Skin Diving

Me and a my best friend are planing to start snorkeling soon. We also talked about also taking up skin diving along with our plans for getting certified for scuba diving. We are wondering what kind of workouts we can do in and out of the water for skin diving? thank you.

get yourself into the pool, lake, or ocean with the mask, fins, and snorkel. if you're into the open water you'll want to get a wetsuit too. the snorkeling/skindiving will make the transistion to scuba so much easier. The best excercise I can think of is going to the water and finning. A good excersice is to practice equalizing.. if you can't equalize you can't scuba or snorkel below about 10' or so. If you are looking into getting into the freediving aspect of it all then you can talk about breath holding and breathing techniques and excercises.

take up yoga, it will help with snorkeling, with breath holding, with stress, with scuba when you fall to the dark side, basiclly it will help in every aspect of your life. You could also get the book on diving fitness. Which I am sorry to say I can't remember the name or author but I know the author is on the boards here. Also I know you can get the book at www.gue.com

Other than that, just swim as much as you can, and get really comfortable in the water, the more you are in the water the easier everything will be.

Good luck and have fun

Like the others said, get in the water as much as possible. Learn to properly execute frog kicks and flutters. When you're out of the water good execises would be any leg resistance type. As dumb as it may look, try crouching like a frog would with your knees bent and your back straight and jump like that for a few minutes. FEEL THE BURN :light:
As always, don't move your arms just keep them to your sides. If you can do that, you'll be swimming like a fish in no time.

Here's a link to some videos that helped me out:
http://www.divetekadventures.com/Images.htm

Hope this helps.

I was a personal trainer in Daytona Beach before I moved back to Michigan and got fat and lazy.

Run... Run a few times a week, Don't smoke cigarettes. The better shape your lungs are in, and your cardiovascular system, the better athlete you will be in the water.

This isn't something that you hear a lot about, but it is probably the most important thing you can do to orient yourself to any water sport, or any sport.

I recommend running every morning (morning if possible, too complicated to explain why mornings are best in a couple sentences, but it is the best time to do aerobic exercise) Pick out a path, or a route that will take you a half hour to run, and run it, once you can run it in less than a half hour, it is time to expand your route. 45 minutes is better, but a half hour works almost just as good.

Predive stretches are a good idea too, don't overdo the stretches, just make sure you stretch out all of your muscles pretty good.

A couple good exercises in the gym are (do them like once a week, or week and half):

Squats
Quad Extensions and Hamstring Curls
Sit Ups, NOT CRUNCHES!!! The idea of a crunch is to build your abdominals so they stick out, not to add any significant stength to your midsection. (which is the most important part of your body for any sport).

It sounds like everyone else covered the in the water stuff...

Your Scuba instructor will definately cover the important stuff.

But at the very least, you should run every other day, if not more, just for a half hour.


Another thing to consider is your nutrition....

I won't go too deep into this, but your body runs off whatever fuel you put in it... Check out the book Total Nutrition if you want to know more about that.

I can feel the difference in my ability level in the water and my alertness when I am eating right and working out compared to when I am living off "Scuba Food."

Scuba Food: Anything from the gas station.

swimmer2006:

Me and a my best friend are planing to start snorkeling soon. We also talked about also taking up skin diving along with our plans for getting certified for scuba diving. We are wondering what kind of workouts we can do in and out of the water for skin diving? thank you.

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First of all skindiving (snorkeling turned up a notch) is a magnificent gateway to scuba. While most open water courses include a skin-dive module it is too frequently blown over and given short shrift. If I had my way skin-dive training and an open water skin dives would take place before a student got near a BC or regulator.

As for exercises all of the above a good things. It's a gentle sport but your legs can work hard and reach the point of cramping. With conditioning you can become quite "cramp proof" If you already have decent aerobic fitness just getting in the water and finning around will do it. Start easy and built the duration and intensity of your dives.

Work for a good flutter kick where your whole leg is working, you can flex the leg some to get the most out of your fins but the whole leg wants to be in on the game.

Other than that you will be getting accustomed to breathing with your face in the water, having a mask on and sustained oral breathing. Using and caring for your gear including exposure protection and weights will become second nature. Add a BC and regulator set and you're rigged to dive.

Be sure to purchase good stuff suitable for the transition to scuba. My wife and I came to scuba via the samew route.

Pete