SDI advantages from TDI -

SDI Advantages from TDI

Article by Mark Powell

We started our journey in 1994 with the founding of Technical Diving International (TDI), one of the first agencies dedicated to providing specialized diving training. TDI set the standard for technical diving education, offering comprehensive programs for advanced diving techniques, including Nitrox, Closed Circuit Rebreathers, and overhead environments like caves and wrecks. As the ultimate one-stop solution for technical divers, TDI established a foundation that would soon expand into new areas of diving education.

In response to growing demand, Scuba Diving International (SDI) was launched in 1998, expanding TDI’s experience and its commitment to safety and quality to the world of recreational sport diving. SDI quickly gained a reputation for its innovative, instructor-driven approach, creating training programs tailored to the needs of modern divers. This expansion allowed the organization to serve a broader audience, ensuring that divers of all levels could find a path to growth and mastery.

Today, SDI, with its sub-brands TDI, ERDI, and PFI, remains committed to TDI’s original focus on safety and quality. All of our programs are born out of doing the deepest, toughest, most difficult, cutting-edge dives there are. We came from the depths into the shallows.

What does that mean?

What does this mean for a new open water student? Does it mean that we want to turn all recreational sports divers into tech divers? No, not at all; recreational sports diving, technical diving as well as public safety diving and freediving are very different disciplines. They require different equipment and training. However, there are huge advantages to learning to dive with an agency that also features these other areas.

There are a number of areas where SDI is different to the other mainstream diving agencies because of our background. In this article I will review each of these areas and the advantages they bring to recreational sports divers.

Flexibility

Technical diving covers a range of equipment configurations including backmount or sidemount for open circuit as well as various types of rebreathers. Different technical diving applications require a range of equipment configuration and so we have never mandated a single equipment configuration. There are key safety principles such as redundancy and streamlining that can be achieved by a range of configurations. This has carried though to SDI. We do not mandate that a diver can only use a jacket style BCD and a weight belt. Instructors can select the equipment configuration that suits their environment and their students rather than sticking to a “standard configuration”. For more information on this see the article https://www.tdisdi.com/sdi-diver-news/can-you-teach-open-water-in-backplate-harness-and-wing/

The reason why we adopted this approach with TDI is that in the early days of technical diving equipment was in a constant state of development. That meant that there was no consensus on a single correct equipment configuration and so fixing on a single equipment configuration in 1994 would have prevented us from embracing new developments that have come along since that time. In addition, the environment and type of equipment available in the NE Coast of the US, Florida, Mexico, Caribbean, South Coast of the UK, Red Sea or Australia was very different and so we had to accommodate these variables.

The advantage of this to the recreational sports diver is that an open mindset with regards to equipment configuration was part of the SDI philosophy from the start. It doesn’t matter if you prefer to use a jacket style BCD or a wing and harness, it doesn’t matter if you prefer a weight belt or integrated weights, it doesn’t matter what brand of dive computer you use. Your instructor will teach you to use real world equipment in a real-world environment.

In addition to flexibility in equipment we also encourage flexibility in techniques. We believe there is no one, single way to clear a mask, perform a descent or execute a rescue. As long as the objective is met, we don’t mind how the student achieves this.

Again, there is a very pragmatic reason why we adopted this approach. When TDI started, our students had learnt to dive with a range of other agencies. Some had been taught to perform a skill one way while others had been taught to perform a skill a different way. For example, some agencies teach in an out of air situation the donor should offer their alternative air source while other teach that the recipient should take the alternative air source. By taking students who performed skills in different way as well as having different backgrounds and levels of knowledge and experience our instructors had to have a level of flexibility in how they dealt with students.

The advantage of this is that having a mindset of treating each student as an individual with a different background leads to much better teaching. It leads to instructors that have to consider the best way of teaching a skill or theory session to the individual students in front of them rather than following a cookie cutter approach and teaching the same technique and the same presentation to each and every student. It turns out that because of where we started our instructor had to become better at all aspects of teaching, not just giving canned presentations.

In recent years there has been increased interest in what has been called adaptive teaching. This means ensuring students with, for example, one or more missing limbs can complete all the skills in a standard diving course in a safe and repeatable manner. This is done by finding an alternative way for them to achieve the end goal. SDI fully support this approach but believe adaptive teaching should be applied to all students, not just those that have a major injury or disability.

Real world approach

The SDI philosophy has led to a very realistic approach where the focus is on what is practical and realistic. Dr Bill Hamilton once said that when it comes to decompression theory the most import thing to remember is “What works, works” and the same principle can be applied to diving techniques. A good example of this is the case of weight removal. Many instructors grew up using weight belts and were taught the skill of removing and replacing a weight belt. Then as equipment developed alternative systems came around such as weight harnesses and integrated weights. These offer significant advantages when compared to a weight belt and many divers, as well as instructors, prefer this type of system. However, I have seen instructors insist that their students do not use the integrated weights in the BCD and instead wear a weight belt in order to perform the “weight belt remove and replace” skill. Once the skill is complete, they are allowed to switch back to the integrated weights they prefer and will actually use for their real-world diving. What has this achieved other than ticking as box. The diver can now remove and replace a weight belt although that is not how they normally dive. We do not know if the diver would be able to remove and replace the weight system they are actually going to be using.

If we think about the real reason for this skill there are two aspects to it. The first it is to be able to remove weight to pass up to a boat or in the case of being lost on the surface or maybe to become positively buoyant in an emergency. The second is to be able to replace a weight if it comes loose during a dive. The important thing is that the diver can do this with the equipment they are going to be using and not forced to do this with an equipment configuration they are not routinely going to be using.

I am not saying that divers that use weight systems should not also do the same skill with a weight belt in case they are travelling and use a dive centre that does not use integrated weights. Teaching a diver to use integrated weights AND a weight belt is a good idea but teaching them to use a weight belt INSTEAD OF integrated weights is not good teaching.

All of the factors above mean that SDI instructors have to have a wider range and depth of knowledge about different equipment configuration and techniques, they have to have strong teaching skills and really understand what they are teaching their students. The following quote from the book “The Element – How Finding your passion changes everything” by Ken Robinson is a great illustration of the differing approaches to teaching.

Too many reform movements in education are designed to make education teacher-proof. The most successful systems in the world take the opposite view. They invest in teachers.

To get a perspective on this, compare the process of quality assurance education with those in an entirely different field – catering. In the restaurant business there are two distinct models of quality assurance. The first is the fast food model. In this model the quality of the food is guaranteed because it is all standardised. The fast food chains specify exactly what should be on the menu in all of their outlets. They specify what should be in the burgers or the nuggets, the oil in which they should be fried, the exact bun in which they should be served, how the fries should be made, what should be in the drinks and exactly how they should be served. They specify how the room should be decorated and what the staff should wear. Everything is standardised. It’s often dreadful and bad for you. Some forms fast food are contributing to the massive explosion of obesity and diabetes across the world. but at least quality is guaranteed.

The other model of quality assurance in catering is the Michelin guide. In this model the guides establish specific criteria for excellence, but they do not say how the particular restaurant should meet these criteria. They don’t say what should be on the menu, what the staff should wear or how the room should be decorated. All of that is at the discretion of the individual restaurant. The guide simply studies criteria and is after every restaurant to meet them in whatever way they see best. They are then judged not to some impersonal standard but by by the assessment of experts who know what they’re looking for and what a great restaurant is actually like. The result is that every michelin restaurant is terrific and they’re all unique and different from each other.

One of the essential problems for education is that most countries subject their schools to the fast food model of quality assurance when they should be adopting the Michelin model instead.

SDI has adopted the Michelin model of diver training for technical diving it is the only option. The good news is that this model also works well for recreational sports diving.

Diving is perfectly safe – as long as you remember how dangerous it is

Another area that provides benefit to recreational sport divers is the attitude to risk management that we have inherited from TDI. High risk dives require the highest standards and a focus on risk management. Deeper dives, mixed gas dives, rebreather dives, cave diving, wreck penetration and using cutting edge equipment and decompression approaches increase the risks significantly. In order to mitigate these risks technical divers take a series of precautions to balance out the increased risk. Additional planning, equipment checks, teamwork, gaining additional knowledge practicing skills, being aware of human factors and knowing when to call a dive are all fundamental aspects of technical diving procedures. These mitigations can be used to balance out the risks to an acceptable level. This means that a well-prepared technical diver may, in fact, be at less risk than a poorly prepared recreational sports diver. However, if you take those same precautions from technical diving and apply them in the recreational sports diving environment you can reduce the risk for the normal recreational sports diver even further. By adopting the mindset of a riskier area, we can make recreational sports diving much less risk.

The Value of Experience and Quality

Within TDI there is a strong ethos of building up experience at one level before moving on to the next level and the value of experience is carried over into SDI. Training is important but we also recognise the value of experience as a diver and also as an instructor.

This ensures that divers are prepared for the dives they are undertaking. Whether that is their first dive beyond 18m/60ft or their first dive to 100m/330ft.

Innovation

Innovation has always been part of our core. When TDI launched a Nitrox course aimed at recreational divers you have to remember that other mainstream agencies were saying that Nitrox was not suitable for recreational divers. Now every mainstream recreational diving agency has a Nitrox course and promotes the benefits of nitrox. TDI introduced the use of nitrox, mixed gas diving and also rebreathers to the wider recreational market. When SDI was formed it was created by people who treated innovation as normal and so SDI became one of the leaders in innovation within recreational sports diving.

This meant that SDI was;

First to make online open water training mainstream. SDI has always championed the use of eLearning as a way of enhancing face to face teaching. We have 20 years’ experience in eLearning systems and now provide services to other organisations that want to develop an eLearning system. Other agencies said that you couldn’t use eLearning in the diving industry but now everyone is doing it.

First to release kids’ diving programs. It used to be that you had to be 18 to learn to dive then some agencies allowed 15 year old to start to learn to dive but we brought diving to anyone from 12 and up and now everyone is doing it.

First to present online specialties such as wreck, computer nitrox, deep and navigation.

First and still the only insured sport-level Solo Diver program. Other agencies have tried to copy the concept with “Self Sufficient Diver” courses but the SDI course is still the only insured sport level course which covers solo diving.

First to allow you to teach “as they dive,” permitting students to learn to dive utilizing a Personal Dive Computer (PDC). At the time it was considered a heresy to suggest that divers could use a dive computer rather than trying to decrypt dive tables. We were the first to recognise that divers go out and buy a dive computer as soon as they finish their class and so it is much safer to teach them how to use it properly during the class rather than let them try to work it out on their own afterwards. Of course, now everyone is doing it.

SDI – One Dive Family

Once you consider the various aspects of SDI that have been influenced by the legacy of TDI you can see why SDI is different from other agencies. Our difference is not represented by a shiny new manual or adding an addition al course. It is represented by the mindset that underpins the entire company. This is why the tagline “One Dive Family” is so appropriate.

Only SDI brings the expertise in providing the safe quality instruction demanded by tech divers to every diver.