Tom Elliott
Freediving Instructor
Tom first discovered freediving when he was at work, on a coffee break and reading about Emma and freediving in BBC Focus magazine and thinking it looked really cool.
Deciding to strike whilst the iron was hot, he immediately rang Emma up and was on a course within two weeks. He loved the first part of the course, but as soon as he got in the water, he had issues with his ears and couldn’t get down at all. But everyone was having so much fun around him, it made him want to do more.
To ‘cut a long and boring story short’, it took Tom years to slowly improve his freediving technique, and then he realised he didn’t need to have perfect equalisation technique, he just needed to stop eating gluten!
However, once he did this, he realised that the limit to his depth was now fear, which was novel as it had been equalisation for the past 8 years!
He then decided to enter freediving competitions because he thought they looked cool, and become a freediving instructor because it meant he could share everything that he had learned on his long freediving journey.
He first entered a pool competition in Bristol and had no expectations of what the competition would be like. He found it a lot of fun, immersing himself in a community, setting personal bests in all three pool freediving disciplines, and coming second overall.
Tom particularly likes dynamic no-fins freediving with the improvements that can be made by improving technique. Ironically, because he enjoys no-fins freediving so much, his no fins pb is a greater distance than his bi-fins pb!
Tom has carried on with competition, including depth events and in 2019 made the UK freediving team.
What Tom loves about teaching, is seeing people overcoming adversity because he’s done it himself over the years. Every person has their own unique set of challenges with freediving and he thinks it’s amazing to help them crack whatever it is they are struggling with.
