We get a lot of questions about what the rotation method is. I think that the single most important thing you should be teaching your swim instructors is to keep their students moving.
Make the swimmers, swim.
You can do that a few ways, but the most important and easiest thing you can do it standardize how you structure your swimmers during a class.
I recommend you leverage the existing structure of a swim team and apply it to your beginners.
Setup a self moving system following the “circle swimming.”
On the swim team, we “Set up your lane,” like this:
Setup your lane:
Set up your lane
1st person starts in the lane’s corner.
Everyone else lines up along the lane line.
#1 pushes off, does their activity, then moves over. Returns to the back of the line.
#2 can begin with the person ahead of them crosses the black line to the other side of the lane.
You can do anything when you return. Stay out of the way.
Setting up your lane and doing circle swimming is all well and good for advanced swimmers, but what about beginners that don’t swim on their own? What do we do with kids that can’t put their face in the water?
We push benches together, and we still follow the same circle swimming structure. We leverage the exact same format but with shorter distances and with benches.
In the graphics below you can see a swimmer doing a front glide from one bench to another. Add more swimmers and treat them just like circle swimming. Your beginners can do glides back and forth, moving in a circle, like circle swimming, and you can maximize the amount of time your students are participating.
Go from bench to bench.
This is an example video. It can be better by using the “rotation” method like circle swimming.