Wow, TIL hyperventilating increases the danger! My brothers and I used to compete against each other in swimming pools, and we'd always hyperventilate at the beginning, thinking this 'got the oxygen in'. In any case, it definitely helped. Glad we never got into trouble this way.

My personal record is ~3:30, but I'm pretty sure I could go well past that if we had practiced instead of just competing.

You can still do it, just never do it alone

We used to hyperventilate before underwater training to extent our time under water