Getting Comfortable In The Water

Getting comfortable in the water is a tricky business. Not least because you have to learn to control your breathing and your body in an alien environment! Added to that the fact that water is 750 times more resistant than air, and a brute force, “Just do more” approach very rarely works – or only works to a point.

Swimming Is Counter-Intuitive

When you learn to swim – there are certain things that it seems logical to do.

Looking forward seems like the sensible thing to do – after all, you want to see where you are going!

When you want to breathe you lift your head – because that is fairly logical.

You move your arms and legs as fast as you can to keep you afloat (and hopefully move you forward!) because it makes you feel like you are making a productive use of effort.

However!!!

All these things that seem logical and rational in your brain when you start will actually be holding you back.

Instead of looking forward, look down at the bottom of the pool or body of water you’re in. (Unless you are breathing or sighting) It’s not the only part of the posture and body position equation – but it’s certainly important! If you’re in a pool, then you have the “T” to tell you that you’re at the end! In open water, the likelihood is that you won’t be able to see very far in front anyway…

With breathing, we want to turn our heads to the side rather than lift – going back to the whole posture and body position part. And with that body roll hopefully going on too, it makes life so much easier to get air in smoothly.

Finding the rhythm of your stroke can take time and practice. For many athletes a good starting point is to take your time – the water can support your mass a lot better if you are not rushing and thrashing about. That’s not to say things have to be glacially slow(!), just that you can follow the idea of less haste to gain more speed.

How To Get Comfortable

When learning to swim – or improving your swim – one of the biggest keys is getting in the water more often. That’s not to say that you should be spending hours in the water each week ploughing up and down; but if you aren’t spending time in the water, how are you going to enjoy it, gain confidence or get comfortable? Just spending short regular intervals in the water can make a big difference in how comfortable you are.

In your swims, pick a focus and stick with it. I like to get people building their stroke from a solid foundation – the higher and more horizontal your body is in the water, the quicker and smoother you will move forward and the easier other parts of the stroke will become. Start your session practising a skill that you know you need to work on. For some, it might be doing a couple of floats just to remind yourself that the water supports you. For others, it may be sink downs under the water to remember how to breath out. And for others, it may be a case of doing a handful of streamlines to remember that a good push off the wall can help your swim.

You don’t have to make each and every swim a massive skills effort – remember we’re not aiming for textbook swimming. Instead, we want something that helps us feel more comfortable, that feels like an improvement. We also want something that we can repeat length after length.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to get in touch; either by email, facebook or leave a comment on here! Remember, you can always get your swimming reviewed in the endless pool with our video swim analysis packages.

See what’s up next week for our #SwimTechTues tip!