Child Development

If your goal is to practice your swimming techniques until you rival the pros, then you need to follow professional tips. The primary focus for competitive swimmers is to get as efficient as possible—deliver the most results for the least possible amount of effort. So, what are some tips the pros use for better swimming?

1. Put Technique Before Speed

You can jump into the pool and swim at maximum speed and intensity to get an excellent workout. However, this is not likely to improve your efficiency as a swimmer. Instead, you need to learn how to swim with focus and intent.

Sometimes, you have to go slow to see where your technique lacks. Starting each practice session aware and deliberate of your movements. Then, you can pick up the pace, focusing all the way on keeping your technique solid and not compromising for speed.

2. Be Open to Feedback

This is a tough one to embrace. Being open to feedback means being open to criticism, and even when it is constructive, that can be a blow to the ego. However, all great swimmers use feedback to inform their approach.

There are many things that you may not notice when you are in the water. You might not be spreading your hands as wide as you thought, or you might be getting weak in the elbow as you tire out. Having an expert give you feedback can help you be aware of the things you are doing wrong, while also helping you correct those problems.

3. Watch the Pros

Your ultimate goal is to be where they are. So, it makes perfect sense to study them and work on emulating them. Many YouTube channels specialize in professional swimming videos and critiques. So, not only can you see what the pros are doing and try to mimic them, but you can also hear feedback from experts in the field. Even the pros sometimes get things wrong, and knowing when they do sheds light on areas to improve.

4. Keep an Eye on the Numbers

There are a lot of numbers in swimming. You have stroke counts, stroke rates, intervals, heart rates, lap times, and more. If you love statistics, swimming is the sport for you.

But even if you aren’t an amateur statistician, if swimming is your passion, you have to keep an eye on the numbers. With them, you have specific metrics that let you set goals and monitor your progress. So, if you look at the right numbers, you get a very nuanced picture of your state as a swimmer. An amateur mistake is focusing on lap times and speed and nothing else. A professional looks at the complete picture.

Additionally, watching the numbers helps you stay focused on the fact that this is a journey. The goal is progress, not perfection. Even the best can acknowledge room for improvement, so never be too hard on yourself!

5. Practice Often

The pros make swimming look easy, but we rarely see how often they practice. These swimmers spend pretty much their entire lives practicing and perfecting their techniques. Getting to the point that a relaxed yet powerful stroke is second nature means spending hundreds, even thousands, of hours in the water, not to mention a consistent training schedule.

The Importance of the Right Swimming Home

No matter how good the tips, you cannot expect to become a professional-level swimmer without the right swim home. At the right facility, you will have access to the trainers and classes that fit your schedule and your needs. Professional instructors will be able to give you all the right tips and feedback, helping you focus on continual progress.

The right facilities also matter. Your skills can easily outgrow the pool you train in, and if your goal is to go professional, you need an Olympic-sized pool to practice in. At the right swim school, you can grow and flourish as a swimmer.

Turn to Blue Buoy for Your Swim Needs

Here at Blue Buoy, we trained multiple Olympians and world record holders. That’s because our instructors are genuine professionals and our facilities top notch. While our record speaks for itself, we invite you to take a sample class to see exactly what it is we have to offer. Achieve your swimming dreams with Blue Buoy.

We all know that the ability to swim is an important life skill to have. However, few people use this particular skill on a daily basis. Does that mean that swimming classes don’t have an impact on our daily lives? Not at all. In fact, we believe there are at least five everyday life skills swimming classes teach us.

1. Measuring Progress One Step at a Time

Having big goals is important; we should all have something important we strive for. But when you measure progress strictly by attaining those goals, it’s easy to burn out well before you get there or skip important steps with the hope of getting to where we want to be sooner.

Swimming does not allow for skipping steps, nor does it allow for measuring progress strictly by the big goals. It’s a sport that progresses in baby steps, even for the most talented of swimmers. Anyone who practices swimming for any length of time will be able to look at the big goals in life in terms of the little steps it takes to get there and feel rewarded by each little goal they achieve.

2. Having Patience for the Journey

Patience has always been an important skill. However, it’s rarer and rarer nowadays. Thanks to social media, one-day shipping, and streaming services, our culture as a whole is becoming accustomed to getting what they want, when they want it. Patience is no longer expected, making it an in-demand skill.

But as noted above, progress in swimming isn’t something you can rush. It doesn’t come in hours, days, or even weeks. Swimmers have to be ready to commit to frequent practice over the long term.

3. Accepting That Temporary Setbacks are Part of Life

Even the best of the best don’t win every time. Regardless, it’s human nature to be upset by loss. But, most people don’t enjoy being around sore losers. This means that we need to condition ourselves to accept that sometimes we are going to lose, and that’s okay. Success only comes through trial and error, after all.

Every swimmer will have bad races. Every swimmer will have those moments where their performance doesn’t reflect their full ability or the time they have put into practice. To keep going, they have to learn how to bounce back and learn from their mistakes. But, with some practice and perseverance and encouragement from our supportive swim classes, it won’t seem so scary.

4. Understanding the Trap of Perfectionism

Many people are natural-born perfectionists, expecting to always perform at their best 100 percent of the time. And when they don’t, they’re devastated. This doesn’t have to be in a competition. Even in solo practice, these individuals can be very hard on themselves.

Swimming is about progress, not perfection. Students are taught they can become good, even great swimmers, but perfect isn’t possible, regardless of medium. After achieving a goal, a new one follows shortly after. That’s because the process is just as important as the product. Thankfully, students can learn not to be so hard on themselves and celebrate what they achieve. This is beneficial for for all aspects of life.

5. Realizing That Your Mindset Makes a Big Difference

The difference between a good day in the pool and a bad day mostly comes down to the mindset of the swimmer. When you approach your practice or competition with the idea that it’s not going to go well, it will go badly. If you approach it with a positive attitude and belief in yourself, it will be a great experience.

This is true in all areas of life, from taking tests to giving presentations to interviewing for jobs. The sooner we realize the impact our mindset has on our success, the sooner we can learn to reframe our thoughts. Swimming is a fun and safe way to develop this skill.

Develop These Skills and More With Blue Buoy

These life skills may not be things you can put on a resume, but they’re skills that can carry people to greater success. Our instructors excel at helping both children and adults use swimming to improve themselves in and out of the water. If you want to learn more about our programs, stop by our school and schedule your sample class.

We look forward to working with you.

Woman’s Day – Benefits of Infant Swimming Classes Go Beyond the Pool
Katrina Vella
Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Parenting
The 2009 National Drowning Report found that almost 60 percent of children under the age of five who had drowned had lost their lives in a backyard swimming pool.

Baby Steps with Swim Training

One way of stopping more and more children becoming part of this statistic is to teach children to swim at an early age — and a very early age at that.

A strong believer in teaching children to swim from birth, professional swimming coach Laurie Lawrence says teaching children to swim and become familiar with water could potentially save their lives and has major benefits on a child’s growth and development.

Laurie’s granddaughter has been being taught to swim since she was just four days old.

“My granddaughter at four days with her umbilical cord still attached was having water poured over her face,” Laurie says.

“Children are in the womb, they are swimming for nine months so you are just continuing that natural affinity,” he says.

“And while you are pouring water over their face you use trigger words so they respond to these verbal triggers and can soon learn to hold their breath on their own on command using these triggers.”

Laurie says his granddaughter at four months old was able to hold her breath on command by using the trigger “easy, ready, go”. He says the trigger needs to be rhythmically constant every time it is said for a child to familiarise themselves with it and what it means.

“Breath control is the first stage of any learn-to-swim program so babies are able to learn to swim from birth,” Laurie says.

“Just as parents talk to their babies from birth, the more you talk to them and read to your baby, the smarter and more familiar with talking they become.”

Laurie says the most important thing that children learn through swimming lessons is to be safe around water.

“Children who have swimming lessons realise how to become safer around water, because they begin to understand the difference between deep and shallow water and they are less likely to go into threatening situations,” he says.

He says there are four major benefits which he has observed of teaching children to swim from a young age or from birth.

Four Major Benefits to Child Swim Teaching

One: Those children who have swimming lessons at an early age, if parents continue these lessons, will have better developed motor movement. In other words they can coordinate their motor movement much better than those who don’t swim.

Two: Because these young children or babies are in lessons and they have to follow instructions, they improve their cognitive skills.

Three: A child who is involved in swimming lessons will develop their social and emotional skills further because they are involved with other children.

Four: Because they are being spoken to about their movement skills in the water and spoken to about colour, their language skills are developed.

Queensland’s Griffith University is currently undergoing a study into these four benefits of children learning to swim from a young age which Laurie has observed.

And it’s not just the swim school teachers who are involved in the process. Laurie says parents play the most important role in teaching their child to swim, just as they teach them to talk and walk.

“If it’s a parent and child activity it makes a huge difference,” Laurie says.

“The best teaching for young children is one-on-one and that’s the safest method of teaching,” he says.

“We teach the parents how to teach their child to swim and I emphasise the word swim and emphasise the importance of moving the child through the water.”

To watch the video of Laurie’s granddaughter being taught to swim visit www.babyswim.info