Diving is one of the greatest things humans have figured out to do. It is firmly set in the extreme sports section of what you can do with your time and money. Many people who love climbing mountains and hiking the trails are also happily diving down the deepest parts of the oceans. Experienced divers will tell you that diving is addictive. Once the bug has bitten, it can be hard to keep the itch scratched.
You can dive every day as long as you have a proper diving computer and follow dive table safety limits. You will have to monitor the depths you are diving each day, ensuring that you rest a bit longer after you have dived deeper.
Becoming a diving fit is one of the requirements to become extremely good at diving, with many divers quickly becoming able to easily dive daily. There is a limit to how many times you can dive a day, and many divers learn the hard way. There are many things that you cannot do after having a successful day of diving.
Can you scuba dive too much?
While you can easily dive every single day, if you are close to the ocean, many diving shops will have you log when the last time was you went out for a dive. There are many reasons behind this, including knowing where everyone on the dive currently is. Diving is intoxicating, and you will want to constantly dive when the opportunity arises. However, when is enjoying the hobby, you now love too much?
You can dive too much when you plan to dive again within 12 hours of your last dive, usually being heavily influenced by the depth at which you are diving. As you are diving, you are not breathing the same mix of air that you would breathe in on the ground. The mixture of air in an oxygen tank usually consists of nitrogen and oxygen that gets compressed as you dive deeper.
By rising too fast or diving too much with an untrained body, you will cause bubbles of nitrogen to form in your blood, causing decompression sickness. As this continues, you will experience pains throughout your entire body, which can, at times, lead to death if not treated properly. Before you are diving fit, you will be much more likely to suffer from this as you are not yet perfectly capable of balancing the nitrogen in your body.
How long can you dive in a single instance?
Diving is a lot of fun, and once you are under the water, you won’t want to leave, in fear of realizing the amazing things you are seeing were only a dream. However, your dive instructor will tell you when to go back up the first few times you are diving, usually checking on you after your full license.
You will usually be able to only dive for around 30 minutes to an hour in your first few dives. As you go deeper, the time spent at depth decreases drastically. Beginner divers will be more likely to breathe too much air, shortening their dive trips significantly, while experienced divers can make the same tank of oxygen last almost twice as long.
You may have heard of other divers going down for hours. These are usually divers hooked up to air pumps that are working under the water. However, cave divers will be able to make trips that are significantly longer. These divers are much more experienced, have specialized equipment, and do not dive as deep as you would when diving in the ocean.
Can you surface and then go diving?
You may think that it should be fine; you could always surface with your empty tank, grab a new set of tanks, and jump in. Inexperienced people are prone to thinking that scuba diving is not too dissimilar to diving in a pool with a pipe attached to their mouths for fresh air.
Divers cannot re-dive after surfacing because the nitrogen levels in their blood will be too high. After going through the decompression process, they would be at a major risk of getting deathly ill if they dive again. Even divers who have been going for many years will not do this. When you are scuba diving you will only dive once until your tank has been depleted.
There are some exceptions to this, usually when you are diving in extremely shallow water, owing to the risk of compression sickness being almost non-existent. Most reefs can be dived without going deeper than 20 feet, which is at the point where the compression becomes a problem when you are diving.
What are the things you things cannot do after diving?
Divers are some of the soberest, safe people you will meet right after they have dived, usually not by their own choice. Many of the things you would consider normal cannot be done after spending a day driving to see the world underwater. Knowing what these are will save you thousands in emergency hospital bills.
- Drinking: Drinking is fun. Many great parties in the world started because there were lots of free drinks available. After scuba diving, you can still enjoy a beer or two that same day with friends. However, you cannot drink heavily as this thins out the blood and increases blood pressure, everything that you do not want to happen after someone has dived.
- Flying: You must wait for a minimum of 24-hours after diving before you get on anything resembling an airplane. The same reason you need to rise slowly to stop decompression is the reason you cannot fly. As the air pressure decreases, the compressed nitrogen you have breathed in becomes bubbles popping in your blood.
- Ziplining: Ziplining, put simply, is the act of going up somewhere high and then sliding on a slide to somewhere lower down. A backyard zip line won’t be an issue, but any commercial zipline that takes you up high will cause decompression sickness.
- Mountain Climbing: For the same reason you cannot fly or zipline, you cannot go mountain climbing, with the added caveat, your blood pressure will be increased dramatically. It comes down to the fact that your attitude is changing quite quickly. You cannot leave the ocean as well, having to wait for at least 24-hours before heading back inland, where the altitude can usually drastically change within a few minutes.
Note: Feel free to read our other post on whether you can rock climb every day here. - Freediving: You may be thinking that if you can’t go scuba diving, rock climbing, or even driving home, you should be able to dive normally. However, you can cause decompression sickness if you go freediving within 12-hours of scuba diving. It may be better to relax for a while before getting ready to do the next extreme thing.
What should you be doing when you are diving regularly?
When you are on vacation or moved to a new house to the nearest beach town, you will want to start diving regularly. Many people choosing to buy their diving boats. When you plan this, you should add a few things to your daily routine, all to increase your body’s efficiency as you are diving.
- Hydrating: It may be cold in the water, but you are losing many fluids while diving, even for a few minutes. Drinking the recommended amount of water each day is an easy way of keeping your body ready and healthy for any diving trip.
- Staying Fit: A good rule for any hobby you have is to stay fit. With a trained body, you can enjoy doing a lot of things for a lot longer. Few regular divers will have a beer gut to accompany their diving trips, as a fit body is a lot less likely to use a large number of resources when diving.
- Eat Well: You should not be eating right before you are diving, but having a healthy diet is an easy way to stay diving fit. Swimming, even scuba diving, is a physically demanding task and your body will be burning calories much faster than you could ever expect it.
- Muscle Health: You don’t need to be the next muscle man in the world, but having properly trained muscles will benefit your diving trips greatly. This is because trained and strong muscles require less oxygen to operate and will help you last significantly longer.
- Check Equipment: If we listed all the equipment you would need to check when diving, we would be here for another hour. But everything needs to be almost triple checked before you go diving, as this is the only way to ensure that everything works perfectly. Having an accident in the pool is nothing like something small going wrong when in the ocean.
Conclusion
You can easily go diving every day if you are ready to enjoy the world of water, with many divers quickly learning that being weightless in the water can itself be an amazing feeling. Diving is a great experience, and if you ever have the chance of doing it, you should take that opportunity.
Just be sure you are diving in hotter waters, as cold-water diving can be an extremely uncomfortable experience!