How to Kick Efficiently for Scuba Diving - Finning Techniques

So today we're going to talk about efficient finning techniques for while you are scuba diving. Hey guys, welcome back and if you're new here, welcome. My name is Olivia, I'm a professional scuba diver and this is Fully Submerged. If you're interested in scuba tips, training, or travel, go ahead and hit that subscribe button and let's go ahead and get into the video. So a quick disclaimer, like all my other videos that are more training based, these videos never are meant or intended to replace formal training from a certified professional with a recognized agency. Support your local dive shop, support your instructors. So I grew up having a lot of swim lessons and I also was on swim team as a young kid. So to me, the swimming thing kind of just was something I already was familiar with, but that's not necessarily the case with everybody and I have come to find that a lot with teaching scuba that people haven't always necessarily been exposed to what is like the proper way to swim when they go scuba diving because you don't have to be a swimmer to go scuba diving. So you have to be able to swim, you know, a little bit and to a certain extent, but you don't have to be, you know, a Michael Phelps or anything like that. So just to kind of help you out and you give you that knowledge base. It's not necessarily something that gets directly taught as part of curriculum in scuba courses, but it's going to make a big difference in if you are swimming efficiently or not efficiently. So the first thing I want to talk about is your body position. So if you watch my video on how to master your buoyancy control, then I talk a little bit about your body position in that video. So be sure to check that one out if you haven't, but basically you want to be in a nice, we call it the diver position, but it's being like in a horizontal position. If anybody's gone skydiving before, that nice opened up arched back position is pretty similar to the diver position that you're going to need to be in. Now, when you're getting into this position, keep in mind, and I think what sometimes people forget since they're underwater or they just maybe don't know, is that you can't just be a limp noodle underwater. You kind of have to engage a little bit of those muscles to keep yourself in that horizontal position. If you go full loosey goosey, then like that's what's going to happen. The water is just going to take you where it's going to take you. Another thing that's going to help out your body position is making sure you're properly weighted. Making sure that you are properly weighted is going to make being in that horizontal position a whole lot easier. If you're underweighted, then your body tends to be feet floating up and your head facing down, where you have to kick to keep yourself under the water because you don't have enough weight. And if you have too much weight, you tend to have your feet dragging on the ground and you're constantly kicking to keep yourself off of the bottom. So another thing that you want to focus on is not using your arms. As divers, we do not use our arms to swim. There is no need for the arms. So really get into the habit of keeping those arms tucked or holding them out in front of you, however, but not using your arms to swim. This is a pretty telltale sign of somebody who is very new and unexperienced to diving is someone that's doing the breaststroke underwater in their scuba gear. Focus entirely on that breath control and engaging your muscles in your body to keep yourself in that horizontal position. And then you just need to use your fins, that's all. That's how you're going to get through the water, just kicking those fins. So before we get into how to kick correctly, I want to talk about how not to kick. Another swimming technique I see from new divers or less experienced divers is bicycle kicking. So bicycle kicking kind of looks like how it sounds. So you are kicking your legs and bending at the knee in a manner that looks like as if you were riding a bicycle. This is not a very efficient kick and it's not going to get you very far. And then people tend to bring in the arms when they do that style of kick too because they're not really traveling very far. So I'm going to go over a and the benefits of each of those. So there's two main styles of kicks that I'm going to go over with you guys today. The first one is the flutter kick and the second one is the frog kick. So the flutter kick is basically your basic entry-level scuba diving kick. Now when you do this kick, you want to make sure that your legs are staying relatively straight. They don't have to be completely stiff and straight as a board, but they stay relatively straight. Your movement is at your hips, not your knees. So there's none of this bicycle kick thing, right, where you're doing a lot of knee bending. It's just nice and straight kicks up and down and up and down. And that's your flutter kick. Now the con to this kick is if you are diving in an environment that has a more loose substrate on the bottom or is very silty on the bottom, then this kind of kick tends to stir up the bottom pretty easily. So as you are kicking your fins up and down, you are pushing the water down and then pulling it back up with your fin stroke. And when you do that, it pulls the silt and the loose substrate on the bottom up and into the water column. The other big main style of kick is a frog kick. Now for this style, you are going to be horizontal with your body until the knee, and then your knees are kind of just perpendicular. And then you're using your feet to do these kind of like outward half circles to push yourself through the water. This is the style that most tech divers use, and then at least where I'm at where we have mostly lake diving and very silty bottoms, this is the style that we try our best to use because it doesn't stir up the bottom. So because your knees are bent, your fins are up and off of the bottom, and then the propulsion of the water is kind of going out and back from you rather than up and down. In this style of kick, you can also reverse the direction of your feet movements to push yourself backwards as well. Whereas in the flutter kick, you're going forward and that's it. There's no way to go backwards. For me personally, when I'm diving, I kind of switch between the two styles. I am mainly in the frog kick style, but usually I switch up to a flutter kick when the environment allows for it just to kind of keep the strain on my different muscles and joints and things kind of evenly distributed. I do a lot of diving, so if you're not doing too many dives, it probably isn't going to affect you that much, but with as many dives as I do, like hours straight of my feet in frog kick mode, it gets a little exhausting. So I like to switch it up to flutter kick sometimes. I don't know that you care, but anyway, if you were curious, that's what I do. All right, I hope you guys found that helpful. If you did, don't forget to give it a like. If you've made it this far in the video and you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button. I'd love to have you back here again. You can also find me up to more scuba shenanigans over on Instagram at Fully Submerged Scuba, and I'll see you guys next week. Until we dive again, bye. Testing, testing. How was my audio? I don't want to do that all again. Probably not going to. What'd I tell you? What did I freaking tell you? I just seem to never learn my lesson. Honestly, I don't know what else to say. Elephant in the room. If you didn't believe me before, here it is, folks. I am crisp, and I only sat in the sun for like 10 minutes to like already sizzle. Where's your sunscreen? Just to give you the full experience of it, check this out. Yikes, yikes. Anyway, I'm gonna go soak in aloe and have a fan put on me because I'm sweltering. Contemplate my life choices and try and do better next time. So, thank you. Have a good rest of your weekend. See you guys next week. Bye.