Assume that at midlife one has gotten over basic fear of the water and would like to learn to swim for real. But one does not relish the prospect of looking silly, joining a beginner class alongside eight year olds. Is it possible for one to take up swimming as a self-taught exercise, practicing at one’s club at 6 am while noone’s looking?
Swallow your pride, not the water 
Really, if you approach your local pool you should be able to find an adult learn-to-swim class that will fit your comfort zone and won’t put you with the 8 year olds. You will learn faster, swim safer and develop much, much better technique.
You could learn to swim on your own, but the end result will not be pretty, or efficient, and will be more tiring, and you will enjoy it less.
Si
Sounds like a good way to drown.
Instead, just sign up for private instruction at 6am. But do learn to swim because it’s an essential tool.
Benjamin Franklin taught himself how to swim, using insytructions rom a book. He even invented his own swim fins.
Another of those facts about the Founding Fathers they never old you at school.
I learned to swim with almost no instruction in the back bay behind Atlantic City. The water is salt, there are no waves and you almost can’t drown. That’s the ideal way if you want to teach yourself. Otherwise I wouldn’t advise it. But if you do, first try to tread water and then do the elementary backstroke.
I would say, based on all the stories of people being flung into the water and, voila, learning to swim, in the process, that yes, it is possible to teach yourself to swim. In fact, it would seem possible to spontaneously learn to swim, in such cases!
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At a good pool, there should be adult-only beginners class too, because a lot of adults for whatever reasons didn’t learn swimming as children.
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Look at the instructor before signing up. S/he should be a patient, good instructor, not a drill sergeant.
2a. How many medals the instructor won when they were swimming is completely irrelevant. A good instructor is outside the basin, not inside holding you up. A good instructor is a good teacher first, swimmer second. A top sportler =! good teacher. A good teacher has patience, creativity and an excellent eye for seeing if you do the movements correct. A good teacher knows enough didactic to break down things into easy steps; a good sportler has forgotten naturally the steps once he mastered the skill.
- You might learn how to swim from a very good book or a video. If you want to learn swim good you need an instructor or teacher like for any other sport: you can’t watch yourself to see what you’re doing wrong and how to correct it.
3a. Learning the correct movements from the beginning is much much easier than learning it wrong and spending a lot of time to correct it.
3b. My personal advice is: learn Breaststroke first, not crawl. I have heard that in the US (and soviet countries), people are taught crawl first because it’s used in most competitive events. If you learn crawl first, you’ll never properly master the leg move for breaststroke (And whenever I see an American swimming on TV, they have a sideways scissor kick instead of the proper wide-open kick).
If, however, you learn breaststroke correctly first, you can learn the crawl kick without problems. (No I don’t know why this is; however, it’s observation based on many athletes from countries with different ideologies regarding on what to teach - medals vs. staying above water.
Therefore, you need to look for a competent teacher who knows proper breaststroke and not just breaststroke with a scissor-kick, maybe one from Europe (not from a former Soviet country, though) or maybe Canada (don’t know in what order they teach).
3c. Why should you learn proper breast stroke and crawl later? IIRC you’re a woman (as I am). The average woman has far less arm strenght than men. Breast stroke is - despite the name - mostly leg work: 60% legs to 40% arms or more (up to 80% to 20%). It therefore favours women and children who have more leg muscles (from walking) compared to arm muscles. (This doesn’t apply to using the scissor-kick, you waste the leg energy that way).
Crawl is mostly arm strength: about 60% arms to 40% legs or more. It therefore favours men who have stronger arms compared to women.
If you therefore want to cross a lake or swim a long time, you can swim a slow breaststroke for much longer than crawl.
My qualification is information from my friend who was a long-time swim teacher and developed his own methods to overcome fear of water with fun exercises.
Oh, and 12 hours (of at least 45 min.) is the absolute minimum, 14 hours is normal. Because “getting used to water” should be the first couple of hours: splashing water with your hands to keep your eyes open, dunking your head in the water, splashing with your feet … while still sitting on the steps. Then floating to experience that you don’t go under as long as air is in your lungs. Then kicking the breaststroke kick from the floating. Then adding the breaststroke arm move. Then adding breathing. Then starting on crawl.
Looking for classes or taking a few private lessons would be a big help; most people need physical demonstrations when doing a physical activity. However, I did improve my swimming by watching the various instructional videos on youtube.
People trying to teach themselves to swim look just as silly as adults in swim classes with little kids. And, it doesn’t work very well; you’ll end up with some very poor habits and techniques.
Most places that offer classes will have adult swim classes, or private classes. I was at a YMCA yesterday that had signs up soliciting for both – at no extra cost to members.
When asking about adult swim lessons, make sure to mention your level of ability (e.g., “I’m comfortable in the water, but can’t do anything more than float a bit.”) Adults can have wildly differing levels of ability, and you would not want to be stuck in a class with the terrified-to-put-face-in-water folks, nor with the need-to-work-on-their-butterfly-stroke folks. If the pool director indicates that the adult class is one of these, ask about private lessons or a recommendation for some other pool. They will absolutely have no problem recommending a more appropriate program for you (no one teaches swim lessons to make $).
Although I agree with most all the rest, a good instructor should be in the pool with the students, so as to be able to quickly correct mistakes (and fish them up if they’re going under). It is much easier to do so while in the pool, although not as critical for adult classes – provided that the adults are not panicky.
A good coach should be on the side of the pool. Instructor for when you’re learning to swim, coach for when you can swim but want to swim better.
My friend used flotation aids for kids, but his observation was that the teachers who went into the pool did so because they thought it looked better, but lacked actual teaching talent. Those who were good teachers and did it for more than a couple of weeks stayed outside the pool, because standing around in the water not moving as a teacher very quickly gives you kidney or bladder infection from the water stealing your body heat (the pupils themselves are moving).
If the instructor needs to fish pupils out, he is going too fast. If he has to correct mistakes, he can do so from outside, too - it’s not necessary for a male teacher to hold a woman from behind to “show her the right arm moves” though a lot of the creepy teachers (who give other swimming teachers a bad name) love this. The teacher can just as well stand in front of the basin and demonstrate the movement, and have the pupils repeat them in air first.
Hm, that seems to be a language issue - to me a coach is somebody - with wildly differing qualifications - working either voluntary for a swim club or as part of a competitive team to train people for competitions. An instructor to me means a qualified teacher (who has gotten some courses) who teaches beginners as well as advanced until you can swim on your own well enough. And since I assume adults don’t want to go into competitive swimming any longer, just for fun, sports and recreation, a coach usually wouldn’t be necessary if the instructor teaches you the basics correctly. The rest is just practice, and building up fitness and muscles.
IIRC this has been done with infants and they know how to swim.
For a certain value of “infants” and of “swim”. There are some famous clips of babies “swimming” in water that IIRC Desmond Morris showed in a BBC clip. This was also used in the “Aquatic ape theory” as “proof”: very new-born babies keep their eyes open underwater and not breathing water.
However, they’re not doing what we call swimming; instead, they’re using the same crawling movements that babies on land use when going through the crawling stage (before walking upright). They also use the “keeping-eyes-open” and “don’t-breathe” instincts quickly after birth and have to re-learn them at a later age.
Children can’t learn the proper coordination necessary for real swimming before usually age 6 (some very coordinated children maybe at 5 or very rare 4).
Children and Babies do have a lot of fun in warm water, which is what the “Baby swimming courses” usually are - babies with special diapers and their parents spending some relaxed time. However, doctors dislike it because, with the babies peeing and pooping uncontrolled, a lot of chlorine needs to be added to the water, which also created chloramine gas, which causes cancer … esp. in young persons. Ops. Not good. (Having a relaxed bath with your baby in your own bath tub eliminates that).
People or children thrown into water can learn to keep above water, but that’s not the same as proper swimming as we usually think of.
Learning proper swimming with the correct technique is important for two reasons:
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If in an emergency, you need to keep above water a long time, preservation of energy is important. A proper technique is far more efficient than a badly learned one.
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If doing it for sport or fun, wasting energy with a bad technique is frustrating and turns you off. In the worst case (rare, though) a bad technique can even damage things: e.g. the old-school, outdated breaststroke leg kick which twists the knees too far outside than necessary can further damage already-wobbly knees (as some adults have).
I was taught how to swim by my parents (doggy-paddling in the local pond), by the YMCA, then the Boy Scouts.
But
All I’d had was some basic doggie paddle lessons when we went to the Jersey Shore, where my aunt and uncle had a house on one of the inlets, with a plowed-out waterway behind the house. I was wearing a kapok-filled life jacket and paddling around.
"Should he be out there like that? asked someone. “The Water’s awfully deep.”
“Sure,” my father replied, “He has a life jaxcket on.”
He called me in. I climbed up the ladder onto the dock. My father took the life jacket off me and tossed it into the water.
Where it sank.
Sink or swim, indeed.
What??? If your students are such poor swimmers that they need flotation devices to stay abovewater the teacher absolutely needs to be in the water with them. I’d advise anyone to pull their kids out of a swim class taught by such a person.
And I taught swim lessons for years, and never once got a kidney or bladder infection from the water “stealing [my] body heat”. I also did not just stand around while ordering my pupil to perform tasks – I was moving around, showing and guiding them in doing so.
No. If the instructor has to fish students out, he or she is teaching students who do not yet know how to float.
If he or she has to correct mistakes it is very unlikely that the pupil will be able to understand what is being taught if the instructor simply stands apart and describes what is wanted. Very few kids – or adults! – learn best by that method. Most pupils need multiple, different forms of instruction: description (“point your toes while kicking and don’t kick from your knees”), demonstration (“kick like this”) and actual correction of their body movements.
“Repeating in the air” is a useful tool, but not a preferred one, as the movements while on ground or (worse) standing are different than those in the water. Best to have the practice occur in the water.
If one thinks that there is a problem with a “creepy teacher”, the solution is to find a different instructor – not to handicap good teachers from using the best techniques to teach their pupils.
And, I’m sorry, but you don’t seem to have had any swim instruction experience yourself. Anyone who has tried to teach little kids how to swim would know better than to prescribe standing around on the pool deck at all times as the proper method.
A coach is someone who teaches people who already know how to swim, to swim better. Whether or not for competitive purposes. I have coached people who had no intent of entering into competition, but who wanted to improve their stroke techniques for personal swimming. Since they already knew the basics, it was not necessary for me to be in the pool with them, and I was able to use the vantage point of the pool deck to spot their (more subtle) technique flaws.
An instructor is someone who is teaching people how to swim. These are students who have gross flaws in their techniques, or have no swimming skills at all. They need to be in the pool with their students. An easy way to identify a good instructor or a poor instructor for beginners, is whether they are on the pool deck during the class (poor), or in the pool with the students (better).
Qualifications are an entirely separate, although valid, concern to this. You should know the qualifications of any coach or instructor you choose.
My daughter was swimming a length of a 50 metre pool with a good stroke when she was 3, and she wasn’t the only one - four other kids from her class were usually swimming alongside them, and the occasional other toddler would come along for a visit and outswim the adults. They’d all been swimming regularly in classes and for fun since they were tiny babies. Do you have a cite that children can only swim from the age of 6?
Babies don’t pee and poo in an uncontrolled way into the pool; it’s caught in the special nappies you mentioned. What else did you think they were for? They’re not perfect for catching all the urine, but babies in a pool are going to be releasing a lot less wee than older kids. If the baby pool had significantly more chlorine added to it, you’d be able to tell by the stench.
I mean, I agree with the rest of what you wrote, but ‘children can’t swim till 6’ is just not true.
This is for beginning swimmers, and kids. Kids have tiny little arms which means they float differently than adults. In addition, flotation devices give them security. They are not used on all kids, but on those kids who feel insecure. Gradually they are reduced as the kids feel more secure.
You were lucky that you didn’t get sick. However, it’s still quite possible to teach from outside just as well as moving around .
Then the instructor is using the wrong sequence or too deep a pool - we have a shallow pool for teaching beginners. Steps on one end, and water you can stand in to your waist, gradually sloping till it’s deeper at the other end. So they start floating, but if anything goes wrong, they can stand up. This is after the first water lessons so they don’t panic at water in their face, but before the swimming lessons.
I didn’t say “describe” I said show. If the instructor is standing on the side of the basin, the pupils can see him better than if he’s standing on the same level. So the instructor says “Do one stroke like this” and makes the movement. The pupils repeat it in the air. The instructor says “Anne, you’re doing it good, but Bob, open your arms wider, do it like this” and makes the movement exaggerated. When all pupils do it correctly in the air, they lie down and do it in the water.
Yes, that’s why the pupils are in the water. But the teacher doesn’t have to be in the water to be a good teacher.
The thing is from personal observation - obviously not you - most of the teachers who did use personal touching in the water were not good teachers. And people who did stand outside were good enough to manage to teach the kids to swim.
Never said I did. I’m not a good teacher, I lack the patience and the sharp eye. But I watched other people teach.
Well I watched countless kids, beginners and advanced, as well as adults (usually those have bigger fears) being taught successfully with the teacher standing outside.
Well, if the basics are taught correctly, further correction of the techniques should not be necessary, unless the first instruction was too short, or there was a long lapse without practice.
Well, I will continue to disagree with you because of what I saw - the instructor who was outside the basin had the sharp eye to spot all wrong movements, and immediately corrected them, while the guys inside the pool just rattled off their programs without seeing anything at the individual level.
The results of the teacher outside convinced the parents and pupils who had doubted at first.
Are you using Stroke in the sense of “crawl” one of the four defined swimming styles, or in the sense of “moving through the water”? Because I don’t have an English cite from a medical journal that children under age 6 generally can’t swim in the sense of properly doing a style, it is commonly accepted that children in that age have trouble with complicated movements and coordination. Children can’t walk before age 1 generally, they usually can’t tie their shoes before age 4, and so on.
Official swimming styles require three different coordinated movements: Arms, legs and breathing. That is too difficult for smaller children.
There’s also anecdotal evidence from watching swimming courses for kindergartners (age 3 and 4) being offered - the children did learn some kind of moving-through-water, but not the full swim style. This was over the course of 10 years or more, with half a dozen children in a course, and multiple courses in one year.
Moreover, when these children returned for a proper swimming course at age 6 or above, they’d completly forgotten those rudimentary movements they’d learned back then, and had to start completly anew, except for the part “getting used to water”.
Not all courses have those special nappies, though.
You usually can, though. If those courses take place in the kiddie or children’s pool, then the water is already highly contaminated from the other children before the course peeing and pooping inside. Maybe the regulations for kiddie pools and the levels of chlorine are different in the US, but here, the kiddie and children’s pools do smell stronger.
Yes, if the instructors in the pool were poor instructors, a better instructor on the pool deck might get better results. But that would be from the fact that those in the pool were poor instructors.
Instructing while standing on the pool deck is an extremely useful method of teaching. It is not appropriate in all situations, nor for all students. It is inappropriate in some cases.
It is an inappropriate recommendation for an adult nonswimmer to seek out an instructor who only uses that method.
You watched some classes. I was Red Cross WSI and LI trained. Please believe me that I know whereof I speak.
Backstroke, freestyle with much better sharp hand movements than I could manage, and beginner breast-stroke. Not doggy paddle.
There wasn’t any danger of these kids forgetting their swimming when they ‘returned’ to lessons, as they never really stopped them. If you’re seeing lots of kids who could doggy-paddle at 2 or 3 and then took 3 years off after they started pre-school, then it’s really not surprising that they’d forgotten how to swim.
No courses I know have those nappies - the babies have them. They’re not allowed in the pool without them, whether for lessons or just to play. That
is the way it’s been for at least 12 years. And I’m in England. The pools don’t smell any stronger.
Many Australian kids can swim 25m. freestyle/crawl by age 6. My kids were not good swimmers, so they could only do 5m. or so before getting tired.
Teachers here work on all the strokes in each lesson, but with a bit more emphasis on breaststroke and freestyle, and teach butterfly quite slowly, with lots of practice at each stage. Kids’ teachers are always in the pool with them until they can actually swim. Once they can swim laps, the teachers coach from the poolside. I don’t know what teachers of adults do.
As for the OP, si_blakely nailed it in the first answer. It’s good to learn to swim properly because it is much, much easier to swim with good technique. Swimming with poor technique is much more tiring than it needs to be. There are bound to be adult learn-to-swim classes somewhere in the neighbourhood.