exposure. At the same time, the water itself becomes part of the solution, offering a naturally calming environment where you can repeatedly use your breath to regulate your nervous system throughout the workout. Over time, you begin to recondition your body's response to stress, learning to shift from tension to relaxation, even under increasing physical and mental load.

You can then translate that self-regulation to your lifestyle, your work, and your performance outside of the pool.

Alex: What I love about everything you said so far is that you guys have a really deep understanding of the audience and people coming from different perspectives. Obviously, we come from an underwater hockey perspective. We're always trying to communicate to people that you can combine cardio and apnea work, but also the idea of pushing yourself past the initial feeling of wow, this is a lot. Because it can be incredibly rewarding.

In that same vein, when you go into your Instagram page, the first thing you see is loads of happy people. That's great. Talking about community in a sporting and health context, what do you feel contributes towards what I would describe as a strong, welcoming community?

Paul: Community is central to what we do. One, you shouldn't be doing this training on your own from a safety perspective. But also, as I have heard from another coach, when you're doing hard things together, it changes your bond.

And I think that's a really beautiful thing. We have a lot of partners who come together, and we have a lot of friends coming together. But I'll speak from my own experience, you're getting to meet and open yourself up to a whole world of new people that by and large, you would never come across in any other environment. And so then when you bring in crossfitters with freedivers, military with surfers, any and all walks of life together, I think that's one thing that makes this community really special.

Whether it’s in San Diego, Hawaii, or Australia, for where we're at right now, the members often say, I love the training but the community is even better. 

That starts with our coaches who create an environment where everyone is welcomed. So I'm glad you said the first thing you see is loads of happy people. It can be intimidating, but everyone that's here is genuinely very kind. And we make sure it's that way, from the top down, just the way the coaches approach you, the way we interact with you. It's not about any type of flex. It’s not about me versus you.

It can be competitive in a playful way, where we're all leveling up. But the sense of community comes about from good people looking for something fun and hard to do. And who would have known, those people get along really well together, haha.

Alex: That's brilliant. Thank you. And finally, you guys have expanded to different locations and lots of different groups. What are your aspirations for H2O Fitness in the future? What's on the horizon?

Paul: An original aspiration was to offer training sessions every day. This past spring in San Diego, we finally achieved that. It wasn't just a business milestone, though. The bigger picture was to make a new lifestyle possible, where this isn't something people experience once a week as a novelty, but something they can integrate into their daily routine. Just as someone might swim laps every day, we believe breath-hold training, returning to baseline, and practicing self-regulation can become daily habits.

That original aspiration was never simply about adding more sessions. It was about creating enough opportunities for consistent exposure that these skills become part of everyday life rather than an occasional workout. The land apnea training has now become a part of that picture.

But the larger aspiration we're focused on is to shift the community culture of any city that we're a part of. This sounds outside the bounds of running a business, but it comes from having experienced the culture in Bondi Beach in Sydney and San Juan del Sur in Nicaragua.

In each of those communities, I would meet people from the United States that would say, oh my goodness, I wish it was like this back where we live. And while we can't simply recreate the magic that these communities have spent generations building, we can certainly try to cultivate a stronger sense of collective connection, no matter where we are.

When I was first in Bondi, it's a place that shaped my worldview around community and what's possible at a larger scale. Not just one group, but the whole city being in it together. And I'm sure there's other pockets in the world that exist like that.

But where I'm from, San Diego, and where our other teams currently are in Hawaii, my aspiration is to be a force for that connected nature. And I know other people want it. I don't think we're alone in trying to create it. And we certainly can't be alone in creating it.

So my aspiration is to run training sessions. But beyond that, to be a force for how we connect. And so that anyone that experiences our programming and our community, can get a sense of belonging, a sense of connection. And they don't have to go elsewhere from home to be able to get that. That's the long term aspiration wherever our training and community grows to.

 

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