Gloves
This one seems obvious, but it caught me out. I love my 5mm gloves, but I do struggle to shutdown my valves in them because I lose a great deal of tactile sensation and indeed grip in them. 3mm gloves will offer you more in the way of grip, but may be a little cold at certain times of year. I find drygloves great when they work. As with just about everything else, try some and stick with them a while before giving up. Perhaps try with thin gloves and graduate to thicker gloves once you can turn the valves but just remember there is a flip side to that once your helps freeze, shutdowns become rather more challenging.
Twinset Configuration
I thought Id avoid this one, but it will no doubt appear on any subsequent thread so lets just get it out of the way. This is one of those TRUTH moments, where you have the priveledge of sharing something which many people seems to struggle with but is an undeniable fact. Are you ready? Here we go. Inverted cylinders are easier to shutdown. Sorry!. Theres so many pros and cons of both ways that I am not going to get into it, but the fact remains that from a perspective of shut downs, inverting is the way forwards, so to speak. Many people adopt inverted rigs for this very reason. It doesnt appeal to me, but then I can do a shutdown. The DIR mob claim that everyone can do a shutdown if their rig is properly configured and they are trained properly in how to trim and weight themselves etc. Well, for the Non-DIR crowd, there really is some truth in this Im afraid. For the DIR crowd, it is some truth, and not the whole of the truth. Some people simply do not have the mobility in their joints and require another solution. This section is in here just to recognise and remind you that the contents are what worked for me, and what I learnt on the way. You may have a pre-existing condition that means inverting is the only way to do it, and if so, go for it!. Actually, if you just fancy having inverted cylinders, go for it!
Kitting Up
Its nearly time to hit the water, so lets kit up. Firstly, when you are putting your drysuit on, pull up the body of your undersuit so that you have some spare material in the top half of your drysuit where you need it, rather than being trapped in the bottom half near your legs. Make sure any spare material is around your chest and shoulders. Do up the drysuit. Now do a superman, by putting your hands together and stetching them up towards the sky, stretching your legs as well. This will ensure that your undersuit and drysuit are best placed for flexibility in the shoulders and arms, and that you are making use of that spare material you pulled up in your undersuit.
Now put on your Harness. Rotate your shoulders a little in the shoulder straps to give them room. If you have any spare material in your drysuit, make sure it is above your waist strap where it will be useful for the shutdown, and not trapped below the waist strap where it is useless. Get in the water.
Trim and in-water attitude
I watched a friend and fellow diver attempt two shutdowns this past weekend, and they were completely different. The first was a disaster, with him not being able to do anything more than just touch the valves, kicking up silt and finning around, swearing through his regulator. The second time, he reached back and went through the valve drill in perfect order, experiencing no problems. Bizarre huh. Not really if you were there. You see, on the first dive, he was stressed and his trim was such that he was at about a thirty degree angle with his feet pointing downwards. Lets deal with those two facts separately. He was stressed. I could hear it in the language he used. Hell, Im not even sure what some of the words meant, and certainly couldnt spell them, but he definitely sounded annoyed. Try tensing up your arm, you will lose mobility as the muscles tense up. Now chill out and let you arm rest, the mobility will return. The lesson is if you are tense and having problems doing a shutdown, leave it and come back to it when you are feeling more relaxed rather than continue to struggle and get more frustrated. I try to control my breathing before a valve drill for two reasons. Firstly, it means I am not going to change depth (much) during the drill. But perhaps more importantly, it means I am going to be relaxed. Now this works for me, just do whatever works for you, but chill out for the love of God, because swearing and kicking about is not going to achieve anything and only make you more annoyed.
The second item in this section is trim. NOW DIR types go on and on and on about trim. Believe me, Im one of them and just as guilty as any other. There are many reasons for this, which Im not going to get into here, but ONE of them is that it makes the valve drills easier. Think about it. If you are horizontal in the water, the valves are going to be where they are supposed to be. The further off horizontal you are, the more likely the rig is to slip down your back a little, and maybe just take those valves out of reach. So how does one achieve perfect trim. Yeah right. Thats for another document, and Ill write it once I know the answer myself. However, even if we cannot achieve perfectly flat trim, we can use this knowledge to help us do a shutdown, or at least train how to do them. Instead of finning about in Stoney , or in a pool, practicing your shutdowns. Just dump all your air and lie on the bottom. That way you are going to be flat and stay in one place. You will also be pleasantly surprised to find that once you get over the sensation of laying on the bottom, you will relax, because you are not having to think about buoyancy, or trim, or position, or anything, just the shutdown. Marvellous!
Suit Inflation
Yet another important element here. Us DIR types run our suits very tight, managing all buoyancy through our wing. This makes trim and buoyancy more precise as you havent got air migrating around your suit but comes at a price. Next time you are in the water, drop a few metres without inflating your suit. Pretty soon you wont be able to reach over your shoulder at all. The squeeze causes the suit to lose all flexibility. So you need to have enough air in the suit to allow the suit to move. On the flip side, if you have ever been daft enough to inflate your suit to the maximum you will find a similar scenario, in that the air bulking out the suit means you cannot bend your arms or legs properly. So there is a happy medium. For me, this means putting just enough gas in the suit so that when I stretch my legs back, and my arms forward doing a superman, I can feel the suit moving over my body as it adjusts. This is another of those get it wrong and youve got no chance elements.
Flexibility and Training
The movement to reach back and get a valve is not particularly natural, but there are some good excercises that will help. Id advise speaking to your local gym, who will in most cases give you sound advice on how to exercise the relevant muscles without damaging them. There are a few I use. For example, when you reach back, you can give your arm a gentle boost by pressing gently on your upper arm with your opposite hand. The key word here is gently. There are some excellent stetching exercises to be found here
http://www.divefitness.com/html/arti...ld_stretch.pdf. Other useful in water exercises are having a buddy gently guide your hand to the valves, and just reaching back and holding them at regular points in the dive, just to get the muscle memory in. Also, have some honest debriefs when you get out of the water, where your buddy can tell you what your trim was like, how far your fingers were, anything else he or she noticed etc. Feedback is essential, becuase you cannot see what is happening.
Conclusions
What Ive tried to do here is to brain dump everything I have learned about valve drills since I started twinset diving. Im still putting the gloss on them myself, but if in this post I have given someone a moment to think ooh I wonder if its that thats stopping me then it has been worth the effort. Once again, I would re-iterate that this is simply the path I have taken to successfully doing the drills. Its not necessarily the path for you. What I am not trying to achieve here is anyway intended to replace professional training. Finally, no matter what I have told you, there is no shortcut to this. Like all potentially life-saving drills, a valve drill is something, in my humble opinion, that should be practiced at every possible opportunity, and it is only that practice at the end of the day, that will get you there.