Keep Trim Position Without Any Movement

[dberry]

My back begins to fatigue, and it aggravates a chronic pinched nerve condition in my neck -actively holding an extreme horizontal trim.

I'm glad someone mentioned this. I understand that one would ideally be perfectly horizontal to avoid being pushed up or down while moving forward (or in a current), but my neck just can't take looking forward when horizontal for very long. I can do horizontal while looking at the bottom, but then I run into things

 

[The Chairman]

Turning your neck as you look forward helps tremendously. Not much. Just enough.

 

[boulderjohn]

it's also time in the water. Your body needs to learn to naturally compensate for any slight variations by adjusting the position of your legs.

I will pile on with the "time in the water" crowd and add a bit.

You see the same thing to different degrees at all levels of scuba instruction. The first time in the pool, new OW students throw themselves off balance through their movements, and then they make exaggerated efforts to compensate, making things worse.The fist time wearing doubles, many divers feel like they are being thrown around, and they struggle even to stay horizontal. All of this disappears naturally in time as your body learns how to deal with this imbalance. its natural reaction is to kick, and it has to learn to do what tbone1004 said instead.

As an analogy, when i was young, I used to do a pretty fair amount of bicycle riding. On extended rides, I would relax by sitting up, taking my hands off the handlebarss, and maybe taking a drink while peddling. I then went nearly two decades without ever getting on a bike. When I started again, I could not come close to doing that.. As soon as I let go of the handlebars, I was wobbling all over the place and terrified of a fall. My body had to learn all over again how to make those subtle adjustments to its position to keep me upright and off the pavement.

This is much the same thing. Your body is actually learning a reflex, and it takes time.

 

[EFX]

It's interesting that the body has to adjust in subtle ways. I never thought about it that way before. I dive doubles occasionally with long periods of diving single AL80's in between. Both setups are done with a BP/wing. My buddy said that it appears I'm fighting with the trim although I don't experience this myself. If I hover I don't have any movement head up or down but while swimming I feel I have to make adjustments.

 

[boulderjohn]

I want to add to the statement I made about learning a reflex by using another analogy that is about as far removed from scuba as it can be--volleyball.

Many years ago I was a pretty good volleyball player. I was a setter for a while, and it took a long time for me to develop the hand skills necessary for that. I was taught to put my hands in the shape of the ball as it came to me. The ball should hit all 10 fingers simultaneously. Those 10 fingers then snap out and release simultaneously, as close to instantly as you can get. A well set ball will leave your hands with no spin whatsoever. My early learning involved watching balls float lazily down toward me before I made the set, but eventually I reached the point I could send up no-spin set even after a shanked pass came screaming at me in a wildly spinning line drive.

Think about what that means. It means each of those 10 fingers is reacting to ball contact independently, providing just the right power and movement necessary to convert the motion of the ball coming to me to the motion of the ball leaving me. That is a reflex, and the only way to achieve it is to do it again and again and again and again and again....