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Visualisation can be used to learn and practice skills without being physically able to do so, but is regularly overlooked as part of recreational scuba diving

By Mark ‘Crowley’ Russell

After completing my Open Water certification in Sharm El Sheikh, work commitments and the purchase of a house prevented me from returning to continue my dive education for nearly 18 months, and I was very eager to get back in the water.

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I spent much of that time dreaming about diving in the Red Sea. I had only two official dives beyond the four training dives required for the Open Water certification, but from the moment I first walked into the shallow waters of the Na’ama Bay training area, surrounded by little blocks of coral and inquisitive lionfish, I had been hooked on scuba.

Now, stuck in my new home, lying in my new bathtub, surrounded – sort of – by water, I began to visualise how it would feel to be back in the Red Sea.

As my breathing became slow and regular, I imagined myself performing the neutral buoyancy fin pivots that I had learned during my course. I remembered how I had had to inhale while I was descending, to keep myself off the bottom, and exhale swiftly and raise my BCD deflator high, in an upright position, to prevent myself pinging to the surface when I didn’t get it right.

It wasn’t long before I could visualise myself pivoting perfectly in my bathtub. I swear I moved up and down a little as I breathed in and out!

Over the intervening months, I took a lot of baths; I dreamed a lot about diving. I read my open-water manual over, and over, and over, and imagined myself repeating the same skills I had learned during my training, and where I had gone wrong.

Upon returning to Sharm to take my PADI Advanced Open Water course, even after 18 months without scuba diving, I performed the weight check, safety drills and buoyancy skills required during my pre-course refresher dives with ease.

In fact, the whole diving experience was a breeze, because during all that time dreaming about diving, in my bathtub, I’d been unwittingly practising scuba diving in my head.

A decade later, two years into my tenure as an instructor and guide in Sharm, standing in full gear on the bow of a dive boat, ready to perform one of the most difficult tasks of my diving career – tying the dive boat onto the wreck of the SS Thistlegorm on a busy day – I would go through almost exactly the same thought process as I had done a decade ago, in my bath.

Breath cycles and inflator buttons had been replaced with boats, ropes and bowlines; depths, times and dangers; and, most importantly, how to get out of trouble if necessary.

Although each diver’s circumstances will vary, as we grow in experience and confidence, and undertake more challenging dive activities, visualisation should always remain one of the most singularly important skills in our repertoires.

All sportspeople do it: visualising the perfect serve, the perfect penalty kick, the perfect racing line. The concept is taught but often glossed over during entry-level training, which I think is a serious mistake. So many little problems – breath control, correct BCD deflation, dump-valve location – are all small and easily dealt with, but because people forget how to do them, they rapidly escalate into very large, and potentially fatal, problems.

Regularly thinking your way through every aspect of scuba diving – from how the equipment works to safety drills – will make you not just a better diver, but a safer diver. If you know how to do something, and when it must be done, you acquire a form of muscle memory, but without having to actually use any muscles.

Visualisation is taught as a fundamental aspect of technical diving, for which the risks of problem-solving failure are exponentially greater than those of recreational diving, but which is also often considered to be safer because of the attention to detail that technical divers pay to pre-dive visualisation procedures.

There are few scuba diving problems that cannot be solved underwater, with simple actions. In order to perform those actions, you need to practise them regularly.

Even if you can’t actually get in the sea, visualisation will help you do that.

Crowley (known to his mum as Mark), packed in his IT job in 2005 and spent the next nine years working as a full-time scuba diving professional. He started writing for DIVE in 2010 and hasn’t stopped since.

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