Quoted By:
New SCUBA diver here. I've been doing open water certification and my instructors and I have been having trouble with my trim. I've been lifting weights for more than a decade. Very dense bones, pretty muscular at 6'2" 185lbs, probably something like 14% bodyfat. Since muscle's negatively buoyant and fat is positively buoyant my buoyancy is all sorts of fucked up.
My instructors told me I could probably dive without weights but need them to practice emergency weight release. Today I dove with a total of either 4lbs or 4kg of weights, I can't remember which. Mounted the belt as high as I could before the BCD would get in the way. And I still have my legs making my body extremely bottom-heavy. We also tried clipping 2lbs or 2kg to the top of my chest and that wasn't enough.
So, to get my torso to have similar buoyancy as my legs I'd have to stick a ton of weights high on my chest. But then I'd be overall very negatively buoyant and would have to swim around with a bunch of air in my BCD which would probably bring my torso back up relative to my legs. Is this a common problem? What do?
