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How to Build a New Habit: This is Your Strategy Guide

http://99u.com/articles/17123/5-scientific-ways-to-build-habits-that-stick

 

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/featured/18-tricks-to-make-new-habits-stick.html

 

Teaching swimming lessons is establishing habits for our swimmers. We look at how to do that in this podcast by looking at how to create good habits. If you want to make better habits for yourself, tune in, and then adapt it to teaching your staff and swimmers.

 

Commit, Start simple, move in incremental steps.

 

Create behavior chains,

 

From Jamesclear.com:

 

“The 3 R’s of Habit Change

Every habit you have — good or bad — follows the same 3–step pattern.

1. Reminder (the trigger that initiates the behavior)
2. Routine (the behavior itself; the action you take)
3. Reward (the benefit you gain from doing the behavior)”

 

 

Swimming Ideas is founded upon swimming as a habit. Our goal with the scripts, techniques and systems is to allow your swim instructors to teach the same way using the same words to instill habit in your participants.

 

We recognize that “habit” is an automatic response to do something. We do our habits automatically without thinking of them.

 

For example: streamline off the wall every time. We want that to be a habit, so we teach lots of good streamlines in a variety of situations to create a habit in our swimmer.

 

For example: breathing on the second or third stroke on freestyle after the streamline is a learned habit. It takes less than a second to do 1 stroke and breathe on #2, but fear of not breathing leads swimmers to take an immediate breath.  We want to train the good habit.

 

For example: maintaining soldier position while swimming is a “habit” or good posture. It is difficult to do, and requires many multiple steps to align your body in the correct way. We do lots of different modes of soldier in differing ways to establish it as a habit.

 

Swimming ideas uses scripts and lesson plans https://www.swimminglessonsideas.com/swimming-lesson-plans/ to get our staff teaching the same way and creating habits in our swimmers.