He Dives Like a Torpedo
Or is that the old fashioned way of diving? It looks painful.
shareNed's semi-belly-flop dives are definitely painful, but no, that's not the old-fashioned way of diving. Rather, it's Ned's idiosyncratic, eminently sensible way of doing a heroic-looking dive into pools that are shallow or of uncertain depth. A swimmer who did a conventional dive into, say, three-foot-deep (one-meter-deep) water could easily hit his or her head on the bottom, break his or her neck, and end up a quadriplegic.
So basically Ned wants his dives to be heroic-looking yet safe, and he doesn't care how painful they are.