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bodypilot90

about how much time to learn

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Since no one has answered you yet, I'll take a shot. And hopefully someone else will come along and chime in with more experience.

So, when you say pop ups, I assume you mean the ability to slow your fall rate by changing your body position to grab more air. In the tunnel this would be the ability to move up?

All people learn at different rates, so this is just my experience. I had 28 jumps when I went to the tunnel. A couple of those were coaching jumps working on levels. I was able to increase my fall rate fine in the air, but I hadn't mastered slowing it yet.

My first few tunnel sessions (2.5 minutes each) were just about correcting a few bad habits in general freefall (tucking my knees a bit which made me slide back - the tunnel is unforgiving of those habits). We worked on up/down on my 3rd session then turned to center point turns and sliding side to side. We brought up/down back in combination with other skills on my 11th, 12th, 13th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, and 22nd sessions (and more after that, but I stopped looking it up at that point).

I'd say it took until the 22nd session for up/down to start to be stable and more under my control. I now have a little over two and a half hours in the tunnel and feel comfortable moving up and down and stopping myself where I want to. Early on, I would move back and forth as I went up or down or I would bounce when I came down or not be able to go up as smoothly as I wanted. If all you want to work on is up/down it shouldn't take you 22 sessions. We started to work on backflying at 14 sessions, so not all of my sessions at that point were even belly flying.

Best thing to do is find a coach, tell them what you want to do, and then get in there and try it. If you can, aim for 10-15 minutes total time per visit.

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To learn the basic "Look down to go up, look up to go down" move in the tunnel? Not all that long. All the various refinements and inputs that you can use ... that's something that you can keep working on every time you go. As a fast-faller, every tunnel session I do I work on fall rate to some extent, whether it's asking the tunnel "driver" to slow the air down so I really have to work just to stay off the net, or popping myself up above the door and doing turns and side slides while staying up, or working with different inputs and combinations of inputs to have more in my arsenal.

A lot of what I've learned in the tunnel has helped me to prevent even going low in the first place on a skydive - learning to stay up while turning or sliding or taking grips - which is preferable to getting low and having to use all your tools to get back up quickly.
"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." -P.J. O'Rourke

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