Is It Essential To Keep Fit For Scuba Diving?

Diving is a highly active sport that requires a lot of preparation. To make the most out of your diving experience, we need to be fit and ready for any dive conditions and encounters. To ensure that you have the best diving experience possible, you need to be psychologically, medically and physically fit. That’s why it’s important that you need to keep fit and active so that you have the safest and more enjoyable diving adventures.

Many divers think that diving alone is going to keep them fit, but sadly that’s not the case. Here I’m going to explain why it’s important that you should keep fit for diving and I’ll be telling you some of my favourite simple workouts that keeps me fit and ready for diving.

Why Is It So Important To Stay Fit For Diving?

Importance of Keeping Fit For Scuba Diving

It’s important to keep fit for diving for many reasons, mostly for safety purposes. Staying fit enables you to take on any diving environment without extreme difficulty and allows you to keep up your stamina for longer. So if you’re stuck in a current or you surface a distance away from your boat, you won’t get as tired as quickly trying to carry out these tasks. Especially as we get older, we need to keep up our fitness levels in order to have safer dives. This is so that it avoids injuries and other medical issues.

Let's also not forget that diving equipment weighs a lot! Especially if you’re like me and dive in cooler waters with all that extra gear we have to carry. We need to be able to carry our gear without difficulty so that it doesn’t tire us out, even before we start the dive.

Before you go diving, I urge you to ask yourself these questions:

Could you help your buddy during a dive emergency?
Could you fight a current if needed?
How far can you perform a surface swim?
Do you get tired easily when transporting equipment?
Do you get out of breath when gearing up and walking to the water (shore diving)?

If you answer yes to any of these questions, then it may be time to re-think your fitness plan. But not to worry, I have a few exercises that have been beneficial for me - they don’t take up too much time either!

Simple Exercises To Keep Fit For Scuba Diving

Simple Exercises To Keep Fit For Scuba Diving - Mike's Dive Store

You don’t have to complete a 30–minute HIIT workout five times a week just to keep fit and prepared for scuba diving. Sometimes it's just about keeping moving and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

Here are some of the things that I do to keep fit and ready for diving adventures during any dive conditions.

Get some fresh air and go for a 20-30 minute stroll daily. I choose to do this in my lunch break as this breaks up the day. Fresh air is also great for your health, so this is a highly effective form of exercise in many ways!
Start including aerobic activity and muscle-strengthening activity into your fitness routine as this is essential to maintain physical fitness.
Take up swimming - as divers, we love the water already, right? So swimming might just be right up your alley in the form of exercise!

Safety reminder: To avoid an increased risk of decompression sickness, DAN recommends avoiding strenuous exercise for 24 hours after diving. We also recommend that you don’t do any strenuous exercise 24 hours prior to your dive. Try something less strenuous, such as a stroll around the block.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, to keep diving safely, you need to lead a healthy and active lifestyle. Try these tips and let me know how you found them! If you have any more advice simple methods of how you’ve kept fit for diving, make sure to put them in the comments so we can help others.

If you have any questions about diving and fitness, please email us at support@mikesdivestore.com where we have a team of scuba diving professionals here to help you out with all your scuba diving questions.