Pretty new diver here, about 40 dives, and looking for advice.
Just finished up a week of dives in Grenada, and made a point of paying attention to air consumption. Based on Internet advice, I focused on breathing deeply and exhaling completely, counting 4 seconds in, 6 seconds out. Doing this, my computer reported average SAC has dropped from about 0.8 to 0.5, and I'm not the one calling dives for gas anymore. This seems like a great improvement.
However, my buoyancy goes to shit when I'm doing this. Breathing more "normally", I can maintain a neutral depth with good trim. But with this more efficient breath control, I go up and down several feet with every breath. This actually makes it pretty easy to control when I ascend and descend, but obviously isn't great for most of the dive.
If I try to breathe normally-but-slow, I feel like I'm hyperventilating.
So what's the trick here? How do you both breathe efficiently and control your buoyancy?
I think I'm pretty well weighted, since I have no problem maintaining my safety stop with the shallower breaths.
1.20.1992:
In a 2012 Tumblr post, comedian Donovan Strain used the song's lyrics to determine that the titular "Good Day" likely occurred on January 20, 1992.[10] Strain wrote that this date was "the only day where Yo! MTV Raps was on air, it was a clear and smogless day in Los Angeles, beepers or pagers were commercially sold, Lakers beat the SuperSonics, and Ice Cube had no filming commitments".