Diving - The Sport
Diving was born when the first person jumped into a lake, river, or ocean from a higher ground, in search of fish, pearls and other marine wonders; and, a few thousand years later diving has morphed into an amazing expression of body language, displayed in modern-day diving competitions.
Competitive diving is divided into springboard and platform, each with varying heights, and each possessing its own unique maneuvers and difficulties. This is gymnastics over water, powerful poetry that demands great physical strength and skills.
Diving - The Demand
Knowing the unique demands of this sport will give you an edge in designing strength-training methodology to improve performance and decrease the risk of injury.
Diving, like gymnastics, require rotational skills, performed in the tuck, the pike and the free positions. The pike position is the most demanding because the diver must bend at the waist and hips with the legs straight and the feet pointed. Rotation always creates centrifugal force (which pulls away from the center). This means that the diver not only must move against gravity but maintain the pike position against a force that wants to pull it apart.
The pike requires that the hamstrings and back be very flexible. Putting the chest on the thighs with both legs straight while resisting centrifugal force is in itself an amazing feast, but the diver in this position must also execute perfect timing in rotational speed and then straighten the body before hitting the water. The task is near a physical spectacle, a magical feat, but possessing strength specific to the movement requirement can only make the skills happen a little easier.
Good divers tend to have good vertical jumps. Of course being able to jump high doesn’t guarantee diving skills, but being able to achieve great height off the spring board or platform can allow more room to express diving skill, increasing the chance for better scores. Vertical jump is a motor quality that can be trained for improvement.
Diving - The Injuries
The majority of the literature on “diving injuries” involves foolish recreational activities such as diving head-first into a shallow lake or a shallow end of the swimming pool, but these have little in common with the serious activity of competitive diving. Information on competitive diving injuries is scarce, perhaps because competitive diving injuries, although they occur, are actually rare; practice, training experience and technique are likely the reasons that injuries are minimized (Badman, 2004). Typical injuries seen in competitive diving usually result from mistiming of take-off maneuvers, where the diver inadvertently contact the springboard or the platform on the way down. Also, visual analysis gives insight into potential, although rare, neck and spinal injuries upon entering the water, where the force of impact can be significant.
The Competitive Diving Workout
The strength and conditioning program for competitive diving focuses on improving strength, power and flexibility to support the expression and accuracy of diving maneuvers. The program also emphasizes injury prevention.
The intricate display of twists, rotations, tucks and flips is a skill that is perfected through endless practice, but to get there from the springboard or the platform takes power, and lots of it. Power is fundamental to the vertical jump. And an exceptional vertical jump height gives the diver the greatest chance to execute technical maneuvers smoothly and effortlessly. Plyometrics, such as box jumps, and Olympic-style weightlifting, such as the power snatch or the hang clean, are excellent training modalities for increasing power. Twisting, rotating and tucking require power from the upper body, and power in this area can be optimized through the use of medicine balls and other upper-body plyometrics.
We believe that strength (specifically structural strength) is important to the diver for injury prevention. Strength should be emphasized in the areas of the neck, back and shoulder girdles, which receive a lot of force during water entry.
For the flexibility required for the pike, both static and active stretching exercises are needed. Static stretches require that you hold the stretch for a certain amount of time. Active stretches require that you actively move into the stretch using your own muscle strength and/or using momentum.
The most important element of diving performance is through diving practice and actual diving. But it is now widely accepted that a solid strength and conditioning program is crucial to optimizing diving performance. This is where Hyperstrike fills your strength and conditioning needs. Train hard, train smart.