So, you’ve booked your first rebreather training course (or any tech diving course, for that matter), and you have a few weeks or even months before your training starts. Stepping into more advanced diving training can be quite a change, even for experienced divers. So, how can you prepare for your TDI CCR course? Here are a few tips.
Why CCR Training Can Be Challenging
When you start diving a rebreather, you lose the secret weapon you didn’t know you had: your lungs. From the moment you become a diver, you start using your lungs for buoyancy control. Whether you mostly rely on your lungs to help you remain neutral underwater or use them to make small adjustments alongside your wing or BCD, your lungs are essential for control.
When you start using a CCR, you no longer exhale into the water after every breath. Instead, you exhale into a counterlung which holds that breath until you’re ready to inhale that exact same breath again. Depending on the position of your rebreather’s counterlung, you may feel a trim change. But your actual buoyancy remains largely the same. When previously you may have exhaled to avoid floating shallower, that exhale will no longer have that effect.
This change is perhaps the single most challenging difference between open circuit and rebreather diving. At least, that’s what I learned during my students’ CCR journeys and on my own.
The Number One Diving Skill to Practice Before CCR Training
Some rebreather models make it easier to control your buoyancy. The Sidewinder is one of them, thanks to a relatively dead air space. Still, ‘losing’ your lungs will make a difference.
How can you prepare for that difference? First and foremost, by becoming as stable as possible underwater, no matter which configuration you dive in.
What Does Stability Underwater Mean?
Stability for the purpose of this blog and the way I use it when I teach means the ability to hang steadily in the water for an extended period of time, in trim, without using your hands or feet.
Most certification courses, certainly TDI courses, have a requirement for hovering as in remaining in place. It’s an essential skill to have when you watch a demonstration of a complex skill. After all, how can you expect to remember the individual steps of a demonstration, let alone perform them, when you couldn’t concentrate on that demonstration?
Despite that requirement, not everyone can stay still underwater for an extended period of time without at least moving their fins slightly. Sometimes, that’s just because your trim is not quite right. And at other times, it’s because you’ve become so used to moving your fins to correct your position that you don’t even notice what you’re doing.
Throughout all that, you’re probably also using your lungs to adjust your position. Once the rebreather ‘takes your lungs away’ somewhat, those bad habits tend to become more obvious and stop you from getting comfortable.
How Can You Become More Stable?
The good news is that you can practice stability on every single dive you do, no matter your configuration. Start with your safety stop, for example. Rather than swimming along, try staying 100% still. Perhaps your buddy can take a video of you to help you spot any subconscious movements.
During the dive, why not stop in front of something you want to look at, avoid touching rocks with a fingertip or anything similar and only move when it’s time to move on. The more opportunities to practice you create, the easier being still will become. And yes, you may have been diving for decades and never learned to be stationary. It doesn’t need to stay that way.
If you’re looking for one single gamechanger when it becomes to becoming more stable underwater, here it is: TAKE YOUR FINS OFF!
You won’t like it the first time but give this skill a chance. Even your second practice will feel easier, and once you master a degree of stability, it will transform your diving in every single configuration you use.
More Helpful Diving Skills to Practice Before Rebreather Diving
If stability is the most important skill to practice, are there any others? Yes, there are. Here are my top three, not necessarily in any order:
- Basics like mask clearing
- Equipment familiarity
- Propulsion techniques
Practice Mask Clearing to Prepare For Rebreather Training
There is never a bad time to polish skills like mask clearing. Like many motor skills, these are perishable. You may not lose your ability to clear your mask, but your comfort level will drop noticeably. That alone can be enough to slow you down in an emergency and stop you from clearing your mask efficiently.
Plus, when you clear your mask during rebreather diving, you are reducing the volume in your loop. Being able to control mask clearing to the point where you simply displace the water in your mask rather than exhale as much as you can, will help you control that change in loop volume.
Improve Equipment Familiarity Before Rebreather Training
Diving a rebreather adds more ‘stuff’ to your diving equipment. To help you manage the new elements, you need to be as familiar as possible with the parts of your equipment you’re already using.
What does that mean in practice? I’ll use the Sidewinder as an example. It’s effectively a rebreather put on top of your existing Sidemount equipment setup, plus a few hoses. If you are struggling to don your normal Sidemount gear, the Sidewinder is going to highlight that struggle and make it worse.
What can you do? Develop a routine for donning that you use on every single dive. Become familiar enough with your gear that you don’t need to look where things go but can put them in place without looking.
Practice using one hand only for things like mask clearing and regulator switches. Anything you can do with one hand, you can also do with two; but not the other way around.
Practice Propulsion Techniques
A good way of thinking of propulsion techniques is to picture a toolbox. Each different kicking style is a specific tool for a job. Of course, you can use the ‘wrong’ tool for a job, but you won’t get the same results.
The more different propulsion techniques you can master, the more they will allow you to stay in place or move to the exact place you want to be in. Nothing really beats mastering and polishing foundational skills.
What To Do If You Can’t Get in the Water
Now, all of the above tips have one thing in common: you need to get in the water for them. If that’s not possible before your CCR training course, there are still things you can do to prepare. Here are three ideas:
- Complete your eLearning and make a list of things that you’re not sure you’ve completely understood. Feel free to ask us for more reading materials if you’d like to learn more.
- Review and refresh everything you learned in your nitrox and advanced nitrox courses. During your rebreather training, we’ll spend a lot of time talking about partial pressures, Dalton’s Law and the formulas derived from it. The fresher that knowledge is in your mind, the easier it will be to build on it.
- Practice carpet skills. During your rebreather course, you’ll learn new motor skills. Because it’s hard to build on wobbly foundations, it helps if you have internalised the movements for, say, donning equipment or removing and replacing a mask. Repeating them on dry land is a great alternative if you can’t get in the water.
Final Thoughts
Rebreather training is challenging, and that first course is perhaps the biggest step in your CCR journey. Remember that everything is new, and you joined this course to learn. Also remember that your instructor is in your corner and wants you to succeed, so they’ll do whatever they can to help you get there. Arriving well prepared will help you thrive throughout and benefit from the course. Follow these tips to prepare and never stop learning.
Would you like to know more about CCR courses? Visit our sister website, kisssidewinder.pro, or click here, or simply email us.