From pivot to perfect.

[Raphus]

Thank you for being patient with me. There's a reason I'm doing this. With a nearly empty cylinder, your breathing needs to be shallow. I'd argue that you are slightly underweighted then. Now with adding 1 kg with a full cylinder, are you able to perform a fin pivot? I'd imagine that you hardly touch the bottom. Of course, you have to place that weight low to make you foot heavy. I'm shaking my head as I visualize all this, so I'm going to stop as this is .... just wrong.

I don't understand why the fin pivot is used as a demonstration of neutral buoyancy either, as it isn't. It is a demonstration of negative buoyancy combined with being foot heavy.

The argument that "a new student can't hover directly, so its better to show them the fin pivot first" is simply false. You may think your instructors are good, but they need to take off their horseblinders. I don't know what else to say. Today, I'm actually submitting a blog series to SDI on how I teach neutrally buoyant and trimmed, but I think some of the instructors who should read it, won't.

Yes with 1or 2 kg a cant do the fin pivot very well.
You are right about your comment, in my opinion. I just said, that my instructs are good in general, but not on the fin pivot task.

But i see this fin pivot in a lot of owds (in the lakes, by other unknown instructors.) so its a wide spread problem.
I try not to blame instructor for mistakes they do, because i cant judge them, with my limited(non existent) experience in teaching.
The reason i am interested in this subject is, because i want to be a good dm/instructor and this includes teaching neutral bouyancy.

Can you please post the link to your blog about teaching neutral bouyancy? I am very interested.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

Yes with 1or 2 kg a cant do the fin pivot very well.
You are right about your comment, in my opinion. I just said, that my instructs are good in general, but not on the fin pivot task.

But i see this fin pivot in a lot of owds (in the lakes, by other unknown instructors.) so its a wide spread problem.
I try not to blame instructor for mistakes they do, because i cant judge them, with my limited(non existent) experience in teaching.
The reason i am interested in this subject is, because i want to be a good dm/instructor and this includes teaching neutral bouyancy.

Can you please post the link to your blog about teaching neutral bouyancy? I am very interested.

I just submitted the posts via email to SDI earlier. As this is my first submission, I don't know how long this will take, but I will be posting in the instructor to instructor and basic scuba forums when the links go live

 

[decompression]

Well, hindsight is 20/20.
The subject came up and it occurred to me that it would have been the perfect time to explore trim weights.
My OW class was done overweighted and kneeling to start. Sure, we learned buoyancy control but nothing about trim weighting. I could only assume everyone was supposed to be fin heavy.
It sounds like you've refined your own methods of teaching in trim and neutral from the start. Nice. It's what makes gravity disappear and scuba so easy.
Yes, any wasted propulsion to adjust trim will cause more gas consumption and fatigue.

Cheers!

Thanks for the kind words.....I have certainly refined things in my courses but I was taught how to teach neutral when I crossed over to UTD many years ago. It’s been great to see so many agencies and instructors pick up their game a bit. Long way to go but it’s the sport we love.