Does freediving help scuba diving?

[TheScubaCenter]

Since you've been freediving, have you seen any significant differences in your scuba diving?

 

[cmburch]

Freedivers in general will be in the water more than on SCUBA, so may help in becoming familiar with the ocean. May be able to handle things such as kelp, swell, surge, waves, etc. better. Not necessarilly though though since you are not strapped to a tank.

 

[Hank49]

One of the things you need to master.....get really good at....in scuba is buoyancy control. Get down and learn to hover motionlessly so you don't expend energy.
Free diving is all about getting down. You vary your weights depending on your working depth (say for diving on a bottom of 35 feet vs dives going to 70 feet). I put more weight on for shallow dives and less for deep so I'll be neutral at 20 feet or so.
Very different approaches to skill development.
But, as cmburch said, any water time is good. It's all fun.

 

[REVAN]

Since I went back to freediving, I've found that I spend a lot more time in the water now than when I was on scuba. I've also been having more fun. I still scuba, but usually it is because someone else wants me to go with them.

If you take a freediving class, you will learn a lot about diet and diving physiology that will be useful for scuba diving. You may likely to loose a lot of weight also which will just improve how you feel overall. Something about going into a deep apnea state just causes the body to shed excess pounds like crazy. I've lost over 25 pounds since I started freedive training about 9 months ago.

 

[wdaf]

Freediving can also give you more safety.
If you know you can survive without breathing for some time and you have an out of air emergency you can do the CESA (controlled Emergency Swimming Ascent) from even bigger depths.

 

[Akimbo]

Freediving was an important part of my Scuba course in the early 1960s. It does a lot to develop a sense of self confidence over equipment dependence. In-turn, I believe that it reduces the human tendency to panic when faced with unexpected conditions. IMHO, panic is the biggest cause of death in recreational divers. Besides, once you get over the hump, it is a lot of fun.

 

[danvolker]

Since you've been freediving, have you seen any significant differences in your scuba diving?

A few of the benefits of freediving for scuba divers:

• With all the huge bulk of scuba tank, large bc, etc, many scuba divers have very poor awareness of what they are doing right, or wrong, in propulsion and trim. But when freediving, they become so "slick" in the water, that mistakes are see and felt right away, and corrections are felt just as quickly. As the freediving biofeedback gets you doing all the right things propulsively, and with trim, it is much easier to figure out how to optimize when on scuba.
• Concept of big kick and glide gets to be easily experienced--this will help alot for scuba divers.
• weighting gets perfected with freediving. Understanding how big a deal this is occurs, and when you then scuba dive again, you will take the time to get weighting right.
• Knowing how easy it is to swim up on your own power, given proper weighting, is knowledge freediving imparts, and scuba divers should have.
• While this is unlikley to ever be of use to most, a good freediver who also scuba dives, would be in a strong position if they ever surfaced after a scuba dive far from shore, and found no boat waiting. A freediver would be able to use the snorkel and be comfortable in the water for as many hours as needed, whereas the scuba only diver is going to be less comfortable without air in the tanks( which is going to happen in this case). If wearing a wetsuit and bouyant, the freediver would have the choice of keeping all the gear and swimming toward shore, or ditching the tank and keeping the BC and swimming to shore...some "might" elect to dump both BC and tank, if wetsuit is bouyant and they dropped the weightbelt--and wanted maximum slickness in the water to make a 3 to 5 mile swim....this may be a solution for a triathlete/competitive cyclist type, but would probably be a big mistake for most freediver/scuba divers......and if they were so far from shore swimming to it was out of the question, then the bc without tank would e the only way to go....and the freediver would still have a big advantage in comfort on the surface with the snorkel and bluewater scenario.