The Buddha hover is just bullcrap. You will not normally do it on any dive. It demonstrates very little.
On any dive do you normally need to "
toss your mask in the deep end of the pool, swim 40 ft underwater to it with fins on and put the mask on, and then have the mask clear and the snorkel breathable when your head breaks the surface?"
http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/ne...8-how-expell-water-your-mask.html#post7266560
Guess that's "just bullcrap" that "demonstrates very little" too?
totally useless, don't bother. Flat, horizontal, no movement. Master that.
I'm not lobbying for it as a de rigueur training approach - and of course students need to leave class with horizontal trim dialed in - but let's not be ridiculously dogmatic. Especially with someone new in the water. And as an instructor I would suggest you think twice about advising a student to "not bother" working on a skill the way their instructor teaches them unless they are being asked to do something dangerous. Far better to help them understand how to do it the way their instructor is teaching it... and then advise them that there are other ways as well. It's challenging enough for many students. They don't really need an anonymous stranger 10,000mi away - as well-intentioned as that stranger may be - undermining their instructor.
Assuming weight and gear configuration don't preclude it, the Buddha hover position very effectively demonstrates exactly what the hover exercise is SUPPOSED to demonstrate... the relationship between inhaling/exhaling and a diver's position in the water column.
The neutral hover is not a trim or propulsion skill. It is a
buoyancy skill. Archimedes doesn't care what position a student is in when that "
Eureka!" moment hits them... why should their instructor? (See what I did there?)
Frankly - while I have never found myself doing a Buddha hover on a "real" dive - it is kind of fun. And many students seem to enjoy it. Especially kids and folks who struggle with happy-feet and hand-sculling early on. Taking fin-tips in-hand deprives the student of the ability to use either - which immediately makes the point for a student who insists that they can't hover without sculling. (Never mind if you have TWO of them in the same pool...) And, for the student who is struggling, the Buddha position has the dual benefit of very intuitively communicating the "zen-like" feeling of being centered and still in the water - irrespective of body-position.
Once they "get it" it's quite simple to move on to combining the "neutral hover" skill with the separate "horizontal trim" skill. If a student is struggling... maybe it's because they're being task-loaded by an instructor who is unwittingly asking them to learn two skills at the same time. I expect that my students will have both mastered by the end of the dive, but I don't demand they start out that way if they're not having fun doing so.
There's more than one way to demonstrate virtually any skill. As an instructor you can take advantage of the "teaching freedom" to use any/all of the fun, effective ways at your disposal if needed. It's as important - or more so - for the student to actually imprint the knowledge BEHIND the skill as it is the mechanics of the skill itself. A monkey can be taught to mime any one version of a skill. I'd much rather produce a student who can hover in any of handful of positions because they UNDERSTAND the skill... than a student who only knows one "by the book" way of doing it.
