Swimming: Dare to Improve

To a beginner swimmer it is often dumbfounding to watch excellent swimmers zip up and down the lane effortlessly.

Sometimes it can seem like your swimming and their swimming is worlds apart. It can be difficult to see a path to improvement from your skill level to theirs. Take comfort that these swimmers were not 'born' as swimmers. Everyone had to learn the skills to be able to swim effortlessly, and you can learn them too!

Guidance + Change = Improvement
How do you improve your skills to be able to swim faster? How do you improve anything? Improvement comes from a combination of proper guidance and behavioural change. In academia a change to your thinking will normally suffice. In the pool, a change to your thinking and to your physical actions is required. While this may sound simplistic or even self-evident, the true fact of the matter is that many swimmers seek guidance (whether from coaches, CDs or books), but are not able to make a change.

The repetitive, habitual nature of swimming can create very strong habits. If you are also uncomfortable, or have low confidence in the water, there is another large pressure to not make change (just in case the change results in you inhaling a mouth full of water and sinking to the bottom!) The repetitive nature of swimming coupled with low confidence in water will surely make the most docile adult into the most stubborn swimmer. Sometimes swimming bad habits can seem to be harder to break than bad habits associated with drug use!

Let's look at how we can put together the two elements of the 'improvement' equation...

Guidance
While guidance should be the easy part, we can still make mistakes looking in wrong places for answers. The best idea is to find a swim coach with experience coaching adults to give you a few ideas of where to start. A good coach will be able to identify your stroke faults and explain the specific areas you need to change to improve your stroke. Otherwise, a Swim CD: Visual Learning Tool is also an excellent learning option to be able to see a correct stroke and have an idea of what you need to head towards. Swimming books can also be a good option to explain the finer details and reasons behind why the stroke looks like it does.

Change
As I have already stated, this could be the hard part. The thing that most people get wrong is that because they are trying to correct their stroke, they are trying to make it feel right. The trouble is that what you had been doing usually feels right. You're past is what feels right. To actually change your stroke you have to be willing to do something wrong! (shock-horror!) Change requires doing things that feel wrong – going out of your comfort zone. Sometimes the change means you have to take one step back first so that you can take two steps forward. The change may mean you even swim slower for a little while (double shock-horror!) until your body adjusts and can speed up again. This, my friends, is the price of change. No one said it was going to be easy!

Good luck my Femme swimmers! Dare to improve! Dare to make a change! I leave you with some wise words paraphrased from Paul Arden:

‘Being right is based on knowledge and experience that is often provable. Knowledge comes from the past, so it's safe. It is also out of date. It's the opposite of originality... Experience is built from solutions to old situations and problems. The old situations are probably different from the present ones, so that the old solutions will have to be bent to fit new problems (and possibly fit badly). Also the likelihood is that, if you've got the experience, you'll probably use it. This is lazy. So: it's wrong to be right, because people who are right are rooted in the past, rigid-minded, dull and smug. There's no talking to them.’

Spencer Vickers is the Head Coach of Parnell Baths Swim Squad and Assistant Head Coach at the Tepid Baths. He provides one-on-one coaching at the Tepid Baths. Email spencer@futuredreams.co.nz or call 021 993 577.