Thoughts on Training, Panic, and Hazing

[fisherdvm]

Isn't it like about 3 AM in Hawaii?? Don't you ever get any sleep, Thal?

 

[Thalassamania]

You need to check the time zones. We're at UCT-10, you're at UCT-5, that five hours different except it's likely six right now due to Daylight Savings Time, which we don't use being to close to the equator and all.

 

[Darnold9999]

Interesting thread.

Part of why I kept diving for 20 + years of vacation diving is, I think, because I was so comfortable in the water. I would get on a dive boat, get the DM to show me again how to hook up all the gear because I had completely forgotten which way all the doohikeys went - and it was different than the last time anyway, jump in the water and be completely comfortable and confident.

All this meant I could keep diving casually while doing the career building thing and even skip a few years when diving wasn't part of a vacation.

Someone barely comfortable in the water would have given up completely. Who wants to stress out on vacation.

Yeah its fun, but without a basic comfort level in the water that first dive after a long layoff is not that much fun in fact it is very stressful. Something those of us who dive regularly have forgotten. Those who teach I am sure see it all the time and how many times will someone go back to the level of stress of your first OW course to be able to dive. If you have a low comfort level in the water that is what is going to happen if you give it up for a year or two. That first dive after a long layoff is going to be no fun at all.

 

[dumpsterDiver]

I recently took only 3 weeks off from scuba diving. My first dive was shallow (80 feet) and I felt weird. Couldn't control my breathing that easily, felt a little nervous, felt like the suit was a little tighter on the chest etc. etc. and as soon as I recognize I'm nervous underwater, it makes me more nervous because I feel like it is a premonition that something bad might happen. Dive was completely uneventful. I am used to feeling nervous at 200 ft solo, but not at 80! It was weird.

Second dive was 110 feet and had to swim hard and felt completely comfortable. I have no idea how people don't dive for 8 months, rent unfamiliar gear and then enjoy their dive. I would be a nervous wreck.

 

[24940]

Thal, thanks for the heads up on the thread. It was worth the read.

I think it is good to test, stress, and panic students in a controlled environment. Unfortunately, time and money does not permit this in 95% of the OW courses in the country.

If instructors are making minimum wage, adding the time and personnel to do this safely would increase the cost of an OW course to above twice what it usually cost, I think.

I would have to disagree with this statement. While I don't do anything as thorough as Thal describes, shop policy for at least the last six years was to blow through snorkeling( They paid to learn scuba) and jump into scuba the first night. This is after all the preliminary paperwork, videos, lectures ans swim tests.

When I dropped scuba from the first session and focused on snorkeling skills, I caught some flack. What it enabled me to do was focus on fundamental issues without the clutter of scuba. Nose breathers, gear fit, mask clearing, entries, kicks and dives are all easier taught without scuba. I can send people back as many times as it takes to master a giant stride while in MS&F, full kit would take forever.

The net result is that the remaining sessions go much smoother.

No, seriously ... when I'm settled we'll set something up for a week or so here in Hawaii.

I'm looking forward to that.

If you want to increase the level of difficulty, you might throw in a maskless air sharing exercise, or navigating while sharing gas, (or both at the same time). Compound problems (within reason, of course) to increase the difficulty of the exercise.

A couple of others I used early on in OW classes:

marble drill- dump a couple of dozen marbles on the pool floor. Each diver collects marbles by flooding the mask, inserting the marble and then clearing the mask. Repeat until all the marbles are gone. The student with the most marbles at the end of the drill "wins". It's a fun and non threatening way for students practice mask clearing to the point of mastery.

The IC at our shop called me on a drill I use and informed me it could be a liability issue if it were not written into shop standards. I'm wondering how things would play out if a student were to be injured while conducting one of these home spun drills, which I love btw....

Progressive stress tolerance training is a great tool. Far better to see where the line is under controlled conditions as opposed to hearing about an OW dive gone bad due to an inability to handle relatively light stress.

 

[littleleemur]

I am a 6'2" 200+lb guy (which may not be attractive to anyone except my wife) and I can easily meet the swimming requirements of even a NAUI or LA County ITC doing the sidestroke. It does not take much in the way of either conditioning or skill.
Perhaps, as Sweatfrog observed its because they had little real investment in it. It is rather easier to get a DM/Inst rating than it once was, and it must be a great disappointment for those who breeze through the current programs and then find out that they can make more money and even get benefits slinging fast food.

The OW swim test is a joke really. I was just using an example of how this guy really couldn't swim and how he really can't be that comfortable in the water, but he passed the swim test and got his OW certification. :11:

Nothing against you Thal - just a co-incidence that he is also 6'2 and 200+lbs - other than that I think he is the opposite of you in the water. That is what makes his certification scary.

I guess I come from place where it is unusual for someone to 1) not know how to swim 2) not know how to swim quite well comparitively 3)be uncomfortable in or around water. The sad thing is after seeing that guy get his OW, I'm confident that my grandmother, in her flowery latex & satin swim bonnet can be OW certified relatively easily - that is once she is willing to get her hair wet.

I heard from my great uncle that once upon a time she did actually put her head underwater while swimming

*no offence to diving grandmothers

 

[sweatfrog]

So what're you gonna do about it? Maybe it's time to experiment with something that you've not tried before.

Actually, as you are probably aware, all of the agencies taught starting with skindiving back in the 60’s, 70’s and early 80’s. My point is that a lot of newer Instructors don’t know that was the case. I actually find it easier to teach someone snorkeling now, with snorkeling in the middle, than I did back then, . I might not like the way everything is done now, but I thought we were in the Middle Ages back then. Those skills were never as in depth as yours and I applaud you for moving people up that comfort ladder.

The IC at our shop called me on a drill I use and informed me it could be a liability issue if it were not written into shop standards. I'm wondering how things would play out if a student were to be injured while conducting one of these homespun drills, which I love btw....

One of the things I’ve thought about for a long time is that there are so few lawyers who work in the diving industry that they seem to move from agency to agency chasing lawsuits. If one thing is allowed by one agency, the next agency should allow it. This depends on how your liability policy is written, but Rick Lessor can’t say things one way in one case and another way in another case, can he?

Progressive stress tolerance training is a great tool. Far better to see where the line is under controlled conditions as opposed to hearing about an OW dive gone bad due to an inability to handle relatively light stress.

It can be. It can also be full of quicksand that you’ll never work your way through. If you’re the only one doing it and someone gets killed, you’re all by your little lonesome in court. If you have something to lose, say goodbye to your life, as you know it. If someone gets hurt, it will be worse.

The freediving skills that are being discussed can all be taught in a pool.

All of them buy a full set of gear. Most of them buy drysuits. Most of them buy a computer. Most of them buy some photographic gear. A few buy DPVs. Do the numbers yourself, what's more profitable and stable? An LDS that trains 300 divers per year, each spending about $500 with an 80% drop out rate or a shop that trains 100 divers a year each spending a couple of grand with a dropout rate of less than 10% (think about what those 90+ divers who are left will spend next year)? But you are right about diving ... most do seem to stop diving. We need to figure out why that is. I submit that at least part of it is that they are never really comfortable diving and, in reality, they have given up on diving before their open water training dives are done, it's just a question of time.

Good for you, it’s admirable that everyone you train trusts your judgment that much. There are a lot of people trying to figure out how to reach that level of success, especially in today’s cyber world.

With all due respect, and this is not intended to do anything except make you think about the issue: your perception is that people who have no problems with scuba move to other activities faster than people who invest more time and effort to make it happen. Correct? Two problems here. The first is that it is your perception, others might recognize blocks to wanting to dive that you don't see. The second is a logical fallacy, let's grant for the moment that your perception is accurate and commitment to diving is in direct proportion to the energy put in to master the discipline. If, by adding freediving skills to the front end we both make the student more comfortable and raise their investment of time and effort, by your own perception they should be less likely to shift activities.

You make an excellent argument. It would also help, if we could lower the amount of weight of a tank. As people get older, they whine about carrying all that weight outside the water. There are some things in the works to assist us there in the future.

You've hit on a critical point, one that I decided earlier not to address, but perhaps I should have. People who are comfortable in the water learn faster and retain more. They are more willing to undertake the activity on their own once the course is over. If they continue the activity for a number of years they will reach a level of accomplishment that they do not need to start over, they just need to refresh. But we need to teach them how to refresh as part of the training that we provide in the first place. We do that, the breathhold kata, the freediving doff and don, the scuba doff and don, the buddy breathing doff and don, the circuit swim, these are all thing exercises that our divers have ingrained into them. These are all exercises that they can use to "tune up" anytime that they feel the need.

I agree that everyone should have learned those skills, I don’t think they have them ingrained. I watch divers in the pool and OW practicing those skills, some months/years later and they have forgotten a lot of relevant skills. Even when you’re helping someone they can get upset, because they might think their Instructor told them to do it another way eons ago.

 

[mbwilliamn]

I'm glad SB doesn't do away with threads. This one has been a font of good ideas and information. You started off talking about training and hazing. Through the thread it appears what everyone is really talking about is how to push the "panic threshold" farther away. I'm defining "panic" as the full blown kind where reason no longer works. There are some great ideas here, but the real challenge is that every student starts with that threshold at a very different place. Look at an individual's panic threshold like their physical fitness level...except you can assess their fitness much more easily. The real difficulty is determining WHERE that panic level is for each student and helping them push it away without inducing a panic situation in the process. A student who is pushed over the point of panic for whatever reason is going to feel hazed, threatened and absolutely lose faith in the instructor who created that situation through direct or indirect action.

I personally have had students who were animals in the water. The instructor's dream! These are the guys who remain calm and collected regardless of the situation or multiple problems. However, I've also had students who appeared rock solid, but encountered an unknown stress factor that pushed them toward the panic well.

Strange enough, just happened yesterday with my daughter (of all people) on her 4th cert dive (first ocean). She stopped her descent at 15 feet on a downline to wreck....Little mask leak...as she tried to clear it, the current started pushing her up the line, so now she's positively buoyant, holding on, moderate current and still water in the mask. Just as I came back to her, she turned her head and the mask came off. So now I have her, the mask and the rope and we made a controlled ascent. During training we did countless iterations of mask R&R, clearing etc. Made a game of reg loss, recovery, using octo. Her buoyancy on the first 3 dives (lake) was great....so what happened? Turns out, at 10 ft she noticed this huge blue space below her (60 ft viz).....suddenly everything else got harder. She didn't hit the panic mode, but she was close. So what's the value of this vignette? If she'd been through a "typical" course where the student removes their mask a couple of times and are not exposed to slowly increasing difficulties under controlled conditions (as most of this thread seems to bear out), her first response to the "big blue" would have been a rapid ascent without exhaling.


Freq change. Breath holding exercises. I would love more info on how to train this. I have always used skin diving skills at the start of my classes to build confidence and identify those who had problems so I could focus extra time on them. The confidence of being able to hold your breath easily for over a minute is invaluable to new students (Thal laid out several paragraphs of benefits!) and I will incorporate it into my next class!

I am also very interested in the details of any other exercises similar to this anyone is using ( Thal, I think you use "self stressing"). Thanks!

 

[dpaustex]

I don't know how much overboard this stuff can go, i.e. the "hazing" type stuff. Don't know if it is really hazing.

When I trained as a DiveCon, our class was asked to do things that we would never have considered doing in the first place. Things like jumping in with all your gear bundled up, sinking to the bottom, then putting it all on. Things like that. The point of all of these exercises is to get the future DiveCon/DM to realize that problems CAN be solved at depth, calmly, rationallly, and with some aplomb.

Now as an instructor, I don't think such actual excercises would be proper for a beginning diver. Do I teach emergency procedures? Absolutely. But I don't run the student through extreme procedures in a basic open water course. Now if they want to learn more, I let them know that additional, intense, training is available, in a course such as Stress and Rescue.

However, the idea of teaching someone isn't to break their spirit and make them think this is some extreme sport, in which you're likely going to die, because your aren't.

I think it is usefull for students to actually experience the "feel" of an out-of-air situation, and to understand what is going on with their regulator, and what is going to happen when it is about to quit giving air on demand. To put this in perspective, they don't take beginning medical students and expect them to perform open heart surgery. It takes time to learn everything.

Now this isn't to say the basics should not be hammered home, such as mask clearing, OOA situations, buddy breathing, emergency swimming ascents, etc. I don't know about other teaching methods, but know SSI teaches these things over and over and over, and the student must demonstrate proficiency in these (and other) skills. I also encourage students to practice these skills with every dive, and with their dive buddy.

 

[Papa_Bear]

Every diver should be able and taught to do a bailout! It was taught to me in basic and it is designed to give you confidence and familiarity with YOUR equipment! It should be a part of basic in the pool and open water for advanced! Sadly it is thought of as torture???