Choosing The Right Weight Belts

Weight belts are some of the simplest and most important pieces of diving equipment in a diver’s arsenal.

At its most basic level, a weight belt gives you the ballast you need to stay underwater. Even if you start a dive with neutral buoyancy , your scuba tank can gain as much as six pounds (3 kg) of buoyancy as you drain the air out of it. If you’re not wearing a weight belt, you might end up surfacing sooner than you expected… and not necessary in a voluntary fashion.

What do Weight Belts Do?

In addition to keeping you underwater, weight belts can help level you out in the water column.

Let’s say your buoyancy compensator (BC) causes you to tilt a little to the right. All you have to do is put a little more weight on your left side or adjust where your weights are on your weight belt and you’re nice and level again. It’s a great fix to hold you over until you can buy a new BC.

What to Look for when Purchasing a Weight Belt?

When you’re looking to buy a weight belt, you’re really looking at two choices:

Hard Weights

Soft Weights

Hard Weights

Once upon a time, hard weights were the only option.

These weight belts consisted of a length of stiff fabric, a release clasp, and several rock-hard lead bricks.

The main benefits of this kind of weight belt are that they’re cheap and it’s almost impossible to rip the belt. However these belts are really uncomfortable. The weights tend to dig into your hips, especially if you’re female.

In addition, dropping a hard weight belt could cause a small catastrophe. You could smash your foot or put a hole in the boat. In fact, many dive boats won’t allow hard weight belts on board because of the damage they can do!

Soft Weights

Enter the soft weight belt. These weights are bags full of lead shot and they’re generally used with belts that have pockets and a zipper or velcro mechanism to keep the weights in place.

While soft weights are more expensive than their hard cousins, they are much, much more comfortable and you don’t have to worry about dropping the belt. If a soft weight belt falls, it causes no damage whatsoever.

In fact, when I described the differences of soft and hard weights to students, I used to throw a five pound (2.25 kg) soft weight on my foot to show how harmless they were and then I’d grab a hard weight and take aim at their feet. They usually got the message pretty quick.

There’s no reason to buy hard weights anymore (unless you want to anchor something down). Soft weights more than make up for the added cost in comfort and safety and the good news is that when you buy a weight integrated buoyancy compensator, your weights will fit in the pockets without any problems. I can’t think of a single BC that was designed to use hard weights.

How much weight do I need?

Have a look here to see the different factors that determine how much weight as a diver you need to carry.

Not as simple as it sounds but well worth the effort.

Diving is supposed to be fun and comfortable. When you go to your local dive shop to pick up a weight belt, get one that uses soft weights.

The small additional cost will be well worth it.

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