... I do, however, find it interesting that no one in this conversation has brought up the idea of setting up drills/ experiences that closely mimic real world scenarios. I am not talking about "hazing" or harassment drills, but rather the types of drills we employ in technical training- which tend to be dynamic rather than the static drills used in most OW instruction. It seems to me that dynamic drills which escalate in difficulty are a nice balance between the two practices. Additionally, this type of training builds the student's confidence in thier own abilities.
I think that those sorts of drills are important, but possibly in a different way than you do. Students, especially those undertaking bigger dives, need to learn what it takes to deal with a wide variety of problems and failures. But we live in a mythos of a paradigm that feature training the exact right autonomic response into muscle memory and surviving because we were able to do just the thing that we had practiced time after time and honed to absolute perfection.
But its not that easy, there are several things that need to be guarded against. As a diver moves toward (and into) panic there is a tendency to revert to older learning. There have been a few accidents over the years involving divers who lost their regulator from their mouth and continued to perform arm sweep after arm sweep, without success, in an attempt to effect a recovery. In the two cases that I am most familiar with, the divers also lost concentration on buoyancy control and were last seen dropping like a stone by buddies who could not catch up with them, and abandoned the chase at significant depth. In both these cases the description was the same,
sunk out of sight over the wall, kept doing arm sweeps. It would appear that the technique had been so ingrained and their perception had so narrowed that that was all they could do. I fear that we run the same risks with S-drills and such.
This problem is especially true when it involves a change in gear that demands a change in procedure. Those two arm sweep incidents occurred with moderately experienced divers shortly after the introduction of axillaries, so why didnt they just shift to their auxiliary and then go looking for their primary? Reverting to old learning under pressure is a well-understood principle. It is similarly illustrated by a story regarding a fighter jet from the 1960s. Pilots ejected whenever anything went wrong. The engineers couldnt find any pattern to the ejections. It didnt matter whether the failure was a stall, a spin, hydraulics, a flame out, locked ailerons, no matter what happened, the pilot became a member of the Martin-Baker Tie Club. When the pilots flight histories were reviewed, it was found that all had transitioned to this aircraft from the same former aircraft. Furthermore, the cockpits of the two aircraft were almost identical. But there was a critical difference, the throttle and ejection seat handle positions had been switched. Pilots flying the new plane had no problem until something went wrong, when it did they reverted to old behavior and mistakenly ejected when they went to apply power.
So what do we do? I feel that a combination of training techniques is required. Divers need to have confidence in their ability to fix things on the fly within a given timeframe. We typically work with what you are calling dynamic drills (I like that term, Im going to steal it) in thirty second blocks, (e.g., if you cant solve it in 30 seconds youre not going to solve it). Why 30 seconds? Thats rather arbitrary, but we established that guideline based on two criteria, and thats where the combination of things comes into play: a thirty second breath hold is not a big deal for our students, even if the problem is discovered after exhaling and while attempting to inhale; and all of the dynamic drills that we do can be accomplished in less than 30 seconds from onset to resolution, with the exception of the deep ESAs that we no longer teach.
So we use dynamic drills to work on the process of thinking your way through problems (I agree with you there, it just something I had not planned on addressing here) and on breath holding drills to make sure that you know that you have to time to actually do so (which is the light motif of the thread).
You know what they say ... "reality is grossly over rated!"
