How do you incorporate focused practice into your diving?

[kr2y5]

What I love is the people who go on ScubaBoard and write something like the following: "New divers don't learn crap in their OW classes. They look terrible in the water, with bad trim, incorrect weighting, and poor kicking technique. They should not waste time on more advanced instruction, though. They should instead go out and dive with that bad trim, incorrect weighting, and poor kicking technique until they have it mastered."

The question how practice vs. formal training should be distributed in time relative to each other is very interesting on its own. A number of people here pointed out that training, or at least mentoring, should come first, so that we have an understanding what to practice, what mistakes we make, and a solid reference point to measure our skills against. Of course, we all probably agree on that, at least I do. With this said, there are still a number of interesting questions that arise...

For example, how much practice does it make sense after training? As time passes by, our memory fades... we might slip into the bad old habits without knowing, or our carefully developed routine might begin to slowly degrade. Even if we know exactly how to practice the day after a class, at some point we might end up practicing it wrong... Should we try to get our skills assessed by a skilled fellow diver? Have someone videotape our performance during drills, or even just a regular dive? How many people actually invest in doing these periodic reality checks, to reassess where they are, whether they have regressed? How quickly do the various types of skills degrade?

 

[crabbyfiddler]

I love your analogy...and my nic should explain why!

I absolutely believe that focused practice is important, particularly in the form of mental practice. My first trip after certification, I absolutely sucked. I knew it would get better, because I have spent my life doing mental practice, visualization/kinesthetic recall. Apparently, I was the ONLY person who knew that, though. LOL

My second trip, because of the imagery, and from observing great divers and using them as a model, things were much improved, especially my buoyancy control. I still watch other divers and try to learn from them, and I still focus on relaxing when I get in the water and focus on that Zen moment of freedom of movement. If those things aren't working well for, no amount of skill drill will help me. Once I feel great (first few minutes of first dive, typically) everything else is like highly aware second nature. Then I can take a minute here or there to review a skill.

 

[boulderjohn]

I think this goes back to what I was saying above. You know good skiiers can survive down black diamonds, and know that good skiiers carve down the slopes. A good instructor (or buddy or mentor) will get you there quicker, but you have something to refer back to. In golf, you have a score you measure yourself by objectively. You know the pros do it well under par in tougher conditions. Play golf every day for 1000 years and you'll get that good (probably). You know how good you can get. In scuba diving, until you dive with someone that's spectacular....you never know how you're doing.

I disagree.

When I was skiing regularly (before knee replacement), I could do better than survive black diamonds. I could ski them confidently and look pretty good doing it. That was only after some intense lessons were finally able to to undo the damage I had done through years of trying to do it using poor technique. In fact, I am pretty sure one of the reasons I needed knee replacement was because I had used poor technique for so many years. In golf, my untutored golf swing had a huge fundamental flaw that meant I could never ever get beyond a certain level of play. Instruction has done a lot to fix it, but I got that instruction too late in my life, and I cannot fully erase those flaws, my bent left elbow especially. If I could spend a few hundred hours practicing, it might be possible, but that isn't going to happen. If I had learned properly in the beginning, I would not have ingrained those errors so thoroughly. and I would have spent those years of playing working on the correct technique instead.

 

[danvolker]

Skiing is an excellent example for this.....there are huge numbers of mediocre skiiers, that can get down a black diamond ...but they are Not doing it right...They dont care....they are happy getting down the way they do...but they are limited in what they can handle compared to a real racer or a good mogul skiier.

There are too many old time divers to count, that figured out a way to do the dives they like a long time ago...but they look a bit sloppy to some of us, and the reality is, they are not optimized for many conditions...they made themselves OK, for the conditions they frequent. That is what this thread is about really..do you want to learn how to survive, sloppily ..or to become really good.
To get to really good, you will need either a good instructor, or one or more really good mentors.
Once you get pretty good....after 1000 dives and lots of mentoring.....you can probably go a great deal further on your own--as can a good racer or bump skiier--once they are good.

 

[victorzamora]

I disagree.

When I was skiing regularly (before knee replacement), I could do better than survive black diamonds. I could ski them confidently and look pretty good doing it. That was only after some intense lessons were finally able to to undo the damage I had done through years of trying to do it using poor technique. In fact, I am pretty sure one of the reasons I needed knee replacement was because I had used poor technique for so many years. In golf, my untutored golf swing had a huge fundamental flaw that meant I could never ever get beyond a certain level of play. Instruction has done a lot to fix it, but I got that instruction too late in my life, and I cannot fully erase those flaws, my bent left elbow especially. If I could spend a few hundred hours practicing, it might be possible, but that isn't going to happen. If I had learned properly in the beginning, I would not have ingrained those errors so thoroughly. and I would have spent those years of playing working on the correct technique instead.

That's a really good point. It begs the question: When to take what training?

 

[AfterDark]

The #1 advice typically given to divers, who want to get better, is to just "dive more". That makes a lot of sense... Everyone agrees that it's all about experience, and as we gain experience, our skills naturally improve.

Then again, you don't give a child a violin, and expect her to become a virtuoso just by randomly interacting with the violin. In many areas of life, it's commonly accepted and goes without saying that the path to get better is through very focused, and targeted practice. One will often play the same short passage, focusing on the areas where mistakes are made, or repeat the same movement, until it gets better, and then move on to practicing something else. Sometimes, focused practice is about overall fluency, or something intangible, but often it's all about ironing out those stubborn wrinkles here and there, and that usually requires a little more of a systematic approach than just repeating the same movements over and over...

Of course, getting obsessed with knob-turning, or some such, runs the risk of losing all fun in diving. Between that, at one extreme, and "do more" at the other extreme, there's presumably a universe of possibilities...

So, what's your approach to getting better? Do you engage in a focused, targeted practice? What kind of practice? Feel free to define "focused practice" in whatever way it makes sense to you. How do you find balance between focused practice and just getting out more often? Or, did you abandon focused practice after reaching some level of proficiency?

I'm putting this in "advanced" rather than "basic", so that we can feel somewhat uninhibited, and enjoy a lively discussion on anything from mask clearing to rebreathers... ;-)

Thanks!

Why is it either or? Skills need to be learned and honed. Not every dive is going to give a diver the chance to hone every skill. Buoyancy control is a skill that is easy to hone because it used on every dive. Some skills like air sharing need to be done as drills to become second nature. The thing is that one must to be diving to perform them real world. So dive more and drill the skills you are weak on or haven’t done in OW since classes. Don't make a dive all about drills but work them into dives occasionally as part of the dive plan.

 

[kr2y5]

Why is it either or?

It is not an either-or... it was not my intention to imply that. If you could please help me see what part of my post implies that, and what do you perceive as the mutually exclusive alternatives, perhaps I could ask the mods to append a clarification to the OP to prevent any further misunderstanding by future readers.

 

[RJP]

It is not an either-or... If you could please help me see what part of my post implies that,

Um... the title?

Focused practice vs. "dive more".

 

[kr2y5]

Um... the title? Focused practice vs. "dive more".

You are right, I have made an unwarranted assumption that everyone would recognize "dive more" taken in quotation marks as an unambiguous reference to a certain type of advice that is sometimes dispensed here, and elsewhere, and the whole baggage of meaning associated with it... and, perhaps it is not even true that everyone has been at the receiving end of such advice, or that it would have been interpreted (or meant) in the same way that I always interpreted it. I sent a request to the mod, hopefully we can get it sorted...

When I heard such advice, whether it was addressed to me, or to someone else, it was typically in response to a question "how do you improve on X", and it suggested that X will naturally improve with experience, so no particular deliberate and focused effort can or should be taken. It never felt like a very satisfactory answer, although I acknowledge that it has some merit... I am glad that I'm not alone in the way I feel about it.

 

[TMHeimer]

Regarding being improperly taught at first and then ingraining bad habits-- I would think the question of "just diving" to improve may assume that habits are good to begin with (but not "perfected"). Obviously if you start out wrong on some things, practise probably does more harm than good. There is also the question of what your goals are. Reminds me of an old thread questioning if an instructor is considered "good" if all they've ever done is dive in the same old quarry, then progress to teaching there. My thought is yes, he can be very good. Diving in the same place/area over and over, then teaching there is OK if that's his goal. Some will disagree. Focused practise on what you want to do diving--wise improves you--perhaps to the point where no one could do it any better (again, assume you start off right). Someone progressing to tech. diving now has a whole slew of stuff to learn correctly, then focus and dive. I have assisted with OW courses 4 years now. The only way I can learn new things or improve on what I'm doing is to continue assisting. That's "focused", but it's also doing the same dives in the same spots.