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Practising Frenzel at Home — Three Steps

No water needed. Three steps that get progressively harder, why freedivers need Frenzel at all, what happens when the air in your mouth runs out, and a simple test to check you are doing Frenzel and not Valsalva.

Equalisation is the wall most beginners hit, and Frenzel is the usual way through it.

But there is something about Frenzel that often goes unsaid: the tongue is a muscle, and muscles take time to build. When people struggle to Frenzel on the buoy, it is usually not a problem of understanding. The tongue simply is not strong enough yet. And that part you can train at home, dry.

A word on safety first. The rule for equalisation is early, gentle, and often — equalise before you feel pressure, not after your ears start to hurt. Pain means the pressure difference is already too large, and pushing harder at that point only raises the risk of barotrauma. Do not dive with a cold, a blocked nose, or sinus inflammation. The same applies on dry land: never force it. Tongue strength is built, not squeezed out.

Three steps below, each harder than the last. Do them in order.

Step 1: Mouth open, nose free, make a sound with the back of your tongue

Use the back of your tongue to make a sound somewhere between a "k" and a "g".

Just copy the sound. Do not think about whether your throat should move up and down, or about swallowing. The moment you focus on the throat, you start recruiting the muscles beside it, which is the wrong place to push from. I trained it wrong myself once, and the Frenzel that came out was crooked.

A quiet sound at the start is normal — it means the tongue is still weak. Louder is better. Volume tells you how well you control the back of the tongue and how strong it is getting.

Step 2: Pinch your nose and repeat

Same tongue action, but this time pinch your nose shut.

Two things happen immediately:

• Your nostrils flare and stay flared
• Your eardrums move

Here is why. The air your tongue pushes normally escapes through three openings: two nostrils and your mouth. Pinch the nose and the air that would have escaped there has nowhere to go, so it turns into the Eustachian tubes. The pressure bends at the nose first, then travels to the ears, and your eardrums get pushed outward. That is equalisation happening.

If the sensation in your ears and nose is faint going from step 1 to step 2, the tongue is probably still too weak. Spend a little longer on step 1 — there is no rush to move on.

Step 3: Nose pinched, mouth closed too

Step 3 adds a closed mouth to step 2.

From the outside you should see two things: your throat moving up and down, and your nostrils flaring.

Same warning as before: do not imagine the force coming from your throat. Imagine it coming from the back of the tongue. That is exactly why step 1 asks for a sound first — the sound helps you find the right place to push from.

The part nobody tells you: the sides of your tongue must seal against your palate

This is the most important thing here, and the thing I hear taught least often.

Everyone says "push with the back of the tongue". But what you are pushing is not the air in your whole mouth.

Think about it: your cheeks are elastic. If you were pushing the entire oral cavity, the pressure would simply bulge your cheeks outward and be absorbed there. It would never reach the Eustachian tubes. You would feel like you were working hard and nothing would happen.

What actually works: the sides of your tongue press up against your palate and enclose a small sealed pocket. What the back of your tongue compresses is only the air inside that pocket. Because the edges are sealed, air cannot leak back into the mouth, so the pressure goes where you want it.

So when you "push with the back of the tongue", the tongue is not relaxed or slack. It is doing two jobs at once: the edges seal, the back pushes. Without the sealing half, no amount of pushing will do anything.

This is trainable too. Plenty of instructors say "push with the tongue". Far fewer say the tongue has to build the chamber first.

So why does mouthfill use the cheeks instead?

You may have heard that the advanced mouthfill technique compresses air with the mouth and cheeks, which sounds like the opposite of what I just described. Both are correct. What changes is the state of your cheeks.

During mouthfill you have drawn a last volume of air up from the chest and are holding it in your mouth, so your cheeks are inflated. Once they are, the distance between your tongue and your palate is simply too great — physiologically you can no longer enclose that space. With the seal unavailable, the mouth and cheeks become the only way to generate pressure.

In ordinary equalisation your cheeks are not inflated, your tongue can reach the palate, and you get to pressurise a small chamber instead — which takes less effort and delivers more reliably.

So neither method is better than the other. It depends on whether you are holding that mouthful of air.

Why freedivers need Frenzel and scuba divers mostly don't

Scuba divers rarely make a point of learning Frenzel, because they carry a tank. Their air supply is effectively unlimited. Push however you like, there is always more.

Freediving is different, for two reasons.

First, we do not want you spending energy. Once Frenzel is working, a small push from the back of the tongue costs far less than driving your whole abdomen. Over a dozen equalisations in a single dive, that difference adds up.

Second — and to me this is the bigger one — efficiency. A flick of the tongue is more precise than a whole abdominal contraction. And with practice it becomes reflexive. You stop thinking about it and it simply happens.

What happens when the air in your mouth runs out?

You might ask: doesn't the air in your mouth get used up too?

It does. But while there is still air in your lungs and chest, it refills automatically, at a separate moment.

Here is the sequence. At the instant you Frenzel, your glottis is closed and you are only pushing the air already in your mouth into the Eustachian tubes. After that push, if there is still air in your chest, you open the glottis again, the positive pressure in the chest sends air up into your mouth, the mouth refills, and you close it and push the next one.

At shallow and medium depths this barely needs conscious thought, and with practice it becomes part of the rhythm. But be clear about it: you are doing it — it is not happening by itself. I point this out because if you assume the refill is automatic, then when you run dry you will wait for something that is not coming, instead of reaching for the switch.

But as you go deeper, the chest air runs low too. With less pressure in the chest, air no longer travels to the mouth on its own. That is where advanced techniques come in — mouthfill being the main one: you actively expand the volume of your mouth to create a temporary negative pressure, drawing air out of the lungs into the mouth, then use that single mouthful to finish the remaining equalisations of the dive.

That is all for much later, though. For now, just get comfortable with these three steps — the rest will come when it comes.

Why does each step feel harder?

Because you are closing the exits one at a time.

In step 1, nothing is blocked, air escapes easily, and the tongue barely works. In step 2 you pinch the nose and lose half the exits. Air pushes at the nose, cannot get out, and diverts to the ears — which means the pinching itself is pressurising the air, and your tongue is what has to hold that pressure. In step 3 the mouth closes too, and the tongue has to push harder still.

Think of a syringe. With the needle open, the plunger moves easily. Block the needle and push again, and you feel the pressure immediately.

So yes, each step is harder. That is the design, not a sign you are going backwards.

How do you know it is Frenzel and not Valsalva?

Valsalva pushes air up from below the glottis. Frenzel uses only the tongue. Both equalise in shallow water, but Valsalva stops working as you go deeper.

The simplest test: exhale everything, then try to equalise.

Empty your lungs completely — bending slightly at the waist helps make sure they really are empty. In that state, the driving force behind Valsalva is gone. If you can still push air into your ears, what you are doing is Frenzel.

A second check: put a hand on your stomach. During Frenzel, your abdomen should not be working.

You may notice it tensing slightly at first. That is usually habit — pushing with the belly feels stronger, and it gives a sense of security. With practice it becomes the tongue alone, with the stomach fully released.

Troubleshooting

The situations below are the ones beginners hit most often. This section is for people who have been practising and are stuck.

I can do it on land, but not the moment I get in the water

This is a different problem from the head-down one below. Head-down is about angle; this one is about your attention being taken up by other things.

In the water you are busy. You cannot touch the bottom, you are holding a position, and in open water there is an instructor and other students watching from the buoy. Pressure builds. Then the sentence starts running in your head: am I going to fail at this again? — the fear of whether you can equalise this time fills your mind, which makes equalising even less likely.

And you are doing all this while holding your breath. Holding your breath makes it harder to relax and focus on anything — try doing a jigsaw puzzle while holding your breath and you will see. Equalisation needs fine control, and fine control is exactly what panic takes away.

So my suggestion is to practise in a pool where you can stand.

Position does not matter; head-up is fine. What matters is that you can stand up at any moment. That one fact alone removes most of the panic. After Frenzel feels smooth on land, the next step is not the open ocean — it is water where your feet reach the bottom.

Why is head-down so much harder than standing up?

This one is specific to freediving — scuba divers usually descend upright and rarely meet it. I was stuck here myself at the start.

First, why it is harder.

Air is light. It wants to rise. When you are head-up, pushing air toward your ears goes with its nature. Head-down, you are asking it to travel downward, or at best sideways. The physics is simply harder, so finding it difficult at first is completely normal.

Second, why people get stuck here.

I have seen very capable students stall on this — people who are constantly in the water, who have scuba experience, who are entirely at home in the sea. But course time is limited, so their first head-down equalisation happens in open water, possibly the first time in their life. Going from head-up to head-down is a 180-degree change, and doing it all at once is frustrating by design.

The answer is a gradual progression, not a jump straight to 90°.

In water: start with a kickboard under your hands, face down, body horizontal, and get equalisation smooth at that angle. Then increase the slope little by little — lift your hips, or lower your hands. Picture yourself as the hand of a clock, tilting down one notch at a time. Once the in-between angles work, the full head-down position becomes possible.

On land: use a bed or a chair to put your head lower than your hips. If that feels easy, add height.

Valsalva is fine for this drill. If your stomach engages, that means you are using Valsalva — and that is fine here. At this stage you are training your body to accept the angle, not perfecting the technique. Get comfortable with the angle first, then go back to Frenzel.

The most common mistake: practising 90° straight away in the sea. Everyone duck-dives and grinds at it. That route is painful and the frustration is high. The angles can be built up on land and in shallow water first.

That is how I got there myself.

Only one ear clears, the other does not

This happens to me too, sometimes. I say that first because a lot of people assume they are the only one, and that they must be doing something wrong.

The human body is not symmetrical. Having one Eustachian tube narrower than the other is very, very normal.

Especially when you push hard, the looser side pops suddenly and strongly, while the other side feels less clear. That gap is usually not a mistake on your part — the two sides simply are not built the same.

Try a few more equalisations. If the tighter side opens after a few more attempts, you are fine, and you can work it open gradually with repetition rather than force.

But some people genuinely have a narrow Eustachian tube.

If this bothers you long-term, see an ENT who works in diving medicine rather than continuing to force it. Forcing costs you an uncomfortable, over-stretched eardrum, and pushing too hard can leave you with frequent nosebleeds — that is not diligence, that is accumulating damage.

In Taiwan you can look up Dr Atlas Chen (@chen.atlas) — an ENT head and neck surgeon who is also an AIDA freediving instructor, running a Eustachian tube and equalisation clinic at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital. He knows what divers are asking about.

One option is balloon eustachian tuboplasty — in plain terms, using a small balloon to widen the tube.

I used to think the effect only lasted a few weeks. Checking the literature, I had that wrong. One study looked specifically at divers: of 13 military divers and aviators grounded by Eustachian tube problems, 92% (12/13) returned to duty, with an average of 8.5 weeks to get back.¹ That 8.5 weeks is probably where my "few weeks" came from — but it is the time to return to diving, not the time before the effect fades. On durability, the wider literature shows significant improvement still measurable at one year, and 87% maintained improvement in a group followed for 34 months.²

To be clear about the uncertainty: the diver study had only 13 participants, and its authors state plainly that long-term effectiveness needs more research. Do not treat it as a guarantee.

I push hard but feel nothing in my ears

First rule out two things:

1. Are the sides of your tongue sealing against your palate? (see the section above). Without that chamber, the effort is absorbed by your cheeks.
2. Are you pushing from your throat rather than the back of your tongue?

If your technique is solid and your tubes are not unusually narrow (that was the previous question), there is something many people do not know.

Pushing harder can actually make it less likely to open.

DAN (Divers Alert Network) puts it directly: if you do not equalise early and often enough, the pressure difference presses the soft tissues at the tube openings together — and forcing air against them at that point simply locks them shut.³

So "no feeling, push harder" is a road that gets worse the further you go. Excessive force also carries risk: DAN specifically warns not to hold a Valsalva for more than five seconds and not to blow too hard, as that can injure the inner ear.

My own experience: after a long time out of the water, the first few equalisations are noticeably harder.

The same effort produces less opening than you remember. This is common and does not mean you have gone backwards.

What I do: open my ears in the shallows before the actual dive.

• Start head-up, pushing gently, to loosen the front section of the tube
• Then, with safety in place, try it head-down in the shallow area, again gently

The point is gentleness, not force. You are asking the door to move a little, not trying to break it down.

Why this is worth the time: after a long break, dropping straight onto the line means needing a lot of force at the very start — and that is a real distraction from the whole dive. You spend the descent thinking about your ears instead of being in the water.

Two minutes in the shallows buys you a smooth dive.

I can't equalise fast enough on the way down

Something many people never realise: the sharpest pressure change is in the first 10 metres.

That is exactly the stretch you pass fastest after a duck dive. So "not fast enough" is usually not slow reactions — that section is genuinely steep.

First: equalise several times in the shallows before you go (see above).

Second: switch to free immersion.

Free immersion is a freediving discipline where you pull yourself down the line instead of finning. For anyone with equalisation trouble, its advantage is that the speed is entirely in your hands:

• Descend one metre at a time if you want
• You can stop completely — hold the line and stay at a depth
• Clear your ears there, then continue

Finning lets you control speed too, but a duck dive already puts you at depth before you can slow down — and that is the very stretch where pressure changes fastest.

If you cannot clear at a certain depth, do not go deeper.

Going deeper only increases the difficulty. The larger the pressure difference, the harder the soft tissue is pressed shut, and the less it will open (the mechanism from the previous question). Pushing on either injures you or demands very strong Frenzel technique and tongue strength — and that is not something you can grow on the spot.

If you get stuck: hold the line and stop. Do not panic. Gently move your tongue and nose and see if it shifts.

If it still will not clear, try changing your body position. The difficulty of equalising varies from person to person and from depth to depth — whether you started head-up or head-down, changing the angle and feeling your way often finds a position that works.

But this comes with conditions: you need enough breath left, and safety beside you. Adjusting like this takes time, so if your breath is running low, do not spend it there. Come up and try again.

So I do recommend beginners warm up with free immersion. Open your ears one depth at a time on the line, confirm each level works, and switch to fins later.

It usually works, and then one day it doesn't

I think of this as a psychological or physiological fluctuation.

It is a bit like acne — you do not break out every day, but on a day when you are stressed or something in your body has shifted, it appears. Equalisation is the same. It is not a fixed ability; it moves with your condition on the day.

A cold is a common cause, and there is a clear mechanism.

An upper respiratory infection inflames and swells the mucous lining of your nose and Eustachian tubes, which narrows the passage; the mucus also thickens and blocks it.⁴ So finding equalisation harder with a cold is not your imagination — the tube really is narrower. Allergic rhinitis works the same way.

This is also why you should not dive with a cold or a blocked nose. It is not just uncomfortable — it is a high-risk state for barotrauma.

A warm-up you can do on land

If you have been out of the water a while, or equalisation is difficult for you generally, wake up the muscles around the Eustachian tubes before you get in:

• Yawning movements, stretching the jaw down as far as it goes, several times
• Move your lower jaw gently side to side
• Some people also like to tug on their earlobes

The yawning has a real basis: the Eustachian tube is normally closed and is pulled open by the surrounding muscles, and yawning uses exactly that group. Diving medicine describes voluntary tube opening as "pushing the jaw forward and down as if starting to yawn."

Recap

1. Mouth open, nose free, make the "k"/"g" sound from the back of the tongue — the louder the better
2. Pinch your nose and repeat; feel the nostrils flare and the eardrums move
3. Close both nose and mouth, and push air to the ears with the tongue alone

Three things that are easy to miss:

• The sides of the tongue must seal a small chamber against the palate, or the pressure is absorbed by your elastic cheeks
• When the mouth runs out of air, you actively open the glottis to refill — it is not automatic
• To confirm it is Frenzel: you can still equalise on empty lungs, and your stomach is not working

And when things go wrong: equalise early rather than harder, build up head-down angles gradually, and never continue past a depth you cannot clear.

Each step gets harder, and that is normal. The tongue is a muscle — take your time with it.

References

Frenzel and Valsalva physiology

• Wolber P. et al. (2022). Prospective study on the Eustachian tube function during Frenzel maneuver in a hypobaric/hyperbaric pressure chamber. European Archives of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, 279: 1843–1850.
• Lindholm P. & Lundgren C.E.G. (2009). The physiology and pathophysiology of human breath-hold diving. Journal of Applied Physiology, 106(1): 284–292.

Balloon eustachian tuboplasty

1. Utz E.R., LaBanc A.J. et al. Balloon Dilation of the Eustachian Tube for Baro-Challenge-Induced Otologic Symptoms in Military Divers and Aviators: A Retrospective Analysis. Ear, Nose & Throat Journal. doi:10.1177/0145561320938156

2. A Systematic Literature Review of the Safety and Efficacy of Eustachian Balloon Tuboplasty in Patients with Chronic Eustachian Tube Dysfunction. PMC6737097.

Equalisation timing and the risk of forcing

3. Divers Alert Network. 6 Methods to Equalize Your Ears. https://dan.org/health-medicine/health-resource/smart-guides/beat-the-squeeze-equalize-like-a-pro/6-methods-to-equalize-your-ears/

Colds and the Eustachian tube

4. Hamrang-Yousefi S. et al. Eustachian Tube Dysfunction. StatPearls, NCBI Bookshelf, 2023. See also Stanford Medicine, Eustachian Tube Dysfunction.

The teaching method here comes from my own coaching. The papers above were used to check the

physiological and medical descriptions. Medical content is a summary of published research and

does not constitute medical advice. If you find something stated imprecisely, please tell me.