Ask any dive professional what skill separates the upper and lower echelons of dive proficiency, and you’ll almost always get the same answer: buoyancy control.

Bet you already knew that, and it’s easy to see why. Divers who master buoyancy control move through the water gracefully. They seem to ascend, stop, hover and descend at will with hardly a fine flick or hand wave – as if they think it, and it happens. By contrast, those without such control constantly kick, scull or wave to stay off the bottom.

They constantly adjust their BCD’s, and visibly expend effort with every depth change – they may dive safely and effectively, but not efficiently. Few skills can do as much for you as peak performance buoyancy. It’s a skill that reaches into every dive, no matter where or what you’re doing.

It saves you air, it saves you energy and it makes your diving more fun. It helps you avoid damage to the environment, and it distinguishes you as a diver.

If you could only make one Adventure Dive, many instructors would suggest that this is the one.

In your Open Water Diver course, you learned the fundamentals of buoyancy control, which form the foundation for Peak Performance Buoyancy. To take the next step, let’s take a moment to find out where you are. Answer the following questions about yourself:  

Buoyancy Check:
       
1. I stay in shape for diving, helping me avoid getting out of breath while underwater. This improves my breath control and allows me to fine-tune my buoyancy more efficiently.

2. When I need to establish comfortable breathing and relax, I use visualization to help attain Peak Performance Buoyancy.

3. Before I dive, I adjust the position and distribution of my weight to match the type of dive I’m making.

4. I check my buoyancy at the beginning of any dive each time I change dive equipment, dive environment or haven’t been diving in a while.

5. When I haven’t been diving for a while, or when using new gear, I warm up my buoyancy skills at the beginning of my dive.

6.  When wearing a wet suit or dry suit, I need only add small amounts of air to my BCD (or dry suit) to remain neutrally buoyant. When not wearing an exposure suit (or a skin suit), I rarely need to add air to my BCD to remain neutrally buoyant.

7. I can adjust my buoyancy using breath control.

8. I’m streamlined in the water with all the hoses and gear secure and tucked close to my body. Nothing hangs away from my body more than a few centimetres /inches in any position.

9. I rarely touch the bottom accidentally while diving.

10. I can hover comfortably at 5metres for a safety stop at the end of the dive.

Okay, be honest. How’d you do? If you answered “no” to a lot of these, then you’ll gain a lot during the Peak Performance Buoyancy Adventure Dive. If you said “yes” to almost everything, great. You’re well on your way, and the dive will help put the finishing polish on your already well-developed skills.

Rule One for Peak Performance Buoyancy is that you don’t wear more weight than you need. Your BCD may be able to offset a bit of excess weight, but every gram you wear that you don’t need adds to your drag and magnifies the adjustments you have to make throughout your dive.

How do you know how much weight to wear? Easy – you perform a buoyancy check in the water. There’s absolutely no other way to precisely figure it out. For peak performance buoyancy, you check your buoyancy:

1. Any time you change your dive gear configuration.

2. Any time you change dive environments (especially fresh water to salt or vice versa) and
3. Anytime you haven’t been diving for a while.

We’ll look at the five steps for checking your buoyancy in a moment, but what if you have no idea of how much weight you need with a specific gear set up ? To make your actual buoyancy check go quickly, you want to estimate the weight you need so you only need to make minor adjustments.

Okay you’ve estimated your weight, now you’re ready to check it. Here’s what to do.

1. Enter he water fully equipped for the dive.

2. Go to water to deep to stand up in and completely deflate your BCD. If you’re using your dry suit, open the automatic exhaust valve all the way.

3. Hang vertical and motionless holding a normal breath.

4. Add/Subtract weight until you float at eye level while holding a normal breath.

5. As your final check, you should sink slowly when you exhale.

It may take a few tries to get your weight exact. With practice you’ll have a good feel for how much to add or subtract based on how much you float/sink.

During the dive, you use air from your tank, which makes it lighter. Although different cylinders have different buoyancy characteristics by themselves, the cylinder and its volume become part of your total mass and displacement when you gear up so your buoyancy will increase as you consume your air, no matter what type of tank you’re using.

Consuming the air from a typical cylinder from full to reserve pressure will usually increase your buoyancy about two kilos. You need to account for this so that you’re properly weighted at the end of the dive and can maintain a safety stop without struggling. Ideally, check your buoyancy and set your weight with a near empty cylinder, then switch to the same type of cylinder, full for the dive. This isn’t always practical, so the alternative is to set your weight as you just learned with a full cylinder, then add about two kilos. If you’ll be making several dives, you may want to recheck your buoyancy at the end of the dive while you’re wearing a near empty tank.
 
Fine tuning your buoyancy.

When your properly weighted and wearing only a dive skin or swim suit, you’ll rarely need to adjust your buoyancy. About the only adjustment you’ll need is to release a bit of air from your BCD to compensate for the air you use. If your making frequent buoyancy changes you’re probably over-weighted. When wearing a wetsuit or a dry suit, you’ll need to adjust your buoyancy throughout the dive to account for three variables. First you’ll need to adjust as you use your air from your tank.
 
Second you’ll need to adjust for lost buoyancy as you descend as pressure compresses your wet suit or the air in your dry suit. Third you’ll need to adjust your buoyancy as you ascend as your wet suit / dry suit re-expands.
 
You should only need to adjust your BCD for these three variables, and to float comfortably on the surface. Put air in your BCD as you descend to remain neutral. Let it out as you come up to do the same. One tenet of Peak performance buoyancy is that you don’t use your BCD as an elevator. To ascend you just swim up. To descend you just exhale. If you need to add or release air for these, you’re not controlling your buoyancy closely.

Keep in mind that if you’re diving in a dry suit, you primarily use your dry suit to control your buoyancy- not your BCD. The exception is at the surface, where it’s more comfortable to float using your BCD. Controlling with your dry suit avoids suit squeeze and it simplifies buoyancy control because you’re not trying to control your BCD and your dry suit.
 
Breath Control.

Your BCD (or dry suit) gives you coarse buoyancy control: you use your lung volume to fine tune it. When you inhale you increase your displacement and buoyancy and tend to rise slightly. When you exhale you tend to sink.
 
Once you’re neutrally buoyant with your BCD or dry suit you make minor changes by timing you’re breathing and breathing somewhat full or somewhat empty lungs as you need to- but never holding your breath. With practice this becomes automatic and you do it without thinking. That’s the first mark of mastering Peak Performance Buoyancy.

Weight Distribution.

It’s one thing to wear the right amount of weight, and another to distribute it for optimum performance. Not only does weight distribution vary from one diver to the next, but you’ll find it varies from one dive to the next for the same diver. For example if you’re taking pictures along a wall you prefer a head up position, but during a search for a small object over a silty bottom you may prefer a head down position. Setting your weight accordingly saves your energy and lets you focus on the task at hand.

Typically though you want to distribute weight so you can swim horizontally as possible. This minimizes drag as you swim, saving you energy and keeping you off the bottom. As a rule of thumb you want your weight forward, towards your sides and stomach, which helps you maintain a neutral swimming position. Especially when you are wearing a heavy cylinder, distributing more weight on your back and around your tank tend to make you “turn turtle” which most divers find uncomfortable and fatiguing.

To find out what your “trim” is (how your weight distribution orients you), become neutrally buoyant and hover in shallow water and then relax completely. Just let your body turn over however it will. You may end up on you back or upside down. It doesn’t matter – you’re trying to find out how to re-distribute your weight for maximum comfort and minimum fatigue.

To adjust for being feet low, adjust weight toward your head. This can include sliding your cylinder up in the BCD a little, especially if it is a steel one. To bring your feet down down shift weight down. If you have extreme leg buoyancy you can use ankle weights or switch to heavier fins. If you use multiple weight systems, distribute the weight so you can expect ample buoyancy in an emergency by ditching only one. One of the advantages of multiple weight systems is that in an emergency you don’t have to dump everything, which reduces the likelihood of a hazardous runaway ascent.
 

Your weight’s correct and properly distributed, so now performance lies in the details. You can have the best buoyancy in the world, but it amounts to nothing if your equipment pokes out, hangs and drags. For Peak Performance Buoyancy you need to be tight and streamlined. Streamlining makes your kicks more efficient and it makes you comfortable because everything’s where it belongs. You use less energy as you swim and you minimize damage to the environment because you’re not dragging gear across sensitive aquatic life.

Here’s what you look like  when you’re streamlined:

1. You’re not overweighted. When you’re over weighted you have to fill your BCD to compensate, which increases drag.

2. You swim horizontally. You don’t have excess weight pushing your legs down, and you distribute weight properly.

3. Every hose, gauge and accessory stays in place stowed in your pockets or clipped close to your body, as appropriate for the item. Nothing swings out when you change position.

Visualization.

It might sound new age hype, but you can enhance your performance of any motor skill- including PPB – through visualization. To do this, you mentally rehearse the performance you want and see yourself doing it well in your mind’s eye. Multiple studies show that mental practice improves performance because in essence your mind programs the body to do it right.

Before diving, take a moment to relax. See yourself swimming underwater, swimming in your gear, streamlined and horizontal, with the right weight properly distributed . Now go inside your imagined self. Feel yourself moving through the water. Feel the buoyancy changes. Feel yourself rise and fall as you breathe with perfect buoyancy control.

Now go and make the dive as you just saw.  During the dive think back to your visualized dive. Make your buoyancy on your real dive meet the dive in your minds eye. After the dive visualize what you did and compare it with your mental rehearsal, if necessary, to further improve your performance. Remember this for programming your mind for your next dive.
 

Physical Fitness.

You might not think of physical fitness as part of mastering buoyancy control, but actually they go hand in hand. The more fit you are the easier it is to control your buoyancy and trim. When you’re physically fit you have more stamina and more muscle power. You cruise through the water well within your physical limitations rather than pushing them. You’re not overexerted and you have the reserves you need to handle problems.

Since you’re not over exerted, you don’t breathe hard. An exhausted diver who huffs and puffs loses the ability to control buoyancy through breath control. The more stamina you have, the harder you can exert yourself when necessary without losing breath control. Lean mass sinks, fat tissue floats. When you’re physically fit you require less weight, which not only means less to lug around but less problems distributing it effectively.
 
It’s easier for a diver to trim for an effortless horizontal swimming position. When you’re fit you’re sleeker and more naturally streamlined. Your body presents less drag. An out of shape diver tends to be fatter which means more drag. It also means a larger exposure suit, which adds buoyancy. So all else being the same, the out of shape diver tends to need more weight than the fit diver. The bottom line is that diving is like any other physical activity. The better shape you are in the more you get out out of it and the better you do it. You don’t have to be an athlete, but you don’t want to be a couch slug either.

Your PPB Adventure Dive may credit (at the instructor’s discretion) toward the PPB Specialty certification. In addition to what you’ve learned in this section and will practice in the PPB course provides added experience applying and practicing these principles. Mastering PPB comes only with time and effort. But the more practice you put in under the guidance of your instructor, the more efficiently you spend this time and effort, and the faster you master these skills.