In what position were you taught to perform dive skills?

[tracydr]

I was also taught on my knees. I realized,last summer, while doing my DM skills with my 6'6" buddy, that its much harder for a 5'1" person to kneel on the bottom than for a tall person. Even with a short tank. I had a lot of difficulty staying on my knees. I finally won't to a fin pivot position or hovered and I was much more comfortable. My buddy had no difficulty kneeling and my instructor is very concerned that teaching students skills in neutral will be difficult to nearly impossible.
I believe if we start with fin pivot and then go to hovering, not expecting a perfect hover, that they will do great.
I've also never been able to do a comfortable "Buddha" position so I will be glad if this is removed from from the curriculum as its a silly way to learn neutral.

 

[Quero]

Actually, Tracy, the Buddha hover is not a part of the curriculum. It is merely a teaching technique intended to prevent students from sculling with their hands and feet in an attempt to maintain their position in the water. By crossing the feet at the ankles and holding the fin tips or the knees, a diver can only achieve stability in the water column by controlling the air in the BCD and in the lungs. When I'm teaching, I tell students that the performance requirement includes not sculling with the hands and feet, and that they may perform the hover in whatever position they like, as long as they don't scull. The problem is that unless the hands and feet are restrained somehow, practically all student divers will scull if we ask them to hover in a normal diving position, meaning that they will try and try and try without success to meet the performance requirements. What I've been doing instead is getting students to do the hover starting from the surface rather than starting from the bottom. I have them release tiny bits of air from their BCDs until they are "suspended" in the water column--neither floating up nor sinking down. I tell them that when they manage this to just stop, take shallow breaths, and hover.

And what does this have to do with the question posed by the poll? Everything, because the mindset that all skills need to be demonstrated while on the pool floor or sandy bottom of a bay leads to the logical conclusion that doing the hover also needs to start from the floor/bottom, and typically it will begin from a seated position, legs crossed. But in fact, in real-world diving, what we actually do is release air from our BCDs at the beginning of a dive and arrest our descent before we crash into the bottom, effectively coming to a hover position in mid water. We never go down to the bottom, get ourselves seated and then lift off the bottom into a hover.

 

[Skittl1321]

I've also never been able to do a comfortable "Buddha" position so I will be glad if this is removed from from the curriculum as its a silly way to learn neutral.

Our instructors told us we could hover in any position we wanted as long as we were mid-water and still. IIRC, the instructor demonstrated in a horizontal position, one DM did the buddha position, and one DM positioned himself upside down.


Edit to add:

I tell them that when they manage this to just stop, take shallow breaths, and hover.

This was my problem with the hover - I'd occasionally find myself crashing down. If I took shallow breaths, I could prevent myself from doing it; but that seems to contradict all the advice to take long slow breaths. How do you reconcile the two?

 

[Quero]

This was my problem with the hover - I'd occasionally find myself crashing down. If I took shallow breaths, I could prevent myself from doing it; but that seems to contradict all the advice to take long slow breaths. How do you reconcile the two?

Briefly--we teach divers to take slow, complete breaths partly because rapid breathing causes carbon dioxide buildup in the blood stream, which leads to massive headaches and partly because slow breathing promotes relaxation, and partly because slow breathing facilitates learning breath control--obviously it also oxygenates the blood. However it does affect buoyancy. When you're swimming, your forward movement negates the buoyancy change, but when you're holding a hover, you will tend to float up and then crash down and then float up and then crash down with long, slow breaths, so when you have to hold a hover, the way to do it is to take shallower breaths, only for as long as you need to stay stopped, and then to resume taking long, slow breaths thereafter.

 

[drbill]

On my knees back in the 60s... but sometimes on all fours with a boot on my butt when the instructor (an ex Marine) didn't like my questions or answers

 

[boulderjohn]

I think this kneeling comes as a natural progression: Think back to the very first OW pool session you ever had, you start out in the 3 foot end and the only way to do anything is kneel down on the bottom and get your head underwater.

That is not the only way to do it in water that shallow. Lying horizontal is what we are talking about, and it is much easier to lie horizontal in shallow water than to kneel in shallow water.

 

[spectrum]

I think someone with the right talent needs to sign up to sketch a karma Sutra of scuba positions.

 

[victorzamora]

Kama Scub-tra? I like it. Not sure about the name. Someone more creative might need to do some thinking.

So, now that there have been a few pages of discussion:

As far as position goes: Can I just say I really don't understand WHY you would ever do a skill while vertical?? I'm honestly concerned about that. I helped out on a LOT of OW sessions in high flow, low vis conditions and always had a hard time with students all on their knees. One group saw me in a "fin pivot" posture and mimicked me....they all were more confident and more comfortable. Being lower helped them stay a bit out of the current and they had less of a moment arm to rotate about. Me being in a fin pivot vs horizontal hover is that if they got too positive for any reason, I was relatively negative. I always did these dives with EXTRA lead, so when a student does something dumb I'm more capable of pinning them down. If I knew a buoyancy skill was coming up and I'd need extra negative, I'd go to a kneel...but only to keep my head up with me pinned to the bottom.

My (certified) fiancee dives with me fairly often, and we were doing pool dives with high frequency. Next time we do a pool dive, I'll run her through a few of the basic skills in a true fin pivot position (neutrally buoyant, not on her belly) and see how her buoyancy does...then we'll move to a mid-water hover.

I've spoken with a few technical instructors who told me that when they teach recreational OW students they go straight to horizontal hover, no sculling, good posture/trim/buoyancy. If that's expected of a new student, they'll know no different. I guess that especially makes sense when en route to a tech course. But tech or not, I don't know why instructors teach bad habits from day one. Standing skills is a habit NOBODY should have......or is there a reason?

 

[boulderjohn]

Standing skills is a habit NOBODY should have......or is there a reason?

History and tradition.

In the first days of formal instruction, there was nothing to make the diver buoyant--not even a wet suit. Tanks were strapped to the back with shoulder straps that went through a band around the tank. That's it.

Kneeling was a natural way to do skills. By the time it became possible to do something different, the kneeling approach to early skill introduction had become thoroughly entrenched. I was part of a team that investigated this as part of a larger project. We wanted to see when kneeling for instruction started. One member of our team was a well known dive historian who started instructing in the 1950s. He could not find any evidence that there was ever a time when kneeling was not the primary mode for early scuba instruction.

I don't know when it started to be different. I believe it was a matter of individual instructors playing around and not making a big deal about what they were learning because of a fear that they might be violating an agency standard. It is only in recent years that instructing off the knees has started to become more widespread. In the Instructor to Instructor forum on ScubaBoard, I well remember discussions 8-9 years ago in which people would talk about this, and the on-the-knees traditionalists would pretty much dominate discussions. Those discussions still occur, but the dominance has been reversed.

Still, I would venture to say that the vast majority of scuba instructors in all agencies have never even heard of instructing any other way than on the knees, and they don't even realize it is an alternative. Right now in the Instructor to Instructor forum, there are a couple of people arguing strenuously that teaching any other way but on the knees violates PADI standards and opens the instructor to lawsuits, even though PADI has clearly said it does not violate any standards.

 

[AfterDark]

The one caveat on my vote for on my knees, we didn't have BCD's in class. We had a tank w/ J valve, plastic back pack for holding the tank, a regulator and a weight belt with a few pounds on it. Enough to stay on the bottom if you stopped swimming. When BC's in the form of horse collars with auto inflators became common, buoyancy control was a self taught skill. We bought it and learned how to use it with a few tips and pointers from the LDS personnel. My B/P and wing is far and away better!