A Happy New Year With Scuba Fitness

Unlock the Ocean Portal - Lifestyle

One of the thousands of reasons I love Florida is that by New Year I don’t have to wait another four months for the winter to end and the spring will come with it's flowering beauty. Snowy landscapes are nice to look at on a picture, but not to live with on an everyday basis.

I love to clean out the old and look for tulips to buy in the store to get the fresh spring into my home as soon as possible.

With the New Year I also change what I am eating. Fall and winter require heavier food, spring and summer contain more seafood (the stone crab season is still on for you who like to pick them) and salads. I don’t do New Year resolutions since I know I will break them all, but I do like to start doing low impact exercises, like long walks with the dog, swimming, water aerobic and of course my favorite sport; diving.

Diving is an excellent form of exercise. You really move your whole body, even the arms, though you are supposed to not move them. Well, we all have our own style in pretty much everything, don’t we?! =)

The good part about exercising through scuba diving is that you don’t know you are doing just that. You think you are only checking out the colorful reef and the striped, dotted or block colored fish. Maybe you are spear fishing the night’s dinner.  Whatever you are focusing on, it isn’t that you are just doing a great workout.

You don’t have to be very fit to be a scuba diver, but you still need to be able to swim some yards in case that is needed in a dive situation, or to be able to tread water for some minutes for the same reason. Stretching is preventing cramps in your limbs (I just started to do yoga at The Longhouse!), snorkeling with fins in a swimming pool (heated, like North Shore Aquatic Complex in St Pete that we use for scuba certification training) to train the right “dive muscles” before the busy dive season start and so on.

Well, there you go. So many reasons to start the new year not only with diving, it also gives you many reasons to get out there doing other physical training to meet the goal; to be a fit scuba diver.

Here are some tips for Scuba Diver training and advice for how to better lift and transport your dive equipment: http://www.divefitness.com/html/articles.html

Anette Monroe

Gulfport Dive Center

http://www.divegulfport.com/#/home/

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Gulfport-Dive-Center/409286502467281