Problem reaching your valves and isolator on your twins/ doubles?

Do the following exercises to improve your movements and fix it.

The world’s population is aging and becoming healthier; therefore, we see more elderly people doing more outdoor activities. Diving is no exception; much of the technical diving community has a middle-age demographic structure.

Other factors that contribute to the age range in tech diving community is the cost and the amount of equipment needed and, the time required for training.

Not only age affect muscles, bones and tendons, but posture as well.

I’ll describe how I did to improve my range of motions and strength of shoulders, core and hips.

Mobility is about control, doing a movement with control within a certain range. My idea is to work on improving the range of motion and strength to safely manage the isolator and valves during dives.

I succeed with a few exercises that I incorporated in my workout schedule.

I always start doing foam rolling because most of your neck and shoulder tension are due to bad positional behavior and this rolling will help to release myofascial constraint. Muscles on your back is restraining your neck and shoulder mobility.

Other way to incorporate a foam rolling practice is by doing a one- or two-days session of foam rolling and flexibility routine, like so:

Another important step to add strength is by focusing on the small muscles that are stabilizer, these muscles play a critical role in releasing the restraints on larger muscles by ensuring stability. If these muscles are in bad shapes, you may get injured.

In the following video you will work with bands. Bands are effective to get into the stabilizer muscles because they can provide constant tension in any direction and helps to stablish mind-muscle connection, which is important for specific tasks like managing valves and isolator.

The exercises covered in this video are:

Band pull apart, face pulls, serratus punches, over and backs, tubing jack hammers, overhead side steps, resisted hip hinge and oblique corkscrews.

These exercises work with shoulder, scapula, rotator cuff and the stability on the hips.

Then you should incorporate with the above set of band exercises a chest and shoulder openers set, that will help you to gain flexibility and mobility. The above video teaches these techniques:

After getting confidences and practicing the above, you’ll be ready to add more difficult workout, but I’ll let it for another post.

Let me know what you did? What techniques you used to improve your range of motion, flexibility, and strength?