Ant Williams
World Record Freediver and Keynote Speaker
Business psychologist and world champion freediver, Ant Williams combines academic expertise with elite athletic experience to teach leaders mental toughness, focus, and peak performance.
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One of the deepest men in the world, Ant Williams has pushed through both physical and mental barriers to hold his breath for over 8 minutes, dive to -100m and to swim 240m on one breath. In short, he knows how to overcome some of the most demanding and uncomfortable challenges a person can face.
Ant worked with big wave surfers, motoGP riders, rock climbers and other risk takers on how to break through mental barriers when he realised, according to him, he was a fraud. He hadn’t done anything high-risk in his life. He wanted to know if anyone could learn how to become a risk taker. So, Ant decided to take up freediving and learn first-hand how to perform under pressure.
He broke the world record for the furthest distance swam under ice in a single breath on 30 April 2024 during the production of “Ice Dive,” the third episode of Adventure, an Apple Original series available exclusively on Apple Vision Pro. Williams achieved the record of 182 meters (199 yards) on a custom-built course in Iceland, with water temperatures of only 0.2 degrees Celsius.
He set the world record for the deepest man under ice in 2019, and wanted to tackle the distance record set by French freediver Arthur Guerin-Boeri. In the opening of “Ice Dive,” Williams states, ‘if you don’t train your mind, it will sabotage you,” which he believes is the key to his success. “There are others in the sport who are more physically suited to it than I am – they are taller and more slender with longer lungs and therefore greater lung capacity,” he continues. “But, where I am unbeatable, is my ability to focus my mind so intently on the task at hand as to almost eliminate completely the risk of failure.”
Coming from a background in sport psychology, Ant was training extreme sports athletes before he became one himself, he became so uniquely equipped with the mental strength it takes the very best athletes to reach the pinnacle of their sports.
