- Messages
- 19,871
- Reaction score
- 18,747
- Location
- Philadelphia and Boynton Beach
- # of dives
- 1000 - 2499
Two things lift my mood significantly, sunlight and diving, they tend to often go together
Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.
Benefits of registering include
Diving's definitely been good for my mental health ... nothing relieves stress like coming home from work in the afternoon and heading down to the local mudhole for an hour of underwater therapy. And it's also been good for my physical health, but in an indirect way. What it's done is motivate me to get my body in better shape so that I can keep diving. I've reached that point in life where there are things I can't physically do anymore that I used to do routinely. I'm 63 years old, and I want to keep diving actively well into my 70's. That means eating more sensibly, spending time at the gym regularly, and generally taking care of my body in ways that will allow me to continue carrying the gear to and from the water. That's effort and sacrifice ... and diving gives me the motivation to make that happen ...
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
+1 for mental health, -1 for physical health... diving is the opposite of good cardio, and it eats into the time I used to dedicate to the latter. Doing both is not impossible, just takes more deliberate mental effort to force oneself... or maybe I should just pick sites that require a really long surface swim...
Like many posters I think its very much a two way thing. The gear carrying aspect sure helps physical fitness, and while diving isn't (usually!) a cardiovascular activity, you definitely get a lot of muscle toning from swimming underwater. But the desire to want to keep diving - especially for those who dive in more difficult environmental conditions - is a strong motivating factor to keep up general fitness in order to keep diving.
Mentally, I think diving is a fantastic sport. It hones your concentration skills when focusing on particular tasks (Navigation etc) but also makes you much more mentally aware in general. I'm as relaxed as the next person underwater, particularly as I'm completely familiar with all my local dive sites and environmental conditions. But I'm constantly alert and thinking about many different things - my gauges (depth & air), the gauges of my buddy/others in my dive group, current dive time, distance back to the boat/surface/shore, what route to take around the site on the basis of all of the above, where other dive groups are on the site and the best route to avoid them, plus where to look on the site for critters, and also looking away from the site and out into the blue for larger pelagic schools etc. And you're constantly learning from your peers and personal experiences, which is never a bad thing either. So I definitely think there are benefits in terms of mental health and development.
"This has been my experience with diving for fitness.
Swimming US Masters - great
Freediving - good
Scuba - not so much
Tech diving - eh, little better than scuba since you lift heavy stuff and have more drag when frog kicking
Cave diving - awful, you just rotate your ankles
Scootering - LOL!
Age has played a part though. I was young when doing scuba along with the metabolism of youth and a host of sports, activities, and strength and endurance workouts. From age 20 to 31 freediving was my passion and I played lacrosse, surfed, ran and lifted a lot. In my 30's I started tech diving, but still did lots of freediving and swam US masters. In my 40's, I have a slower metabolism, bad knees, and I'm tech and cave diving & scootering. I run as much as my knees can take, swim open water in summers, but I focus on the Stronglifts 5x5 program to keep in shape at age 46. 5 sets of 5 reps are good for my joints and heavy weights help boost testosterone and improve strength. I need to work on flexibility. Been bad on that since a car accident in 1999 in the Cayman Islands.
Being underwater is chicken soup for the soul as a terrific stress reliever as was pointed out. Being on scubaboard ... not always the case.
This! I used to play baseball, basketball and climb mountains before the scuba addiction set it. Now I find myself spending an hour or ninety minutes covering an area the size of a Volkswagon. When I began diving I spent more time in the library than the water trying to learn about what I saw. Now I'm on the interweb far more than I'm diving. Oh, and I get pretty grumpy when I can't dive, like this weekend. :furious:+1 for mental health, -1 for physical health... diving is the opposite of good cardio, and it eats into the time I used to dedicate to the latter. Doing both is not impossible, just takes more deliberate mental effort to force oneself... or maybe I should just pick sites that require a really long surface swim...
I feel like Roseanne Rosanadana is reading a viewer's letter.Better health??? Since I have started diving, I have put on almost 100 lbs, most all my hair has fallen out, my vision has gone to hell, my hearing is now terrible and I have tinnitus, my low back is a mess, my thoracic spine ain't great and my neck is not good, I have arthritis in my hands, knees and probably elsewhere, I've had cancer cut off my face (most likely from excess sun exposure) and my endurance is nothing compared to what it was when I started diving.