In one picture that was taken of me I was practically vertical, and I didn't like that at all.
Worth pointing out that vertical is perfectly fine and very useful. (As long as the head is at the bottom, not the top)
In fact, for people wanting to work out their buoyancy, doing headstands with the face an inch or two from whatever bottom you got will be a very effective way to recognize buoyancy issues. Once buoyancy is worked out, th trim and propulsion have a way of sorting themselves out naturally because a neutrally buoyant diver who is out of trim will send themselves up, hand usage will send them up.
And a neutrally buoyant dive will also probably get sick of the left/right bounce of the flutter, and learn to use each fins to do all sorts of things.
---------- Post added August 1st, 2013 at 10:27 PM ----------
Buoyancy/trim/propulsion is definitely part of my AOW course curriculum. I once had an AOW student ask me which dive was our buoyancy control dive. I said "all of them" ...
Exactly!
At one point does it make sense for a diver to not be neutral? So since we are training divers, at what point would we ever want them to not be neutral, since we are, after all, training divers, not gear manipulation machines?
I never use the word hover in my OW class, either, because at what point is hovering not simply expected behavior if not actually moving forward or swimming up? (Similarly I simply do not label many "SKILLS" because frankly they are just expected continuous behavior, or expected responses to things that can just happen during a dive. I have students ask me all the time "when we are going to do the skills?", after doing dives of doing continuous skills of neutral buoyancy, in trim swimming, proper buddy procedures, interspersed with mask removal, reg recovery, etc.
As many have pointed out again and again, the
student materials extremely useful for students to get a handle on things to come have become the unfortunate default location where many
instructors have come to look for guidance on how to do skills. Call one overweighted diver forward, do fin pivot, dump air from BCD, go back to the line wash rinse repeat. Then the overweighted divers all start off beating the hell out of the sand.
---------- Post added August 1st, 2013 at 10:34 PM ----------
One of the biggest takeaways from my PPB class is the ability to compensate when I'm over or under weighted. Here is what my instructor did at the beginning of the course. We started off with simple hovering: vertical, horizontal, upside down. Then he handed me a 2lb weight and we did it again. Then another 2lbs. At first it feels impossible, but after a few minutes you realize you really can compensate with lung volume. Then he had me inflate my BCD until I was comfortably neutral with the extra 4 lbs. Then (you guessed it) he took away 2lbs at a time. When we were done, I could get neutral within an +/-4lb window... 8lbs! And I used to fret over a pound or two! I had been trying to improve my buoyancy on every dive, but I don't think that on my own I would have ever been able to make the breakthroughs that my instructor facilitated.
And this is a great idea for training divers who because they mostly dive when travelling, have little input on what sort of gear they get handed to go diving with, and can easily end up with tanks, wetsuits and BCD with all kinds of ballast. One of the shops I used to work with actually used a first dive and second dive tank which varied by 6 pounds of buoyancy which meant that even divers who though they had it dialed in on the first dive would suddenly be 6 pounds more negative on the second!
The actual technique of holding a two pound weight in your hand is something I have seen clever travel divers do to compensate for the fact that jackets tend to give less than optimal trim when diver are wearing too much on their belt.
---------- Post added August 1st, 2013 at 10:44 PM ----------
You know John, I haven't spent a lot of time introducing the back kick to my students unless they ask for it. Perhaps I should rethink that.
For me, the reason to talk back kick, and helicopter is to give students something to try instead of hand usage.
For most OW students, they will end up in a bunch of heads staring at something at some point and wonder how to get away from the crowd without handwaving and potentially ripping the surrounding divers regs and masks out. Deep inhale if on top, but....
If you have introduced OW students to the idea that a neutral diver committed to not using their hands will learn all sorts of ways to use their fins, you can at least get some people giving helicopters and back kicks a shot.