Scuba Diving Resources | Scuba Certification
What Is Scuba Diving? Is Scuba Diving a Sport? Five Types of Scuba Diving.
What is recreational open-circuit scuba diving? Extreme sports vs. water sports vs. scuba diving. Breathing air underwater after a scuba certification!
Darcy Kieran is the author of the handbook “The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide To Scuba Diving: How to increase safety, save money & have more fun!” and two unique logbooks for divers, divemasters & instructors.
Explained briefly, scuba diving is a water activity (not a sport) that involves breathing air (or nitrox) from a cylinder (not a tank) while underwater.
What Is Scuba Diving?
In case Google hasn’t told you yet, scuba is an acronym for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. Because it is an acronym, in theory, scuba diving should be written as “SCUBA diving” or even “S.C.U.B.A. diving.” However, nowadays, scuba is used as a word and pronounced as such. Therefore, we write scuba as a common word and pronounce it “skoo-buh,” not S-C-U-B-A.
So scuba is actually a set of equipment, hence the word “apparatus,” which is a fancy term identifying technical equipment or machinery needed for a particular activity or purpose.
Meanwhile, diving is an activity. And scuba diving is a type of diving.
Scuba divers often talk about “diving” without the word scuba, as in “Let’s go diving!” Although it’s a common shortening of “scuba diving,” we need the context to know that the person is referring to scuba diving. Otherwise, the word diving alone would lead to confusion with numerous other types of diving, including:
- Diving per se, as in the action or the Olympic sport of jumping into the water from a platform or springboard.
- Freediving, which is a competitive sport centered around staying underwater for as long as possible and/or going as deep as possible in a single breath. I like to write freediving in one word to prevent any confusion with a dive that would be free of charge, like in “free (scuba) diving.”
- Sport diving or skin diving, which is basically snorkeling. There are nuances between these three terms. For instance, skin diving usually refers to a mix of snorkeling and non-competitive freediving. But for our discussions here, we can package all of this under “snorkeling.”
- Surface-supplied air diving or tankless diving, which is similar to scuba diving, except that air is provided to the diver through a long hose connected to a source of air at the surface. It is often done in commercial diving activities but can also be done recreationally.
Otherwise, if you are thinking about getting a scuba diving certification before your next tropical vacation, it is open-circuit scuba diving that you will actually learn first.
Open-circuit means that when you are underwater, air goes from your cylinder to your lungs (through a piece of scuba diving equipment called a regulator) and then is exhaled in the water, which is why you see bubbles around scuba divers.
Later on, you could progress into semi-closed or closed-circuit diving, which is done by using equipment known as rebreathers. The air exhaled from your lungs goes back into the rebreathers and is scrubbed of the carbon dioxide you exhaled before going back into the breathing loop. It requires specialized diver training.
If rebreather diving sounds exciting, then make sure to master your entry-level open-water scuba diver skills and knowledge as a strong foundation for training in more advanced scuba diving activities.
But, with all that said, most of the time, when people refer to “diving,” it is implied to be open-circuit scuba diving. Otherwise, they would talk about rebreather diving.
So open-circuit scuba diving is what you will learn to get a scuba certification card known as a c-card.
Truth be told, there’s little “diving” involved, except at the beginning. It should probably have been called scuba swimming, scuba exploring, or scuba fish watching, but they didn’t ask me! Sometimes, I am just “scuba being” while hovering in front of a coral head, waiting to see what sea life will come out of it.
Either way, scuba diving is a means to an end, just like breathing is on land. You do it as part of life in that environment. And since the choice of underwater activities is quite broad, scuba diving is for all ages, with some restrictions, but the list of prerequisites for scuba diving is not very long.
Is Scuba Diving a Water Sport?
Recreational scuba diving is not a water sport because “sport,” as per Oxford Languages, is “an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others.”
When scuba diving, we do not compete. And on top of that, we try to avoid physical exertion, which leads to higher air consumption and a shorter dive time. Typically, we move very slowly when scuba diving.
So there is no competition in scuba diving. It is not a water sport, and therefore it is not an extreme sport either. I wish insurance companies would understand it! But that is a different topic!
So scuba diving is an activity because breathing underwater is not a sport more than breathing on land is. Conceptually, what you do with your ability to breathe underwater could be a sport, but that is seldom the case in scuba diving.
In fact, underwater competitions are usually done without scuba gear, like in freediving and underwater hockey.
To be clear, at its most basic level, scuba diving refers to breathing underwater, and that specific ability opens the door to many other actions.
For example, on land, you may use your ability to breathe to sit on your couch and binge another Netflix series, or you may go jogging as a cardiovascular activity.
Similarly, you may make a water sport out of your ability to scuba dive or, more precisely, a physical water activity since there is no competition. Scuba diving can have health benefits, including cardiovascular fitness as well as muscle strength and endurance.
But you do not have to make it so. In fact, you do not even need to swim around. You may go down over a coral head, watch it for an hour, then come back up, almost as when you sit in front of your television!
5 Types of Scuba Diving
If you decide to get a PADI certification or any scuba diving certification from various dive training agencies like SDI, it is “recreational diving” that you will learn.
What is Recreational Scuba Diving?
Recreational scuba diving refers to diving for enjoyment. Fair enough!
More precisely, in recreational scuba diving, you can always make an uninterrupted ascent to the surface should you wish to terminate the dive. In other words, in recreational scuba diving, we do not dive in overhead environments that would limit our access to the surface, and we stay well within our no-decompression time limits. Therefore, we do not need decompression stops on the way back to the surface.
What is Tech Diving?
Tech diving or technical diving is an advanced form of recreational diving in which you can not continuously and freely ascend to the surface, either because you penetrated a structure (like wrecks or caves) or because you dove deeper or longer than the no-decompression time limits allowed. In tech diving, we may also dive with a wider variety of breathing gases which may include helium. In short, in tech diving, we push the limits.
Lately, with the growing popularity of tech diving, people have started to use the expression recreational diving to describe scuba diving which does not include tech diving. However, in reality, tech diving is an advanced kind of recreational diving because it is still an activity people do for fun or as a personal challenge.
Here’s a sidenote for the purists reading this. We may also go in an overhead environment in recreational diving, but… Barely! Usually, in recreational scuba diving, we will not penetrate a wreck or cavern beyond the point where we can see natural light and will stay within 130 feet (40 meters) from the surface, adding the depth of the dive to the length of the penetration. If this sounds confusing, don’t worry! At first, as a newly certified scuba diver, simply stay clear of overhead environments.
What is Commercial Diving?
Commercial diving means the diver gets paid to work underwater for industrial, engineering, construction, maintenance, or other commercial purposes. For example, the diver may do activities like cutting and welding, cleaning, placing or removing heavy objects, and inspecting pipelines.
Because it is “work,” it falls under labor standards like OSHA in the USA. OSHA is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration from the Department of Labor. OSHA’s requirements are pretty stiff, but it makes sense considering the risks are also significantly more than in recreational diving in terms of the number of repetitive dives, length of time spent underwater, lack of visibility, and the strenuous nature of the tasks.
Technically, recreational dive instructors are commercial divers since they are paid to work underwater — teaching scuba diving! But in most jurisdictions, underwater activities done by recreational dive professionals fall in a gray zone, and nobody looks at this type of labor standard. If American recreational dive operators had to follow all labor standards from OSHA regulations, recreational diving would be astronomically expensive and complicated.
What is Scientific Diving?
Scientific diving is a breed of its own. Scientific divers use equipment and techniques in the direct pursuit of scientific knowledge. Scientific divers also bypass the stringent commercial diving standards as long as they satisfy the specific definition of a scientific dive, which I will not get into here.
What is Military Diving?
We’ve all seen military diving in one of the numerous movies and TV series glorifying Navy SEALs! Military diving is a black box encompassing risks and responsibilities, unlike any other type of advanced diving.
Here’s a tidbit of trivia. Many advances in recreational scuba diving equipment have been implemented thanks to developments first introduced in the military, like regulators designed for icy water and rebreathers. In fact, developments and innovations in military diving equipment regularly move into the recreational and technical diving world later on.
There you have it!
Your first step to getting a scuba diving certification and exploring the wonders of the underwater world is to learn open-circuit recreational scuba diving. It opens the door to many other types of aquatic adventures. But first, you need to walk before you run! Or, actually, you need to be comfortable with breathing underwater before you join James Cameron to explore the Mariana Trench!
But don’t rush it! Learning to dive is as much fun as diving is afterward. Take the time to pick the right scuba diving instructor with whom you will master scuba diving skills for safety, comfort, and fun.
More on this soon, including why we dive with cylinders (not tanks) and the difference between breathing air or nitrox in recreational scuba diving. Subscribe to Scuba Diver Press to stay in the loop.
Also, from Darcy Kieran:
- Handbook: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide To Scuba Diving: How to Increase Safety, Save Money & Have More Fun!
- The Best STARTER Scuba Diving Logbook & Checklists while getting your open water diver certification!
- Handbook: Your Career and/or Life as a Scuba Diving Instructor: How to Make a Good Living Out of Your Passion for Scuba Diving!
- The Best ADVANCED Scuba Diving Logbook & Checklists for certified scuba divers, divemasters & dive instructors!
- Reference book: Scuba Diving Industry Market Reports & Statistics.
And if you want to have a taste of scuba diving while you are bored at the office, have a look at my novels with a scuba diving twist, starting with “Mystery of The Blue Dragon” and “Shadows on Ocean Drive.”
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