Is Tunnel Time Coaching Worth It?

You will get better but you won't be a ninja until you devote your time to also become a tunnel flyer, not just a skydiver who comes to the tunnel to learn static head down. The tunnel is extremely fun and can get pretty cheap when you host huck jams or attend them, or when you fly with friends, especially on standby. Go to the tunnel, fly your ass off, and devote your skydiving energy to everything else but attempting to learn as much as you can in 45 seconds of typically chaos. Trying new things in the sky with "coaches" who can't even stay near you to save their life isn't going to teach you anything, and at close to $100 a jump in jump tickets and coaching fees, you might as well come actually learn something in a controlled environment with people who way way more wind experience and knowledge. The way speed works on your body position and how different it can be so quickly, finding lift without a rig, dialing in your range of motion, learning all of these things work way better in a controlled environment like the tunnel. In the sky, everything is changing so quickly, it can make learning things way harder and very easy to develop bad habits. In fact, the difference between skydives where folks feel they did better or worse might have just been a change in speed or drag that they were wearing. And they have no idea why. After taking a 4 month hiatus from the sky, I flew in the tunnel almost every day and when I came back to the sky I could do almost anything and everything that I had been daydreaming about. Everything was easier. Tracking, transition to my back while tracking, angle flying, driving really hard to people in my sit, taking socks in a sit was like nothing. Little things I had been working on a skydiver became 10x easier after flying in the tunnel with no skydiving, including tracking which I "couldn't do" in the tunnel. Get yourself some tunnel time man.

/r/SkyDiving Thread