Swim lessons overall are pretty easy. Put your face in and move your arms and legs to make you move. We help, as swim instructors, in guiding our students to the quickest most efficient way of doing that. One of my favorite things about swim lessons as a teacher, is the immediate feedback that we get from our swimmers. We can try something out and it might work with student A, but not with student B.  This allows Swim Instructors, if they are observant, to recognize techniques that work well.

Teresa teaches in Arizona and has contributed some of her effective teaching tips before. Here she details one of her simple fixes for a common problem in swim lessons: the dreaded sinking belly, or “V” position. This happens when swimmers lift their heads up and attempt to still make splashes. Ultimately, it leads to them sinking down into the water and going into a vertical position. In this guide, Teresa shows us a creative use of a swim noodle to address this issue (Get some from amazon here: http://amzn.to/2bzWWtn).

 

From Teresa:

I have a new Technique that I wanted to share and I’ve included a picture of one of my students doing it so other Instructors can see it correctly used in order to solve the problem I had to overcome.

 

Problem: I had two students this session that were kicking too slow during the streamline and front glide for freestyle so they kept sinking instead of swimming.  The boy’s body form was more like an upside down “V” instead of a streamline so he kept going too deep in the water instead of swimming right on top of the water.

 

Solution: I tied a knot in a noodle to make it look like motorcycle handle bars and asked them to KICK around the pool as though they were riding a motorcycle and he realized that he had to KICK faster in order to keep his FACE out of the water.  The other thing he realized is that the handle bars would get covered with water if he swam in his upside down V so he started relaxing his body so it would be more like a streamline like it’s supposed to be when swimming.

 

The first picture (dark hair) is using the noodle properly

Here, in the second picture (blonde hair) was still “too bent” to keep the handle bars up and going too deep while he was swimming.

BOTH kids started swimming all over the place after 2 days of using the “Motorcycle Kicks”.

 

 

Thank you Teresa!

 

Have you used this swim teaching technique? Let us know by connecting on Facebook, Twitter, or in the comments.