Swimming Tips For Beginners: Face In The Water, Float, Breathing

Various Swimming Styles Swimming Tips For Beginners

In this series I have asked a few people to pass on a few of the tips they have for learning to swim; Duncan passes on his Swimming Tips For Beginners On Learning The Various Swimming Styles.

Overcoming Fear A Matter Of Exposure

These are not my students and I may or may not agree with what they are teaching but I thought that the exercise was worthwhile.

As I have said please feel free to post your tip that has helped you learn to swim.

Enjoy     
Richard

Although swimming is now an easy thing for me to do, that was not the case when I started off. There are various tips that helped me through my swimming training and made me a swimming pro.

Fear, Face, Float

There are various swimming styles that you can decide to learn, but the basic style is Freestyle. There are some very important tips that helped me out in my swimming training. These tips are general and will surely help you learn all the swimming styles.

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These tips include the following:

The main tip that really helped me out in learning how to swim was getting over the fear of the swimming pool water.

For me and most people, when starting out, the fear of water is common. The fear of water freezes one's mind which leads to one forgetting what they have learnt thus making swimming difficult. Usually, drowning in the water or water getting into one's eyes are some of the causes of this fear.

In my case, I overcame my fear by frequently exposing my face to the water. I would carry out this, by having someone splash water on my face using a bucket or by simply jumping in the swimming pool that was not deep for me.

The other very important step in swimming is relaxing one's body. Due to the fact, that the human body is made up of mostly water it should be easy to float. However, this is not the case because the human body mass is heavier than water. This gets worse when one is tensed up and this was my greatest problem.

I overcame this problem by first getting over my fear of water and I believed that I would float. But the most helpful thing was being helped to float; my friends helped me balance my body which gave me the confidence to, later on, float on my own. This was the greatest fete during my training.

Breathing

The other challenge I had was breathing when swimming. Before I got a hang of it, I had drunk a considerable amount of water. My main problem was controlling my breathing when my head was above the water and holding my breath when I was under the water. This used to tire me due to a lack of enough oxygen.

The right way is you breathe in when above the water and when in the water you breathe out.

I practised breathing by standing in the pool where my head was above the water. Then I would breathe in and put my head under the water. I would breathe out in the water and rise above the water. I repeatedly did this until I got used to it.

After I had learnt the above steps, it was now the easy part of learning how to kick while in the water. After which I combined all I had learnt which was not easy.

But after you get the combination right, which typically relies on your confidence, you are swimming.

After which, now you can learn all the swimming styles that are out there.

Enjoy     
Duncan