How to Teach Kids to Swim

Kids are very enthusiastic and fast learners and they possess an infinite curiosity. Therefore teaching them how to swim at an early age is a great thing since they have the potential to learn how to breathe, how to stay afloat, how to manage the speed and rhythm and the right strokes.

Parents should make sure that they are watching the kids at all times and at no point should kids be left alone or out of sight in the pool. This is true regardless of how shallow or small the pool may be. Parents should also try to take their kids to pools which are not overcrowded and have good standards in terms of sanitation, rules and regulations on showers and cleanliness, and at least one life guard on duty.

Parents should make sure that kids are exposed to expert training right from the beginning and not rely on incompetent or overconfident trainers who can expose them to wrong breathing and swimming techniques. This is crucial because unlearning bad techniques may prove to be harder than learning afresh.

Kids should be taught how to properly breathe while partially submerged in the pool so that they can retain as much energy as possible for the longest period of time. Care should be taken to emphasize that they do not ingest any water while breathing and do not inhale it during the time their heads are fully or partially submerged in water.

Kids should also be taught to keep their hands, palm of the hands, trunk and legs as straight as possible to make sure the body moves as hydro-dynamically as possible. The kids should be first taught the freestyle technique and later they can be taught breast stroke, back stroke and finally butterfly. There is no perfect age to learn swimming but kids as young as two years old can be introduced to the joys of swimming.

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The Important Strokes

When you begin to swim, you may find that you are only doing the most basic stroke that almost everybody knows- the dog paddle.  And while you can mull your way through the pool using the dog paddle (and it can even save your life), you have got to move beyond that level if you are ever going to experience any kind of success at the sport of swimming.  After all, having a skill is great, but being able to show if off to people is a whole lot better still.  There are four different types of strokes that are typically done in competitive swimming.  They are the back stroke, the breast stroke, the butterfly and freestyle.  Each one has its advantages and disadvantages, but you can get good at any of them.

The breast stroke and the butterfly involve keeping your legs moving in the same way as one another.  The back stroke and freestyle, on the other hand, are flutter kicking strokes, because your feet move in opposition to one another during them.  And this is a fairly important distinction, because you will generally find that you are better at one type of kicking than you are at the other.  While some people master all four strokes (and become individual medley stars), most people will be doing very well just to get one stroke down really well.

There are situations in which every kind of stroke is important.  For example, you are more likely to end up saving your own life in a bad situation by using freestyle swimming.  It is the fastest and the second easiest to handle.  The breast stroke, on the other hand, tends to be easier when you are out to be aware of where you are going.  There is no better looking swimming stroke than the butterfuly, for when you want to impress people with your power.  And the back stroke is just good for keeping afloat effectively.

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Perfecting Your Strokes

When you first jump into the water, you are almost undoubtedly going to be a pretty bad swimmer.  Everybody starts out that way, even if they will later go on to win Olympic gold.  No matter how great you may one day end up, you start out a raw rookie, just like everybody else.  And this is definitely a good thing, because it teaches you the humility that you are going to need, either when you lose, or when you want to inspire other people in a positive manner.  Between the first time you hop into the water and the first time you win a race, you are going to have to do a lot of practicing.  Your strokes are going to need to become very good.

The first step is, you are going to need some proactive feedback on how you swim.  If your strokes get really bad, you are going to be seriously inefficient.  While every professional athlete has some kind of technical faults in their game, they can overcome these imperfections through their sheer athletic grace and their ultimate ability to visualize what they want to achieve and make it happen.  You are not going to start out with these capabilities (though learning them is a big part of the sport, too), so you might as well get your form to the highest level that is humanly possible for you.

Once you get to the point where your strokes are very good, you are going to have to practice them successfully over and over again, until you have your muscle memory tuned to the point where you can do your strokes perfectly without investing any kind of thought into doing so.  It has got to be a completely automatic action.  And when you swim your very best races, you are going to find universally that this is the case.  Just remember to practice successful strokes, and you will learn to be great.

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Butterflying

There is no other stroke in the entire sport of swimming that makes you look as powerful as you do when you are butterflying.  While its name may sound a little bit sissy, most people will never even think about the title of the event while they are watching it happening.  In fact, in most cases they will be too focused on watching the powerful people who are rocking the water to even care that the stroke that they are practicing has a silly sounding name reminiscent of an insect.  But the butterfly does take more than just powerful shoulders, if you want to practice it properly and really succeed with it.  All of the best butterfliers know that technique is at least as important as raw power.

Granted, the technique that you use is naturally going to be supremely important.  If you butterfly improperly, for instance, you are going to get disqualified.  And if you end up going too far to one side and hitting the lane line, you are going to end up doing even worse, as your battered arm struggles to keep up the proper stroke (it has happened, and it is a very painful thing to watch).  The better your technique is, the more likely you are to actually be able to win.  But technique is nowhere near the entire thing.

You have also got to develop good strength.  And while everybody can recognize that a good butterflyer is going to rely a lot of his or her shoulders, not everybody realizes that your abs, legs and back (both the upper and the lower parts) come into play with every stroke you take.  When people say that swimming is a very full bodied exercise, they are neither kidding nor exaggerating about it.  As important as your form is, throwing your hands forward with great force requires you to rise out of the water effectively.  Your entire body must be quite strong.

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The Strokes of Breathing

When your coach tells you to do a particular number of strokes in between breaths, you might wonder at the purpose of it all at first.  Now, while the best way to do things is to just do as your coach tells you to and ask your questions later on, sometimes it will help you if you keep a particular intention in your mind while you are working out.  In this case, you are working to strengthen your lungs, so that you do not have to breathe as often while you are swimming for a purpose (such as winning a medal for it).  But you are also working to strengthen your mind, so that you do not panic while you are under the water for a few seconds.

A significant part of the swimming process is naturally going to be physical.  People who are not in good physical condition are not going to do very well when it comes time to swim in races.  They are going to be the first ones to crap out, tire out, and have to breathe on almost every stroke.  They may even be the people who have to pause half way through a race, just to catch their breath.  Fortunately, this almost never happens in competitive swimming, but you probably get the point.

What a lot of people do not realize is that there is also a significant mental aspect to swimming effectively.  Far too often, a person whose lungs would be perfectly fine to stay under a few seconds longer will chicken out when it comes time to do so, unless they are used to taking several strokes between their breaths.  If you are used to just doing two or three stroke breathing, when it comes time to do something as simple as a flip turn, you are most likely going to end up emerging faster, breathing more frequently… and it may end up costing you the race.

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Fun Facts about the Four Basic Swimming Strokes

If you’re new to swimming or if you’re just looking to broaden your skills beyond the dog paddle, here are some interesting things you should know about the four basic swimming strokes used in competition.

Front Crawl

Called the “freestyle” by competitive swimmers, the front crawl is the fastest stroke overall. Although a “freestyle” competition officially means that swimmers can use any stroke in the race, swimmers will almost always go with the front crawl for its speed and efficiency. Because lifting the head out completely of the water reduces speed, expert racers learn how to turn the head out of the water only high enough to take a breath.

Backstroke

Also known as the “back crawl,” this is the only competitive stroke done on the back—which makes for easier breathing, but it’s hard to see where you’re going. It’s also the only competitive style for which swimmers start in the water instead of diving in. Until the mid-20th century, backstroke swimmers held their arms straight in the underwater push, but Australian swimmers discovered using a slightly bent arm underwater improved speed. The bent-arm technique thus became the favored method worldwide.

Breaststroke

Generally considered the slowest of the competitive strokes, the breaststroke is difficult to learn and to master. Performing the breaststroke requires superb timing, and swimmers can be disqualified from a race if they miss even one stroke. A popular stroke with recreational swimmers because of its leisurely pace combined with its excellent aerobic benefits, the breaststroke is done by pulling the arms along the body while legs do a “frog kick.”

Butterfly

The newest stroke to competitive swimming, the butterfly was first swum as a separate Olympic event in the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne. Called the “butterfly” because of its wing-like arm movements, the stroke is considered by many swimmers to be the most difficult stroke to perform well. The powerful pull-and-push movement with both arms makes the butterfly’s peak speed even faster than that of the front crawl, but the stroke’s recovery phase makes it slightly slower than the front crawl during a race.

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