The importance of having a correct buoyancy is crucial for dynamic. It’s shocking to see how few people get this right; of course I expect beginners and relatively new freedivers to get it wrong, but I see too many competition level freedivers who do max dynamics having the wrong buoyancy. Wrong weighting means that you constantly have to correct your direction in order to advance horizontally. Too much weight and you will have to swim forward AND upwards. Too little weight and you have to swim forward AND downwards. Why not aspire at using your limited amount of energy/oxygen to only swim forward instead?
I dont have an estimation in terms of percentage as to how many meters you could gain if you did it right, but I know that when I do frc dynamics I get hypoxic on distances that I can do very easily when I’m not overweighted (I’m often too lazy to bring an extra belt, so I use the base of my neckweight which is 2.5kg, which is way too much for FRC).
One of the biggest mistake I see everyone doing when checking buoyancy is: push off, glide and then surface before coming at a stop.
Fact is, for all you geniuses out there, as long as you move forward we won’t see your true buoyancy because strong forward momentum will make you stay at the same level.
YOU NEED TO STAY THERE UNTIL YOU COME TO A COMPLETE STOP GODDAMIT!
But that’s not all, as you can still “cheat” without even knowing you do that. How? By trying to stay at the level you know you should stay. Move your blades a little or point your head down, stiffen your legs a bit; this helps you stay at the desired level and from outside it’ll appear you got it right. And then I’ll ask you to repeat it again but with your eyes closed and all the booboos will bob up (or down).
So how do you check your buoyancy without having to repeat it 100 times and wasting all my time in the process?
By doing it like I tell you to do it THE FIRST TIME:
1- DO-NOT-GLIDE, and
2- CLOSE-YOUR-EYES.
How hard can it be. Very hard apparently.
And then once we established if you need more weight or less (there are 0.000% chance that it will be right the first time even if you have been freediving for years) we start adding or subtracting. How hard can it be, also very hard.
This just barely covers the basics, because in fact there are another 100 ways to fuck it up after this point.
For example, weight distribution is usually poorly understood or ignored. In fact being perfectly neutral doesn’t necessarily mean being perfectly horizontal. Let me explain: if we take your body as an object, like any other object it will either float, sink or be neutral. But an object with limbs, appendices and airspaces will be “heavier” in certain places than others. If you put your snorkel or your Gopro on the surface and let it go, it will float or sink, but the point I’m making is that it will do so in a certain position; you can push it and turn it around as much as you like but as soon as you let it go it will go back to that position. Your body will do the same, because parts of it are more buoyant than others. So when a freediver checks his buoyancy there are 2 critical factors that he needs to consider: overall buoyancy (is he sinking or floating) and horizontality (yes it is a word, I checked). To do this you will need to film it (or to ask a buddy to watch you – I wouldn’t trust many of my buddies on this…in fact I wouldn’t trust my buddies with much of anything but that’s a separate topic).
For the sake of generalisation, women have higher body fat but smaller lungs, so they don’t necessarily need more weight overall, but their weight distribution will be different, as they tend to have floaty bum and legs they usually need more weight in the waist and less in the upper body than men.
Often men have very heavy legs and as soon as they start to glide their legs fall towards the bottom and drag; in this case they should have all their weight on the neck/back and none on their waist. If this doesn’t fix the problem, you need to get creative and add some neoprene or something floating in the area around your ankles. For example cutting the last 10-15cm of old wetsuit pants and wear that piece of neoprene under your wetsuit pants may add enough buoyancy so that your legs stay in line with your body when you glide. Some women may need to do the opposite, by cutting off the last 10-15cm of their wetsuit pants in order to reduce buoyancy. These kind of tricks are for the more advanced freediving and generally are only used for DNF where the gliding phase of a dive is crucial.
At times having floaty legs can be an advantage too when doing dynamic with bifins or monofin: if gliding isn’t part of your style, the extra leg buoyancy can slightly assist your upkick. I do have a very “lazy” upkick and for bifins I use less weight on my waist than when I do DNF, because it helps my legs to go up more easily after the downkick (but I’ll add some on my neckweight to keep my overall buoyancy neutral).
Personally I think that freedivers should have a perfect pool buoyancy even if they don’t care about dynamic performance; the reason being that wrong buoyancy will force you to develop a bad finning technique, and when that becomes a habit it will stay with you also in the sea and it will affect your depth performance. I have seen it dozen of times on students, and undoing these years-long mistakes take an incredible amount of effort. So why not doing it right at the beginning and skip the headaches later.
And then at this point into the conversation the smartest freedivers will say, “but my instructor just taught me to push and glide!”
But of course dummy, when your instructor has 2 days to teach you to freedive + keep you alive in the process, he can’t spend the entirety of the course to teach you competition level skills, right? You were taught what you needed to know for the level you were at. That doesn’t mean that there is not space for growth and improvement. Should we skip teaching advanced math in high school because you already got the math tables covered in primary school?
Just because you were told something as a beginner it doesnt mean the same information applies to a competitive level freediver. And this goes for basically every other freediving skill and technique, of course, not only buoyancy. Which seems obvious enough, but you wouldnt believe how many times I heard this objection.
