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Before any activity (or sport), you must maintain an optimal level of fitness so that you can have an amazing time. No matter how intense or light the sport is, you need a fitness and diet routine to prepare you ahead. These routines are consequential to your health, safety, and experience.
Diving, for example, is an intense activity that needs a whole lot of preparation – from the getting of gear to pre-dive weight check, SMB deployment, mask fitting, etc. However, you need to know how to get fit for scuba diving so that you can have a wonderful time underwater. Therefore, this article aims to provide you with useful diving health and fitness tips.
See how to fit a snorkel or scuba mask here.
What are the Fitness and Health Tips You Need?
Diving involves every part of your body – breathing, muscle coordination, feet flex, calves balance, brainwork, etc. Thus, you will need a routine that encompasses all the different parts of your body so that you are well-prepared for what you are to expect.
Below is a list of 7 fitness and health tips that work for diving preparation.
Walking/Jogging
One of the easiest exercises to prepare you for the day’s activity is walking or jogging. It has some pretty incredible health benefits, making it one of the essential fitness routines. For instance, it allows you to burn fat and improve heart strength to take on tasks a bit higher than usual.
If you include walking/jogging into your daily routine, you must schedule how you do that. You could decide to walk up to 4 hours per week – 30 minutes per day. Besides, it is much possible to include other fitness routines with this.
Go to the Gym or Try Warm-Ups
In a bid to stay fit, some people decide to signup for the gym to improve their joints and muscles. There are a few gym equipment designed solely for diving; hence, you could try them out. It would be best to confirm with a gym instructor what workouts to try out since you are specific about what you want.
Alongside, you can also try out warm-ups to boost blood circulation and improve the muscles for good wetsuit fitting. Some of the best warm-ups include squatting, push-ups, body stretch, windmills, etc. For each of these exercises, you decide how many minutes per day.
Stay Hydrated
Since you will be spending a lot of time in the water, you may also start practicing how much water your body should absorb. Now, you don’t necessarily have to go to a pool to do that; keeping yourself hydrated is enough. With the right amount of water, you can train your body to take as much as recommended, i.e., half the body weight.
While you are keeping yourself hydrated with different kinds of liquid, you are reducing DCS odds. However, you shouldn’t try to drink alcohol even with the substantial evidence that it helps the heart. The alcohol will stress your heart and ultimately lead to death for the kind of activity you are embarking on.
Eat a Healthy Diet
Apart from staying hydrated, your nutrition is another thing you should watch before going diving. You must maintain a healthy diet targeted solely towards fitness goals to don’t have a difficult time underwater. If you would have to stop your regular diet before scuba diving, you should.
A healthy diet, especially for diving, often includes food low in fats, sugars, and carbohydrates; however, it should be protein-high. If you are not sure what to do, it will help if you visited a nutritionist to get a training plan. Overall, whatever you eat influences the body’s general condition.
Practice Breathing Exercise
Another fitness exercise you need for diving is Deep Breathing. The importance of this exercise cannot be overemphasized because it involves training the lungs to work underwater. Experienced divers know how much this exercise is, so they dedicate some minutes every day to practice. Some of these divers even include Yoga because of its known benefits to improve breathing capacity and lung function.
If you are new to diving, dedicate 5 minutes every day to practice this deep breathing exercise. You should straighten your arms out sideways, take four to six deep full breaths, and finally, relax.
Take Quick Brain Assessment
No matter how much you are physically fit, you may not find diving fun and easy if you aren’t mentally. Diving also involves a lot of mental work, which means training your brain to take up certain tasks. These tasks involve providing quick responses to difficult or impromptu situations or emergencies.
You may not have the luxury of time to take this brain assessment test while diving, but you can during a pre-dive. Some of the things you can decide to do are to take short pauses before diving deeper to assess the situation, the risks, and the possibilities.
Keep Feet Flexed
One last exercise that will prove very useful is the Feet Flex. It is an adaptive exercise that improves your swimming/diving. Since your legs are mainly involved with your movement in water, you should consider flexing your feet to improve muscle strength and arch support.
When you are 50 feet underwater, you may need to start finning like a fish, and without a preparatory exercise like this, you may develop foot cramps.
There are other exercises you could try out, but these are the common ones to make the diving experience a lot comfortable and easy.
Conclusion
Not everyone can handle performing an activity like scuba diving without the necessary preparations. As much as you need to get your gear ready, you also need to be physically ready to handle whatever situation comes your way. With these fitness and health tips provided above, you shouldn’t have much of a problem surviving underwater.