Firm and Fit
Posted By Nicolas Danan on 20 May 2007
DB: When I listen to you, I feel like I'm listening to the PADI head of education back in the days when scuba was an elitist sport practiced only by military people. PADI decided to market the sport as a recreation and created an educational curriculum designed for the masses. We both know that the scuba industry has been struggling in recent years, trying to find new markets. It's not doing that great overall. Would you say you would like to follow a similar model?
MS: I wouldn’t like to follow the exact model as we freedivers are different. I feel that the marketing made by scuba diving was more like “it's so easy anybody can do it!” What I am trying to show is that freediving is easy because it is something you are born with. I would like freediving courses to be an exploration into your body's capabilities, not just grabbing equipment and checking out the fishes.
I find that freediving as a discipline is closer to surfing, kayaking, and kite surfing. It's a direct interaction between your body and the water element. I see freediving also developing more as a lifestyle than as a hobby that you'd do once a year on vacation. As a matter of fact the Scuba industry itself is trying to recover from that “hobby” image that they had for so long.
Freediving is already a lifestyle in itself. If you look at freedivers nowadays, if you talk to competitors and ask them what they do, many of them are pretty educated people. They all have jobs that allow them to freedive often. They don’t drive luxury sedan even if they make a lot of money -they spend the money on traveling to get to more freediving playgrounds. They also are environmentally-conscious people. They care about the ocean and want to protect it. The freediving culture/lifestyle is growing as we speak.
FIT would like to cultivate this lifestyle and help it grow.
DB: There are now more and more freediving courses available to the public. Freedivers, PFI, Deeperblue, to name a few. How is a FIT course going to be different from the other folks?
MS: Talking about what I know already, the difference between a PFI and an FIT course will show up on a longer time frame. I was one of the creators of the curriculum at PFI.
One of the main differences you will see in the FIT curriculum is that I have broken down the different subjects covered during a course to be more digestible by the students. One of the biggest problem I had found teaching the PFI way was that the students left a 4-day course very excited, but a lot of them were confused by the amount of information they got in such a short time. They needed to come back and have several refresher courses to fully absorb and comprehend the knowledge and skills. I decided on keeping the three levels on the FIT curriculum. Level I is for novice and very inexperienced freedivers, Level II is for people who are comfortable in the water and have experience with freediving and Level III is for highly-experienced freedivers who have completed Level II. PFI did not have the Level I course that FIT has created, that is, a course designed for people who've never done any freediving before. Every level has it own workbook, video, and slide show. Last but not least the Level III course, which is geared toward experienced freedivers, is also a more thorough program in that it's more than just in-water training the way we used to do it at PFI. FIT will provide more knowledge to its Level III students: dietary science, training program design, and more on advanced techniques like deep water equalization.
DB: Still on the subject of education, what is your relationship with AIDA?
MS: I've been member of AIDA since I started to compete. I respect them very much. It's the largest governing body for freediving and all my records have been set under AIDA rules. I've never even thought to join any other organization. That said, I believe it was a mistake for AIDA to start an education system, since that makes AIDA a non-profit organization trying to get involved in a moneymaking business. It doesn’t look good as they spend their manpower, time and money to focus on things that are not directly involved with the main objectives, which are to create rules and safe environments for freediving competitions. And, of course, to grow the sport by organizing more competitions.
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