Your First Freediving Course: Resistance Is Futile
Posted By Paul Kotik on 21 March 2008
If I had a dollar for every email I've received asking me how to learn to freedive, well, I wouldn't be writing this article, now would I? I'd be paying some other poor sap to do it for me. But until our corporate suits figure out a way to monetize ( I'm told that's what getting paid is called nowadays) those enquiries, I'll scribble on to the best of my ability.
What most of those folks are really asking is: "Where can I find free content on the internet that will turn me into a great freediver?". My answer is always the same: Nowhere. I advise these good people to seek proper training with qualified instructors.
Freediving, especially at the entry level, doesn't lend itself well to autodidacticism - that's self-teaching for those of you out there in Rio Linda. People who have trouble accepting this should curl up in front of the fire and read Freediving Self-Taught, by I.C. Black, you know, the one that sleeps with the fishes, the one you won't see around here no more. Besides the pesky matter of solo autodidacts taking up perfectly good space in the Obituaries page, there are those many things a freediver has to master which are by nature difficult or impossible to discover on one's own. So, the answer remains: "Take a proper course."
This year the chickens have come home to roost. I've had to spend time thinking about the students I've known in the freediving curricula I've taught, and about what their outcomes were.
I discern two broad categories of outcome, two clusters, if you will.
There are students who profit enormously and make excellent progress, and then there those who come out about like they went in. Roughly speaking - either it works, or it doesn't.
Here's where things get a little strange. It looks to me as though the more freediving experience the (untrained) incoming students have had prior to their first course, the less likely they are to land in the successful cluster.
It also seems to help to be female.
Consider these fictitious students, composites of the many who share their key characteristics.
Bob comes to an intermediate -level course with ten or so years of freediving under his belt, and spearfishes regularly with his pals. He thinks his deepest freedive was to about 20 meters/66 feet.
Sylvia is a certified scuba diver. Her freediving experience is limited to the snorkelling she did before getting her C-Card and "...moving on to real diving", as she puts it.
Four days later, as the course wraps, Bob has a stuffy ear, still has a personal best depth of 20 meters, and is not a happy camper. Sylvia, on the other hand, has pushed past 30 meters with ease and is positively glowing with enthusiasm.
What happened? Turns out it's pretty simple.
Bob thought he'd already arranged most of the pieces of the freediving puzzle, and so he approached the course with a plan to pick up what he imagined were the handful of tricks that would catapult him to the next level. He's a competitive fellow, our Robert is, and assumed he'd smoke his classmates and then go home and smoke his pals. Problem is, much of what Bob thought he knew about freediving was either trivial or just plain wrong. His learning strategy, therefore, failed him.
Bob's Freediving Course Experience:
What the Instructor Says-
"...and so during our descent, as hydrostatic pressure increases, our lung volume decreases. At about 20-30 meters, for most people, the lungs are compressed to their residual volume, making equalizing with the Valsalva nearly impossible..."
What Bob Hears-
"....blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah -30 meters - blah-blah-blah equalizing blah-blah-blah-blah..."
See? Bob was perfectly configured to resist learning what his freediving instructors were teaching.
Sylvia, on the other hand, knew she knew next to nothing about freediving, and this was to her (very considerable) advantage. For one thing, even though she's competitive by nature she doesn't approach the course as a contender. Why would she? She doesn't expect to win a game she's never played before. Instead, she pays close attention to everything the instructor presents, asks questions and follows directions in the pool and in the open water.
Experienced instructors are pretty good at identifying resistance to learning, whether it's active or passive. Teaching a resistant student - in spite of himself - is a dodgy proposition, though, and an instructor has to weigh the benefit ( and justice!) of concentrating his efforts on a Bob. This shift of finite didactic resources is necessarily at the expense of the other students.
Ultimately it is, of course, the student's responsibility to maximize his outcomes from the course he's sunk his time and money into. As students, we should help our instructor to help us. Self-scrutiny is the key here. We should be alert for signs of resistance in ourselves, and adjust our attitudes accordingly.
Unless one's ego is terribly fragile, there's no cost associated with coming to class as a blank slate, intellectually virginal, a total novice, as green as green can be. The knowledge you can gain in your first freediving course forms a complex system, and though some or many of the factoids comprising it may be familiar to you the system they form is not. The whole imparts new meaning to each component, meaning which is novel to you and which may be crucial to your development.
Pay attention to everything, no matter how old-hat it seems at first blush. You don't know which elements of the curriculum are important and which are not - if you did, you'd be the instructor, not a student. Be like Sylvia, not like Bob. Resistance is futile. Ask questions - especially the stupid ones. I think that the most impressive question I've ever seen a freediving student ask was this one, in an entry -level course:
"Are you saying that I'm to inhale, then hold the air in, and then dive under the water?"
You read that right. Yes, that is indeed the basic procedure for this thing we call freediving. Dumb question? Not at all - that student made a huge leap forward on that day. It turned out that she'd always exhaled fully before diving! This student hung on the instructor's every word, asked, without shame, the questions that needed asking, and progressed by leaps and bounds.
You want to get the most out of that freediving course you've signed up for? Leave your ego at home, confess your complete ignorance, treat all the course material as critically important, and submit to your instructor's gentle reshaping of your knowledge and behavior.
That's the winning way.
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