Thoughts on Training, Panic, and Hazing

[Thalassamania]

I agree that "good" training should push you past your comfortzone. The training Thassalamania describes doesen´t seem to ever get too close to the students "panic threshold" but does gradually make them comfortable, where they weren´t before...

I never had a student panic during instruction and I've never, to the best of my knowledge, had a diver we trained panic in "real life." I suspect this is because we let them approach the somatic symptoms slowly and easily and they learned how to deal with the feelings there.

....

Having said that, I think that having your students get very close to their "panic threshold", is playing with fire unless you really know what you´re doing...TBH I don´t think it has any place in anything but advanced training like dm/instructor, cave, wreck, ice or deco where the consequences of failiure are serious enough to warrant the risk and the resources needed to do it safely...

In my experience there is not need to push people into an actual panic state to get them to learn how to handle it.

 

[TSandM]

In my experience there is not need to push people into an actual panic state to get them to learn how to handle it.

No; in fact, experiencing panic teaches people very little except to avoid the situation that made them panic in the first place. Panic is, by definition, the absence of rational thought, and one doesn't learn anything very useful when not rational.

One thing I've gotten from talking with three different instructors is that it is a very fine line between the stress that grows someone's abilities and the point of decompensation where you are damaging them. I was surprised to hear one say that simply setting off an air gun behind a student can provoke panic and bolting. I can much more easily imagine that a student going for his backup reg after having donated and finding nothing there could easily lose composure. These are things technical instructors have to cope with regularly, and a good friend of mine, who videotaped a day of our Helitrox class, said at the end of it that any ideas he'd ever had of instructing had gone out the window from watching us. He said that the vigilance and intensity of focus of the instructor was really daunting to see, and he did not ever want any part of it.

I do agree that much of what I'm talking about has no place in basic scuba training, whereas Thal's breath-holding exercises are obviously beneficial. But I was introduced to this type of stress training in a class designed for diving in the 80 to 100 foot range, where solving problems underwater becomes more and more desirable, and composure under stress becomes more critical.

 

[spectrum]

While it may be hard to put this sort of activity into the SOP OW course partly because it would be a turn off to many I think it would be a great AOW elective.

 

[SlowRain]

Lots of thoughts on this and not enough time to express them completely...but I think there is value to introducing some stress components to diving, although I am not sure that basic open water is the right venue. As an example, we make (in essence) a "contract" with new divers that they are to dive to a maximum depth of 60'. Now we all know that should a newer diver elect to go deeper, the sky will not open up and fire a thunderbolt at them. We try and train from the prospective that scuba is safe, as long as you follow the rules, and the rules imply that as you add to your experience level and your skills, you have more lattitude in your diving. Again, what we try and convey sometimes falls on deaf ears.

I do not condone a military approach to training...been there...done that...wore out the t-shirt. Yes, it can program appropriate response, but some of the schools I attended in the military it was less about response and more about "do you have what it takes to be successful." I attended, among others, Ranger school at Ft. Benning and it's associated training camps in Dolonega and Eglin AFB. The school was truly a masterful disguise. It wasn't about combat tactics, yes, you learned those, but the school truly is about leadership ability. But the harrassment is unrelenting, you were deliberately put under as much physical and mental stress as could be generated...you can quit anytime you want...we started with 200 some candidates and at the end of week #1 the class was at 50%. We graduated about 70. It is a matter of record that in the history of the Ranger training course, students have been seriously injured and there have been fatalities. This kind of training situation has, in my mind, no place in basic scuba training and not in any dive training at all outside the military. By doing so you have established an elitist attitude...which is appropriate for SOF groups in the military...but not good for a sport that we are trying to grow, as you will have a surprisingly high percentage quit very quickly. That cuts revenues to dive shops, equipment companies, as well as throwing a negative light on a sport that we dearly all love and want to see grow.

In my mind...and the message I conveyed as strongly as I could in training new open water divers was (simplified here)

1) Anyone that tells you scuba diving is totally safe is lying to you. You can be seriously injured or die participating in this sport.

2) Scuba can be safe, however the greatest dictating factor on the degree of that safety is you as an individual diver, as well as your buddy on a dive.

3) Your margin of safety is predicated by your abilities and training, as well as your maintaining those skills, and diving in conditions that fit within those skills. If you wish to dive in conditions outside those skills, you substantially reduce your safety margin by not being trained to negotiate those conditions, which in turn greatly increases the chance you and/or your buddy could be injured or worse.

Granted..this is lip service...it truly is. While it is up to the instructor to convey the message, it is ultimately up to the student/diver to process that information and decide whether or not they follow the rules.

I am sure the training standards may be different, but we did turn off student's air supplies...but it was only when the student was aware we were going to do so. I thought that was an appropriate sensation for a new diver to learn and in turn learning the response to that happening. As TSM stated...you do not have to put someone into a panic state to effectively teach appropriate responses. Often you will find it is counter productive and usually results in a high percentage of quitting, not a problem in the military, but probably counterproductive in a sport we are trying to grow. You can induce stress by putting exercises under time, putting exercises under a point system where sub-standard performance results in deductions, etc.

The key is (in my mind) that, at least when it comes training...that merely being shown the "response" and practicing it once or twice is not sufficient. Stimulus and response training takes quite a while to become second nature. This means longer training times, perhaps to long to really be viable. Instead we rely a great deal on the idea that the diver will take it upon themself to internalize and stay proficient once they have been brought to that level.

I think as a diver expands their training, the use of inducing stress can be valuable, as long as it is performed in a manner that does not cross the line into the arena of harrassment. Let's take an application of learning to shoot a lift bag. This skill is taught in advanced training such as deco procedures or advance nitrox, depending on agency. A common "gotcha" is jamming the reel. Now...to take a diver who, for the first time is trying the skill, jams the reel, and as soon as he/she does, turn off their air and pull their mask off is probably, at best, going to induce a lot of anxiety and at worst have them go into complete panic. On the other hand...if I tell you that a) if you jam the reel, you will lose points, b) that I might turn off your air during the exercise, or remove/flood your mask, or both...then I have you thinking about it. If you have any sense going on between your ears, you are going to establish a priority of actions list and mentally rehearse appropriate responses. I have set you up to start thinking! We will cover what could go wrong and what the priorities should be...which helps the student understand what should be first versus what shouldn't be.

The next step should be a pool session where those stress points can be induced in a confined environment and reviews conducted to correct any problems...this is where it is necessary for the instructor and student to have honest communication on what is happening and what needs more work. To simply throw the book at someone without giving them the benefit of learning first is harrassment. To inform and then induce situational problems followed by evaluation and remedial work if needed is training. It is a progression of first becoming aware of what can go wrong, then training to appropriate response, and finally inducing those situations and review/evaluation which results in additional training or progression the next set of skills and challenges. Obviously the more "serious" the training, the higher the expectation of being able to multi-task and perform effective problem resolution should be. I don't know that you can make it "universal" as I would expect someone taking a trimix class to have different abilities than someone taking a basic nitrox class. Training and expectations should be commensurate with what the class is, and what it allows as a deliverable for the diver to participate in.

In my mind...that is how it should take place.

 

[jimdiverman]

I have just recently (March 9th) completed full cave with my tech instructor with whom I have been working toward my full cave certification since last summer. In that time I have been in his Advanced Nitrox and Deep diving course, his cavern course, twin set course and then cavern to full cave that started about 3 weeks ago now.

In all of his courses, he created reallife scenarios that included no mask swims, buddy out of air, lost buddy, lost line, valve drills, following off the line without attaching a line:no, etc. and combinations of those. He never did anything in the water without first explaining it in the classroom or out of the water before a dive. What he did was to put me in the proper mindset to make some very serious dives in a foreign environment. He created a situational awareness in me that made me a better diver.

At no time during these drills did I feel in danger because I knew that this was training, and this was my time to learn to do this. When I was asked to keep my eyes closed, I did that. I wanted to know if I could really do this. I wanted to know that if I got myself into this situation, I would have the knowledge and skill and the memory of actually doing it in training, if only in a practice setting.

Yes, my instructor rolled off my primary valve during a blind lost line drill. The first time he did it, I opened my eyes, and gave him the out of air signal, and seeing he was already so close having just rolled the valve, I realized right then what happened. So before I took his reg, I reached around and turned my primary back on. He got a chuckle out of that.

On a subsequent dive during a blind lost buddy drill, it happened again. This time I didn't open my eyes. I first went right to my backup regulator and began breathing from it right away, reached around and turned on my primary valve all the way, and went back on the primary reg without changing buoyancy and in a very short time. I could hear my instructor laughing through his regulator. So was I.

But the story doesn't end there. On a subsequent dive, at the beginning of the dive, I did not open my primary valve all the way on land. I got distracted and forgot about it. I had air, but the valve was not completely open when I jumped in the water. This was at Ginnie. As I was passing through the lips on the way back out from Cornflakes, my primary regulator stopped giving me air. I looked back and saw that my instructor could not possibly have rolled off my valve here at this place, especially since the flow was pushing me ahead of him. Again I put the backup reg in my mouth, opened my primary valve when I was through the lips and switched back to the primary reg. I had done this to myself this time. Somehow I had rolled off the primary when I went through the lips. Since the valve was not open all the way to begin with, it didn't take much to close it.

I am very proud of my tech instructor. He did his job well. An instructor's job should not be just to give lectures and watch students perform tricks in the water, it should be primarily to create thinking divers. That is what we really need. Panic is not an option in a cave. I want to be pushed to my limits and know what those limits are in a controlled environment, that being the training environment. That is what I am paying for and why I am in training. That being said, I don't believe that an instructor pulling my mask off my face and rolling my valves off is fair if he doesn't first tell the student about it. You have to set up the situational awareness in the student diver first. Doing these things without that awareness is what could create panic in a diver and may be unsafe.

But I strongly agree with the practice of setting up situations that force the diver to think, solve problems and resolve a situation, even situations with multiple issues. I am not an instructor, so I don't certify divers, but I do dive with them occasionally. I don't want instructors to hand out certifications to divers who will be a menace to themselves and possibly their entire dive team, whether that is in a cave or strolling on a reef in 40 feet. I also don't make the rules for certification organizations. I also don't think I am an expert. What I am is just a regular guy who listens to his instructor. I am relying on him to give me the tools to make me safe in the water if I listen to everything he tells me. With time and practice and continued training, I hope to be around to talk about it for a long, long time.

I'll take all the beatings my instructor can dish out in training. Why? Because I am human and I am still going to make mistakes. I can only hope that the mistakes I make don't cost me my life and I can learn from it. Diving is serious business and the incidents publicized on this board in just the last 10 days are a testament to that fact.

 

[tedtim]

...I'm not an advocate of the military training model, it relies too heavily on things that I feel run counter to to the creation of thinking divers. It does produce a proper response, but it does so at the cost of an ever increasing number of failed candidates as the level of training rises. I do think, however, that there are many things that we can learn by careful examination of that model.

As someone who was also in the military I can offer a different take on this. I speak from the perspective of a flight instructor and specifically to using the full motion simulator. There are certain things we cannot do in an aircraft because they either cannot be simulated or have a high probability of resulting in an accident.

We did not follow a model where we continued to load up the students with situations until the point of failure. Our model was a progressive one in that if we added problems they had to be an extension of the original problem, or as a result of the response that was taken to the original problem. We also place the students in a realistic scenario where they used the individual skills they developed to solve the problem.

When we taught the skills, they were taught one at a time in a controlled environment - explain, demonstrate, have the student imitate, then critique. We then proceeded to the next step which was introducing individual problems within the context of a training scenario. The final step was to introduce the compounding of the problems based on the response provided by the student. So, we would not have a situation where we would introduce a hydraulic failure along with an engine failure along with a communications failure unless we could somehow show how this could happen in a realistic environment.

I do not agree simply with task loading someone to the point where they can no longer deal with the problems. If I were to take a course where this was the approach I would be spending quite some time with the instructor afterward to ask them to explain how the particular series of problems they presented related to the real world.

Is this type of approach possible in an OW course? Thal, maybe in the extended course that you teach it is because the training objectives are different than the courses to produce open water recreational divers. I can't see value in increasing task loading beyond a reasonable, realistic level in the initial training. Certainly, when folks move into more demanding areas they compounding of problems makes sense to me.

 

[Thalassamania]

Thank you for the correction and input. I should have exempted flight and other technical training from my blanket statement. Duh ... and my Dad was a flight instructor.

 

[aaron9876]

I had originally planned on putting this in a new thread in the I2I forum, but then I decided that it might be of interest to a broader audience - Thal

Where can I take your class? (I'm a PADI AOW diver and I wish we did it that way in my class):14:

 

[Thalassamania]

PM sent.

 

[Teamcasa]

Good thread Thal.

When I was first certified (1968) I had a tough old bastard that trained me hard before certification. (No time for a long winded story.) My recent re-certification with my lovely bride was woefully inadequate (PADI) by comparison. But all in all, the bases were covered and now with many dives and practice she is becoming a skilled diver.

Training for panic, escalating failures and other underwater emergencies should be balanced and adjusted for the style of diving one plans to do. A typical resort, warm water diver that only visits the corals and pretty fish is less likely to need blind lost buddy, silt-out or confined space training but should have OOA, Buddy OOA, mask recovery, weight loss, navigation and SMB training down pat.

Panic sets in differently and under different conditions for every individual. Most well trained divers will not panic for 15 to 30 seconds when faced with OOA but after that, who knows. It is dangerous to practice not panicking in a situation contrived to induce panic, even in a controlled arena. However, it should be practiced enough to know what your buddies panic point is.

Some will panic at the loss of a mask but this can be practiced enough to virtually eliminate panic altogether. The same is true for many situations short of OOA with a buddy too far to share. But this too should be practiced at close range in an effort to build confidence.

I also believe basic rescue skills should be part and parcel to EVERY level of certification. Sadly, it is not.