When will my kid learn to swim?

I love this question. The truth is that learning to swim takes time. It is a direct relation to the time amount spent in the water learning in a healthy, safe, fun environment where they get frequent expert feedback from a master.

The more time you spend learning to swim the faster you’ll learn!

Why are they only swimming short distances?

Short distances are used for a variety of reasons. All of them are aimed at a singular goal: giving learners an opportunity to practice new physical skills without anxiety, fear, or fatigue.

We want to mitigate swimmers creating bad habits through struggle. We want to reduce difficulty as mucha s possible so that learners can focus their attention on new skill attainment and new physical muscle memory.

My kid never gets a chance to swim a full length of the pool. How will they get better if they’re always stopping short?

When we leverage short distances we’re doing it to limit learners from doing things that lead to bad habits.

For example, if we ask a new swimmer to swim for longer than they can hold their breath they will struggle to take one. Over time as they do this distance more and more they’ll begin to automatically take a breath in a way that may be inefficient, wrong, or lead to quick fatigue.

We limit distance to limit breaths. Some times our distance swam is the limit of 1 breath, some times it is the limit of 2 breaths.

Our goal is to remove the anxiety about breathing so that the learner can devote the entirety of their attention on doing the activity.

We learn complex things by “chunking.”

Chunking is breaking complicated things into smaller pieces. Then we put them back together again.

Complex skill: Front Crawl with Breathing

Chunks:

• Body Line & Posture
• Front Crawl Arms
• Flutter Kick
• Breathing

We break apart Front Crawl into smaller pieces and then teach those smaller pieces in isolation. Often we couple something with Streamline or a previous skill the swimmer has already mastered, like Front Glides, or Position 11.

So we take 1 of the chunks, and chunk it again.

Each time we do a short distance skill activity we should be working on a specific “chunk.”

Let’s look at the “recovery” chunk.

Straight arm recovery:

The recovery is when the arm exits the water, reaches forward, and returns to Position 11.

For beginners, we swimmers to recover over the water with a straight elbow in a rainbow shape.

Here are some activities you can do to focus on the arm recovery “chunk.”

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High elbow recovery:

As swimmer mastery increases, we remain focused on this chunk and encourage high elbow recovery.

Here are some activities to work on a high elbow recovery:

3 x SL + 3 FR D: Fingertip Drag

Underwater pull is same. When recovering, swing hands wide and lift elbow above water to allow just the tips of the fingers or only the nails drag along the surface of the water as you reach back to position 11.

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Once you’ve done some work on a “chunk” put it back together and let the swimmer practice the full stroke.

3 x SL + 5 FREE + 1 flip

Short distances = improved focus on targeted chunks.