The Fit Factor

If you could travel back in time to 1960 and look at a typical diver of the day, what would you see? Most likely a diver who:

• Is a lean and muscular male.
• Has a well-defined waist.
• Doesn’t need a lot of weight because he doesn’t have a lot of fatty tissue and his crude neoprene wetsuit isn’t that buoyant.
• Doesn’t have to worry about a BC cummerbund covering up his weight belt, because BCs haven’t been invented yet.

For divers like this, weight belts provided an adequate means of carrying what little weight the diver needed to offset his own natural buoyancy and that of his equipment.

Now let’s fast forward to today and look at a typical diver. What do we see?

• Today’s divers can easily be male or female, and come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes.
• Today’s divers are more likely to be overweight and use thicker, less-dense wetsuits — both factors that can require divers in full wetsuits to use 20 to 30 pounds of weight (or more) — even when properly weighted.
• Many of today’s divers do not have well-defined waist lines. A number of these divers (particularly women), have such short waists that there is hardly room for a BC cummerbund, much less a weight belt in addition.

An especially common problem among older male divers is the phenomena of “big gut, no butt.” You see these divers struggling in training, trying to hold up weight belts that refuse to stay in place and are constantly falling down around their knees.