Bob,
In all honesty, I did not make that post as an attempt to sound like I do things everyone else could not do.....
In fact, my belief, is that if you or I were to take the "typical" diver...typical fitness....and put a "Soft" pair of freediving fins on them, we could show then the correct kick shape, the several primary kick styles to use, and then give them some feedback over the next hour....then these people would be blown away with the new potentials they never imagined were possible for them before...
Unlike Jets or Hollis or other paddle fins anyone talks about here.....MOST freedive fin makes come in several different stiffnesses....much like Golf clubs come in Drivers, 5 woods, 8 irons, and putters....etc....the Freedive concept is to get the fin that is ideal for the kind of dive you will be doing.....It is essentially giving you fins perfectly targeted for divers with low muscle fitness, or at the stiffer end of the spectrum, fins targeted to divers that are quite fit.
The original intention, was for spearfishing competitions that could last 8 hours, a freediver would need a very soft fin to kick for that long....soft and very efficient to protect the stored energy of the diver( glycogen supply and ability of muscles to keep working) .....and on the other side of the spectrum, on normal dive days, the freediver might want to do drops on a 30 foot reef, or a 70 foot reef, or a 110 foot deep reef...each depth has a different ideal "gear size", for the "push" of the blade(stiffness)....If a freediver drops deep, they will want the big gear to leverage muscle with little aerobic needs ( anaerobic power) and allow fewer big kicks to get them back up ( rather than the high frequency kicking that would take place with soft bladed freedive fins---which don't really leverage anaerobic power as much as they do aerobic power) ... On a 30 foot reef, it is very easy to dive for many hours with the soft blades, or medium blades....and you don't need the big gear of the stiff blades--and the downside of the stiff/deep drop blades is that even a fit freediver will only have the juice to do this for an hour or 2 at most....
Scuba divers do not swim anywhere near as much as freedivers do...so even the stiff blades are fine for a fit scuba diver doing 3 dives in a day off a boat....but....most scuba divers would find the soft blades much more comfortable, and easier to control with precision.
The soft fin most scuba divers can see in a shop, is the LD Cressi 3000..the LD for long distance, meaning it is the soft fin. There are much better freedive fins than Cressi...they are kind of the cheap economy car of freedive fins...but they are still massively superior to jet fins or hollis fins..or splits
Much better would be Mako, or Specialfins.com , or DiveR , or almost any composite material bladed freedive fin. They push easier, and return more energy at the end of each kick..almost like there is someone behind you shoving you forward after each kick.
I have put many friends that were NOT athletes into freedive fins..soft ones, and they very quickly came to love these...and dive with nothing else.
This is where I was coming from....
