Team Diving vs. Buddy Diving – Do You Know the Difference?

By | Knowledge Base

I recently had a conversation with a potential student about how I teach team diving techniques compared to what is taught in traditional diving classes. It occurred to me that many divers do not know the difference between team diving and buddy diving. They feel that if they stay with their buddy and can air share in an emergency, that is team diving. It is not, team diving is much more than sticking with your buddy and helping out in an emergency.

First, let’s define buddy diving as it is taught in traditional diving classes. When people go through these classes, they are taught to stick with your buddy, do air shares, and some basic buddy rescue skills. While these skills are important, it does not take the place of working as a team. Buddy diving, is simply looking after each other. The buddy is just there. It doesn’t do much for the safety of the team nor the objectives of the dive. One of the biggest areas where buddy diving fails is in the pre-dive planning stage. In traditional PADI diving classes, students are normally taught BWRAF as their pre-dive plan. That is an acronym for: BCD, Weights, Releases, Air, Final OK. There is no discussion as to how they will descend, swim around, communicate, when to thumb the dive and ascend. This is where buddy diving breaks down.

So, what is team diving? Let’s use the analogy of a football team. US football, not soccer that is. In football, the team works together to work their way down the field to score a touchdown. Everyone on the field has a job to do in order to ensure success. If one area of the team fails, then the quarterback gets sacked, the running back fumbles the ball, or the team must punt away the ball. If an offensive lineman does not do his job effectively, then the quarterback or running back can, potentially, get hurt. The same is true for team diving. The team must work together to ensure the safety of all members of the team. Next time you watch a NFL game, watch the offensive linemen. They are always pointing to something, shouting at each other, etc. The quarterback reads the defense and may change the play at the line of scrimmage (i.e. call an audible). This is an excellent demonstration of constant team communication. Each member of the team knows where other teammates are at at all times. Just as in diving, we must be able to effectively communicate to let the team know where we are at, what to look out for, etc. We do this with passive and active light communication.

It all Starts in the Beginning

To ensure team success, the entire team must be on the same page. Not just in knowing what is expected, but in skill and experience level. Inexperienced divers can learn a great deal from experienced divers, but they must learn it at their current experience level before moving on to something more aggressive and out of their level. This is one aspect of diving where people get into trouble. They simply try to do dives, or take classes, that are above what they are really capable of handling. The problem is they don’t know when to put the brakes on their diving and say, I need to get better before moving on. They don’t do a honest assessment of their diving skills. I had to learn this the hard way, see here.

As part of the pre-dive plan, the team must get together and determine how the dive will get done. They must determine what the goal of the dive will be, who will lead, what the gas plan is, etc. For shallow reef dives, this can be very simple and take only a few minutes. For complex decompression dives, it can take days.

The Team that Descends Together, Stays Together

The majority of diving problems occur during the initial descent of the dive. As a team, it is important to stay together during the descent. There are multiple team descent techniques that can be employed, depending on the water conditions. This is where you need to have learned team diving from a good instructor to knows team diving protocols, not reading off the internet. :)

A good number of diving accidents have occurred when diving alone. Now, that doesn’t only mean solo diving. It includes when buddies lose contact and separate from one another. If the team descends together and gets to the target depth, then the leader can communicate to the team the direction to swim. This helps keep the team together and swimming off in the right direction. In other words, everybody starts the dive together.

Lending a Helping Hand, or Two, or Three

When the proverbial crap hits the fan, I want my team members there to help me out. This shouldn’t be confused with being self-sufficient. If I’m having a problem with a gas leak, my teammates can see my valves where I cannot. They can tell me which one to shut down, or just do it for me if I am dealing with another problem. They are there to provide me gas, if for some reason I need it. In other words, my teammates must be on the same page as me so that we can prevent small issues/problems from becoming larger (i.e. the incident pit). When diving as a team, all resources become team resources. This includes equipment, gas, etc. But it also includes that person’s experience. This is where solo diving courses fail because the diver solely relies on their own, possibly limited, experience. When I’m diving with less experienced divers, I’m able to prevent or foresee potential problems they may have based on my past diving experiences. A diver’s education and experience level is a big resource one can bring to the table in the team environment.

The bottom line is that divers shouldn’t be fooled by instructors/dive stores who are claiming to teach team diving. Nine times out of ten, they are only talking about buddy diving and not team diving. Do your homework and ask the all important question, “How?”. An instructor who truly teaches team diving will be able to teach more than just the “buddy system” and teach how the team can achieve it’s goals, including teams with more than 2 or 3 people.

I welcome your questions or comments.

Dive Safe,
Duane Johnson
Precision Diving

Team Building: The Individual and the Team

By | Training

I found this article. I wish I had the name of the original author so I can give proper credit. But this article is an absolutely great one on team diving and building a strong dive team. While reading this, I found many similarities with the individuals I dive with regularly. It is long, so take your time reading it.

Team part 1: The basic brick of the team – The individual
I’d like to throw in some thoughts regarding the idea exposed in a thread on Ocean Discovery about team building. I will start talking a bit about the individual before going to team. I do this because I believe that while a team can be the sum of the strengths of the members, it can also be the sum of their weaknesses. And in serious situations, the weakest member of the team can determine the “breaking point” of the team.

For an (advanced) team to be successful, and result in a unified (dive) team I believe that it’s potential members must meet a basic set of conditions:

1. Share the passion for the sport.
2. Have an open mind
3. Share a common set of *realistic* goals.
4. Share a minimum common level of knowledge in sport specific skills and theory. Differences in this level should be minimal.
5. Have a success oriented attitude
6. Have the ability to adhere to a set of standards and procedures which are adopted by the team for its operations.
7. Manifest a continuous need for improvement in sport specific skills, general sport skills, theory (where applicable), and mental training.
8. Subject themselves constantly to self assessment and peer assessment.
9. Adopt a common configuration for equipment and hardware.

While many of those 9 points are either self explanatory or have beaten to death as in the case of equipment configuration , I’d like to explain a little more on some of the other points.

Specifically:
Share Realistic goals:
Its clear that sharing goals is a condition to have a good team. However goals should be realistic as well. By reaching your goals in the near future, you basically propel your motivation forward for the next set of goals. Setting unrealistic goals, and failing to reach them can act as a demoralizing agent , which will weaken the individual and implicitly the team which have this individual as member. But goals shouldn’t be too easy to reach also, so they should be set in such a way that a considerable amount of work and progress must be done to meet them.

Have a success oriented attitude

Simple. The individual should expect success. Failure is not a defining point in the evolution of the individual. Should failure to meet goals occur , the individual is prepared to learn from it, and derive a positive experience. Such individuals also often decouple their self-image from their actual performance. This should allow an individual to enjoy and derive new experiences, without having their self esteem lowered by eventual failures.

Improvement in sport specific skills, general sport skills, theory (where applicable), and mental training.

Mental training is important in a individual. Even in a sport like diving.
There are situations when an inappropriate emotional state, strong emotions like anger or fear can spell disaster. An individual should cultivate his/her mental abilities, learn to control strong emotions, deal with fear (real or imaginary).

Subject themselves constantly to self assessment and peer assessment.

Self assessment is important. It is important to identify current levels of training, identify weaknesses and set goals for correcting the identified weaknesses. However, an even greater importance is to submit yourself to peer review. While self assessment is a great asset for progress, it is still a subjective evaluation, and therefore should be completed with peer reviews.

In the process of a learning experience it is also important to ask your instructors for a complete assessment.

Individual Mental Training

In any sport mental training is very important, and mental and emotional aspects of training should always be considered.

Related to diving, for example, there are direct implications of the emotional state of mind and fear over diving. Think cave diving for example, and think at the old book “A blueprint for survival” by Exley, where at least two of the 10 commandments in the book are directly related to psychological factors and mental discipline. For those which haven’t read the book, I refer to rule 4 , “avoid panic by building up experience slowly …. ” and point 10 “never permit overconfidence to allow you to rationalize violating a recommended safety procedure”.

But mental attitude and fears play a critical role in the educational part of an individual as well, although this may not be so obvious at first sight.

For example, a failure oriented attitude, will hinder progress of an individual towards goals. More so, a failure oriented individual will fear embarrassment and fear failure above anything. Such an individual will avoid failure at any price, instead of deriving a new experience from it, and move forward towards his goals.

A direct consequence of fear of failure may be that the individual will avoid high quality training, for example they will go forward with their training with an organization and instructor whose standards are lower, will avoid very good but tough instructors, and in a word he will move away from anything which even remotely can be a cause of failure.

A consequence of fear of embarrassment can be, for example, to pass up an diving opportunity offered by a more experienced member of the community, because you fear that “you will look bad and be embarrassed by your lack of skill”

This is why posts like “only 1% pass ” on The Deco Stop exist in the first place. And to be fair, I hope that the instructor did not scare the student by saying to him “that 1% only pass”. This can only add unnecessary burden to the student. Rather I hope the instructor told him:
“It will be very hard, but I will do anything which depends on me to see your goals for enrolling in my course come to life”

Team part 2: Linking the individuals
Preferably, a team should be formed by members which share as many as characteristics as discussed in the previous post. Some of them are mandatory, such a set of common goals, and passion for the sport, and the will to adhere to a set of common rules and procedures + equipment configurations adopted by the team, while others, such as slight differences in the technical level for the individual can be compensated for in training.

Many times when such individuals meet, assuming that they are not already part of established teams, a natural bond will form, which is the first step towards building the tam. It is likely that an individual which meets another with which he shares so many characteristics will prefer him as a member of a team to another person which doesn’t share the same state of mind and goals.

Quote:
Unfortunately, it seems that divers that are in the best position to start this team-building process are often the most embarrassed, uninterested, or indifferent to this process – the recreational DIR divers!

Well nailed. From my point of view, creation of the team will not happen so easily here. This is because I believe the immediate goal is “to be a safe DIR rec diver”, but for most of them the next goal misses them totally. Because of this, a motivation for progress doesn’t always exist, and a team, even if one forms, will be focused on “lets meet next Sunday and spend some time together diving” , rather than evolution to the next level of training and improvements in both individual and collective performance.

Don’t get me wrong, such a team is OK as well, and can be safe and educated. And many people will genuinely want to stay at this level and not go further than that.

Here, I believe, the instructor can play a positive role. The instructor should try (especially instructors coming from agencies for which the team is central in diver education) to spark the need for continuous self improvement and a thirst for knowledge in the individuals he has just trained. For many of them, this will be enough to want to know more, to be better, and help others to be better.

In other cases, as for example in places which are isolated geographically, team members may initially share less common traits than above. This is because they might be the only potential members for a team there. Yet as long as an open mind is kept, and players work together to meet the required characteristics and work for improving the team , this is OK.

In conclusion I believe that the best teams are configured by individuals which share common profiles. It’s only natural to be so. Its also for the best, because this way progress is natural and unhindered by capital differences in mind set and perception between the members.

Players in such a teams are powerful ones, and can recognize easily individuals with similar characteristics. Don’t dismiss a potential team member just because he was trained by agency “X” and you are trained by agency “Y”. Recognize the potential and help a potential team member improve , of course if he accepts that. =)

Team part 3: Coaching the team
This is a complex part. A part about which I believe one can easily write books with hundred of pages, and a very hard subject to handle. Coaching a team is way more complex than coaching an individual, after all, despite the fact team members share a lot of traits, they are different human beings. Not only has one to deal with different humans, but also with the links and inter dependencies between the humans forming the team.

Once individuals are linked together in the team, they must begin to think as a team. This doesn’t mean that individual thinking is discouraged or negates the fact that each team member is unique. Yet each team member will contribute something, and will move the whole team towards the next common goal.

Maybe the best results are meet when the members of a team constantly train together. This has the advantage that the set of procedures and standards will almost become a religion for the team members, and the familiarity between members enables them to act as one.

The efficiency of this type of team was fully proved by military in many cases.

A point which is also important for the team, at least as important as it is for the individual, is self-evaluation and peer review. Like an individual , a team should assess itself and its workings, and constantly work to improve the team. Like an individual, a team should always exercise its weak points, not its strengths. Individuals should complement each other and function in such a way that one compensates for the others weaknesses.

Dive Safe,
Duane
Precision Diving

The Value of the Backwards Kick

By | Knowledge Base

Many people have asked me why I put so much effort into showing my students the backwards kick. In this article, I intend to explain why the backwards kick is so important to all levels of diving.

First, let’s look at using the backwards kick in a recreational environment. As we dive, we dive in teams of 2 or 3 divers per team. The backwards kick is essential to maintaining position in the water column. When the team of divers ascends/descends, it is the most critical time of the dive. This is where the majority of problems occur. In order to perform a safe descent/ascent, the team must descend/ascend together. It is critical for the team to stay together. As the team descends, depending on current/conditions, they should descend facing each other. To prevent bumping into each other or swimming around in circles, the backwards kick enables divers to quickly stay in one position, thus focusing on the team members. Same thing holds true for ascents.

These reasons are the same for recreational divers as well as technical divers who must perform decompression stops. By maintaining the team position, the divers can now turn their focus onto more important activities such as the gas switch, shooting a bag, etc.

Now let’s look at using the backwards kick in the technical/overhead environment. When performing tasks such as line tie offs, it is critical for the team keep it’s position. While one person is performing the tie off, another team member should be watching the environment around the team as well as keeping his/her light on the reel/line for the tie off. This requires significant buoyancy and trim control. Thus requiring that the backwards kick be very solid. As the team move through the overhead (either wreck or cave), it is critical that the divers do not bounce off the environment they are moving through. Moving through a wreck or cave requires significant control over your self and equipment. By being able to stay in one spot, divers can turn their attention to handling situations that may potentially creep up.

In this article, we touched on reasons why the backwards kick is an essential skill for divers of all levels. It facilitates control over yourself in the water column. Thus allowing the diver to keep a high level of situational awareness instead of trying to keep their position in the team formation. The backwards kick must be instinctive. That is, that the diver can do it without thinking about it. We are able to walk backwards if the person in front of us. We need to be able to do the same thing while underwater.

Here is an example of what the backwards kick looks like:

Dive Safe,
Duane
Precision Diving