Taking a mask off underwater

This post is a cut and paste from this thread on scubaboard https://www.scubaboard.com/community/threads/when-the-thought-of-taking-your-mask-off-underwater-just-freaks-you-out.587119/ by the user rsingler. I thought it was interesting to share.

There are a few universal “small hurdles” during the first pool classes when getting Open Water certified. There’s that first time you inhale from your regulator when submerged…the first time you have to take your second stage out of your mouth…or getting water up your nose. Some folks seem to handle them easily, and others struggle. It’s a mental challenge.

As an instructor, though, there is one issue that bedevils a few students that occasionally seemed to defy fixing: the prospect of taking their mask off underwater and breathing from their regulator as they swam around the pool. The purpose, of course, is to be able to self-rescue if the strap of your mask breaks and you lose it. You and your buddy calmly ascend to the surface, with both breathing, but only one wearing a mask and guiding the pair.

When you are having a hard time doing this successfully, you get water up your nose. When that happens at the bottom of the pool, it can be panic-inducing. Over the years, I have had repeated students with this issue that just wanted to quit, and it became an obsession for me to figure out a way to train them to control that muscle in their soft palate, so they could breathe only through their mouth.
A side benefit is easier mask clearing and less mask fogging, because warm moist air coming out of your nose during a dive will condense on a cold mask.

If you have, or fear you might have that problem, here is my method for curing it. It’s silly, but it just works.

I ask my students (in a quiet room, and usually by themselves so they don’t get embarrassed), to slowly say “Tonka” (as in toy Tonka Truck) over and over and over, fifty times.
I ask them to feel in their bodies for that moment when their nose/palate shifts from N to K. I ask them to feel that muscle close off their nasal passage for the hard “K”.
Next, I ask them to say the syllable “K” (sounds like “kuh”) after Tonka, e.g., “Tonka…kuh”. Yep…another fifty times, “Tonka, kuh!”
I explain that they have just taught themselves what it’s like to close off that muscle.
NEXT, the exercise is to say “Kuh!” and then inhale through pursed lips, like sipping through a straw. Pursing the lips really seems to make a difference, btw.
You get it…”Kuh!…then suck in”, fifty times, without breathing in through the nose.

Now the students are closing off the soft palate and immediately breathing in without inhaling through their nose!
Enough repetition, and this is usually enough to get them to pass their (previously failed) no mask breathing drill.
Obviously, it also works to solve this mask fog issue.

But if it’s STILL a problem, the graduation exercise (now that they know they can close that muscle, at least on land) is to try to REVERSE the process:
You know that disgusting old man who clears a gob of snot in public? Well, that’s sort of where we’re heading…📷
At the moment the student starts to say “Kuh!”, I ask them to stop before any air comes out their mouth. It’s just a “K!”
At that moment (and this one usually takes a moment to figure out), I ask them instead to exhale a little puff through their nose, and NOT through their mouth, while they keep that muscle closed. It sort of sounds like getting ready to snort.

After all the practice closing that muscle to prevent exhaling through their nose (“Tonka…kuh!”), a deliberate action to snort through the nose and NOT the mouth suddenly makes the light bulb go on. They can control that muscle! They were closing it, and now they deliberately had to open it (even though that’s the opposite of what they want to do with their mask on). They have control of the muscle!

Now we put a mask on, and they purse their lips and pant in and out, breathing through their mouth only (while thinking “Kuh!”) and they have compete control of that muscle. No mask fogging. No problem passing no-mask swim. They can feel when that tiny flap of soft palate presses against the roof of their naso-pharynx.

That’s my system. Being silly about it in class actually seems to make it easier.