Peak Buoyancy Specialty Course

[evandroairton]

Practice what? If the diver hasn't had solid instructions and knowledge transfer from a competent instructor or a mentor, what is he going to practice without knowing what he should be and shouldn't be doing?

You really can't practice what you don't know or understand.




If it were that simple, everyone would be a star in buoyancy. It is much more complicated than this. It starts with proper weighting based on various factors (tank size/buoyancy, thermal protection properties, etc.) and goes to proper breathing patterns and on and on. They need a competent instructor/mentor at the beginning to impart on them the proper and safe techniques and knowledge transfer and then they practice. Again, you really can't practice what you don't know or understand.

Practicing mantaining trim and atitude.
Make weight checks, try to mantain depth with breathing cicles, those skills are (or should) be taught on OWD courses, so, the basic skills are there, you can even play games, like puting a tank upside on the pool bottom and try to hold position at the valve level, a good tool, that a friend of mine uses while teaching is to use some form of mirror by the pool side and get the students watching their own attitude
Other play is putting a cable with pre marked depths and try to hold position without contact.
Some dive centers i know even make buoyancy Gymkhanas on midweek for open water students refine their skills.
As i've said, courses could be quite nice, but having the opportunities to practice are simply great

 

[BoltSnap]

Practicing mantaining trim and atitude.
Make weight checks, try to mantain depth with breathing cicles, those skills are (or should) be taught on OWD courses, so, the basic skills are there, you can even play games, like puting a tank upside on the pool bottom and try to hold position at the valve level, a good tool, that a friend of mine uses while teaching is to use some form of mirror by the pool side and get the students watching their own attitude
Other play is putting a cable with pre marked depths and try to hold position without contact.
Some dive centers i know even make buoyancy Gymkhanas on midweek for open water students refine their skills.
As i've said, courses could be quite nice, but having the opportunities to practice are simply great

This is a terrible advice and is very misleading.

BTW, if the OP had all of the knowledge he needed in his basic course, he wouldn't be coming here to ask. In fact, this would apply to all training/skill questions on SB. It isn't here or there, the OP needs guidance on how to work on his buoyancy and weighting skills, he can only do that with a competent instructor/mentor not by theoretical incomplete tidbits of information as in your reply.

 

[VikingDives]

However, doing an honest self evaluation of my buoyancy, I probably do need help.

The question to ask is, "I live in __________ and I am looking for an instructor who can help me master buoyancy."

I had some students recently who'd started advanced open water with another instructor, but wanted to finish up and take rescue with me. Our first dive together (their checkout) was a disaster. Overweighted, out of trim, no buddy awareness, common signals not recognized etcetera. My response was to stop doing AOW and just work on buoyancy and trim. By the end of the next dive, each diver had dropped about 15 lbs, they could hover and swim in trim. Both said it was their best dive ever.

The point is, I'm not some buoyancy ninja, but a decent instructor who cares about his/her students can quickly teach you what it might take 50 dives to learn yourself.

I won't belabor the point, but I concur with everything that @Jim Lapenta @boulderjohn @tursiops and @BoltSnap said. My only advice is find someone that isn't your OW instructor to teach you - if you make it out of OW uncomfortable with buoyancy, that instructor isn't going to be the person who gets you to the next level.

 

[boulderjohn]

One of the biggest reasons people have trouble with buoyancy is that they are overweighted, often considerably so. In evaluating dive fatalities, DAN has reported that a large percentage of the victims appear to have been significantly overweighted. To have good buoyancy control, you need to be able to fine tune through your breathing, and you can't do that easily if you are overweighted. That is because for every extra pound you carry, you must have nearly a pint of air in your BCD to balance it. If you have a few extra pounds (as I personally like), you will be fine. More than that, and the expansion and contraction of that excess air will be more than your breathing can overcome.

So how do all these people become overweighted? It starts in their OW instruction. I posed for comparison pictures for an article on this topic in the PADI professional journal about a decade ago, and when I did, I had not taught students on their knees in years. I first posed for pictures as I normally taught (neutrally buoyant), and then I tried to pose for the comparison pictures on the knees. I couldn't do it. I had to add a tremendous amount of weight to get stable enough to perform dive skills on my knees. The vast majority of instructors teach students on the knees, and to make that happen, they MUST have students overweighted.

Then there are the online weight calculators. You go to a website, put in your wetsuit, tank, etc., and it recommends weighting for you. I have tried several, and every one of them gave me at least double and sometimes triple the weight I needed.

Here are two stories that will illustrate the problem.

1. The student was assigned to me for the OW certification dives in a local lake. He had done the pool work with another instructor from our shop. Knowing he would be doing the OW dives in a 7mm suit, he had used a 7mm suit in the pool so he could "dial in" his weight. When he came to me, he knew he needed 22 pounds--his instructor had done the work to get it just right. I looked at his very small frame and thought "no way!" By the time he was done, he was diving with 10 pounds, and it was a revelation to him how much easier diving in general and buoyancy in particular had become.

2. I was diving in Ste. Maarten with a dive operation I had grown to know well, and I knew one of the instructors was going to be working on AOW dives with a young woman that day. When I saw them underwater, they were doing very basic buoyancy skills, not the skills of the AOW dive they were supposedly doing. I later asked the instructor what was going on, and she said the woman had asked for an unreal amount of weight initially. She had talked her down to half that request, and when they got in the water, she saw the woman had no buoyancy skill whatsoever. I later talked to that woman, and she said that the shop where she got her OW had given every student 20% of their body weight in the freshwater pool (she wore 20 pounds on her 100 pound body) and told them to use more when they dived in the ocean. She said no one could do any of the buoyancy skills for the OW class, but the instructor said they did not need to be able to do them, because skills like hovering could only be done by highly advanced divers.
​

Summary: You can't just go to anyone and have them teach you buoyancy. If you go to the same people who are creating the problem in the first place, you won't get the improvement you need.

 

[boulderjohn]

I wanted to put this story by itself.

I was diving in Akumal with two friends, and the dive operation we were using did one-tank dives to the nearby reef. One morning we had a DM who had not been with us before, and when we came in from the morning dive, he said that the three of us were the only ones signed up for the next dive, and he wanted to know if he could take us to a more advanced site, one more fitting our abilities. We agreed. By the time that boat left, though, another couple had signed up for the dive. When we got to that more advanced site, it was immediately obvious that the other couple were not up to it. The wife's buoyancy was so bad the DM spent the first 5 minutes of the dive giving her a buoyancy lesson, and the husband was not much better. All the swim-throughs and canyons the DM had wanted to take us through were ignored, and we did a very blah dive over the site instead.

When we got back to shore, the DM apologized. He said the other couple were not capable of doing the dives we could do because they only had about 25 dives, not the vast experience we obviously had. I pointed to my friends and told him that I was their instructor, and I had just finished certifying them the day before. The two dives he had seen them do were their first two dives as certified divers.

That is the difference between divers whose OW class is taught neutrally buoyant and those who are taught on their knees with the hope that they will learn buoyancy later as they gain experience.

 

[Scraps]

The way I teach AOW, every dive is a peak performance buoyancy dive. Each AOW dive requires you to perform certain skills, and you’re supposed be neutral, relaxed, and in trim when you perform them.

Although it’s not a mandatory dive, I like to teach peak performance buoyancy, and I like to make it the first dive in AOW because that extra focus to dial in the weighting and learn to manage depth through breath control makes the rest of the course work much better.

Many AOW students begin the course unable to perform a controlled descent without touching the bottom—a skill they should have mastered in the pool sessions of their OW course and demonstrated in all four of their OW dives. We have to fix that kind of issue first.

Generally speaking, peak performance buoyancy and underwater nav are the two most time consuming dives: PPB because it’s essential to master before moving on and so many students need remedial work, u/w nav because there are objective standards and you have to re-do exercises if the student doesn’t end up close enough to the mark.

 

[Grantt]

For the course itself, it really comes down to the instructor. I have gone through this class three times with three different instructors. Once for myself then twice just going along on the dives with family members doing the course. Huge variance between instructors.
I would ask your intended instructor what the class entails.

 

[Wibble]

An instructor's for life, not just a single course

OK, flippant, but it's very much the case for more advanced diving.

The challenge you face is that in the beginning you don't know good from bad. The good news is you've asked this in the right place as there's plenty of people who do and who don't have a dog in the fight.

As frustrating as it is, there's few courses which only cover the three core skills: buoyancy, trim and finning. Get those sorted and the world's your oyster; diving is so so so much easier no matter what you're doing. Without those, well, you'll see people who are really overweighted (=bad), swimming along virtually upright (=bad), kicking up the bottom (=bad), bumping into the reef/wreck (=bad), cannot control their buoyancy (=bad), using their hands to move around (=bad)... In short they're crap divers, more often than not because they've had crap instruction.

Peak Performance Buoyancy should help massively. But ONLY if taught by someone with exemplary skills. You can quickly tell as they'll be flat, completely still (for minutes on end), have impeccable buoyancy and will move around only by finning, no hands. It's a great thing to watch them in action. Alas it's not that common as those skills aren't always valued in the recreational diving community -- they're absolutely normal in technical diving.

So... I would recommend finding an instructor who's also a technical diver. You're after someone who dives for long durations using oxygen and helium, often to deep depths, say 200'/60m. Have a chat with the instructor about their non-teaching dives (the clue's often the dive duration, not the depth).

 

[Diverlady13]

I just completed my 10th dive. I plan on taking my advanced open water this February. I have several more diving scheduled before this. With AOW, you have 2 required dives and then can choose 3 specialty dives. A lot of dive shops push Peak Buoyancy but after watching James' comments on Divers Ready, I dismissed the idea of this as one of my 3. Basically, he says it just takes practice, which I'm sure is true. However, doing an honest self evaluation of my buoyancy, I probably do need help. Does anyone have experience with this particular specialty course? Did you get value from it? If I'm not going to get a lot of value from it, there are plenty more specialty courses I find far more interesting. However, if it truly dramatically improved my buoyancy, then it would be worth it. But, I fear James may be right and it really just comes down to practice and more diving. I am improving with each dive. Opinions?

As a diver with much less experience than many already posting, I'm going to encourage you to take that Peak Performance Buoyancy dive. I found that dive immensely helpful. While, yes, diving frequently can (should?) help improve your buoyancy, that PPB dive does teach enough skills in the water that you can more effectively monitor and improve your buoyancy going forward. It just helps one become more comfortable in the gear and in the water. Will you come out of that one dive with perfect buoyancy? Unlikely, but it should help you prevent picking up some bad habits and reinforce what good buoyancy is like. Then you can dive dive dive and keep improving.

Also, I assume you are doing a PADI certification? There are a bunch of fun sounding dives for AOW, but most of them are things that you really can learn on your own. Example - fish ID. Could be fun, but it doesn't really help you improve your diving skills. Take the dives that will enhance your diving abilities. The rest can be learned on your own.

And, yeah....agreeing with what someone else said. Some of James' videos are helpful and informative, but a lot of what he says is purely his own opinion. The more I dive, the more I disagree with a lot of what he has to say.

 

[BoltSnap]

And, yeah....agreeing with what someone else said. Some of James' videos are helpful and informative, but a lot of what he says is purely his own opinion. The more I dive, the more I disagree with a lot of what he has to say.

And he is frequently very wrong on technical issues as related to equipment (especially his series on regulators) as well as his advice on diving and training. He is a great sweet talker BS artist. He makes what appear to be "profound" sounding statements that impress the uninitiated and inexperienced in many of his videos unfortunately. He is the stereotypical "used car salesman."