platform flat fall

Question
How serious are the injuries from bad fall from the 10m platform? How do you do to avoid serious injury once you are in the air and know the dive can't be saved?

Answer
Hi Pablo -

The injuries from a bad fall from the platform can be serious. They range from the painful sting of a 'belly flop' to broken ear drums, internal organ injuries, sprained neck & back muscle pain. Other injuries are from extended training on a platform that are usually wrist, triceps & shoulder injuries.

Avoiding serious injury once you are in the air is near impossible. The only thing you can do once you know you are in trouble is to try and make yourself as small as possible (curling into a ball) to keep as little skin area exposed to a bad landing (be careful not to let your knee and nose collide). You have to have very good spatial awareness and a very fast reaction time to do this. When you dive off of a 10 meter platform you are hitting the water at about 33 miles per hour.This does not give you a lot of time to react at that speed.

There are several reasons bad crashes happen on platform:

1. The primary reason divers crash from this height is that they were not prepared to do the dive in the first place. 10 meter diving should only be done under the supervision of an experienced and U.S. Diving Safety Certified Registered Coach.

2. The diver did not spend enough time at the lower platform heights (5 meter and 7.5 meter)training to be able to perform dives safely from the 10 meter.

3. Even experienced divers can get ' lost ' during a 10 meter dive. They lose their spatial (air sense) awareness in the middle of the dive and cannot tell up from down. By that time what they think is the water is the sky which is followed by the crash landing. Pools with a white bottom can be deceptive, especially outdoor pools, because the color of the pool and the sky are the same. The best pools with 10 meter platforms have dark bottoms so the diver can tell the water from the sky or ceiling.

4. The surface of the pool needs to be agitated with a stream of water. When the surface of the pool is calm, the diver cannot tell the surface of the water from the the bottom of the pool. It is important to know when traveling 33 miles per hour when you are going to contact the water !

Some pools are equipped with an ' bubbler ' system to soften the crash of a poor landing. Before the diver goes off the platform, the coach switches on the bubbler and a large amount of bubbles comes from the bottom of the pool. If the diver is going to crash, these bubbles greatly reduce the sting of a bad landing.

If you are diving off a platform without a certified coach, I strongly encourage you to stay only at the lower levels and also become more proficient at springboard diving. The best platform divers all got their training on springboard before pursuing platform diving.

If you do not know where you can find a coach, send in another question with your home town and I will help you find a coach close to your area

Good luck with your diving this summer.

Tom Trapp