Yes, i’m one of those who didn’t learn as a kid. Yes, i’m one of those who gets some fright when i’m on a boat. I’ve decided I want to conquer this fear during our brief Chicago summer. Any tips on how I can teach myself? Any one in the same boat? Anyone who recently learned with any advice? I’ve look up a few videos and tutorials but I was hoping the good members of AF can also help me out.
Thanks.
I definitely don’t want to be in the same ‘boat’, man!!!
j/k
A good hands-on instructor is the way to go, I think
Swimming is definitely a skill that you should know. See if you have a friend that swam in high school or college - these people are often excited about getting back in the pool anyway and like to share their knowledge. See if you can offer them something in return - maybe offer to teach him something, treat him to beers after, or something like that.
For me, I’ve never been an amazing swimmer and it was hard for me to swim four lengths of the pool without getting tired. My technique wasn’t very good and my energy management was worse, yet I had signed up for a triathlon this spring so I needed to find a way to get it together for an 800 meter swim. One of my business school classmates was the captain of his swim team in high school so he was able to give me some pointers once a week, and I’d just fit in one or two more sessions in the pool that week just to practice the stuff he taught me. Other than being a great swim instructor, he was also a good friend. In exchange for his swim coachings, I held a private tennis clinic for him once a week.
Anyway, my recommendation is to find a private swim coach but definitely start with a friend first. They’re most likely to be patient with you and attentive to detail, especially if you have an important life goal such as learning to swim for the first time.
I’m pretty sure most public pools in Chicago will offer adult group swimming classes. If you are going to pay for pool access, might as well just sign up for the class.
I’m in the same boat, lol.
Haha. Good one.
Thanks for the advice guys. I’m being introduced to a girl who was on my college swim team and she’s willing to teach me for $20 a class which I don’t think is too bad. I have a pool in my building but it’s not olympic style or anthing. It’s just a water source for the HCBs I share a building with to dip in and lay next to.
Thanks guy. This is the summer I learn for sure.
It’s worth kknowing, and the biggest issue will probably be getting over your self-consciousness about learning as an adult, and it looks like you are on your way to doing that.
The first thing they teach you is that the human body will tend to float in water unless it is weighed down by something (so stay away from the mafia). Then they show you how to float and breathe when you are tired and have no energy to move. They’ll have you practice breathing out while under water (bubbling) so that you can use the time your mouth is above water to breathe in. Then, they show you how to power your movement.
The breast stroke (with the frog kick) tends to be easier, whereas the crawl (sometimes called ‘freestyle’) tends to be faster and requires more complex breathing technique. The sidestroke tends to be the most efficient use of energy, so life savers will often get to someone using the crawl, and then use the sidestroke to bring them back in. The butterfly stroke is more acrobatic and pretty much used for competition and showing off. It’s kinda fun, but requires a lot of energy.
In competitive swimming, much of the trick is really about reducing water drag to improve speed, and there it’s actually about flow. The fastest swimmers actually don’t necessarily have the fastest moving limbs… they’ve managed to optimize their strokes so that bringing their arms out of the water doesn’t slow them ddown when they are in the faster part of the stroke.
As for kicking, different kicks power differently. The frog kick in breaststroke and the dolphin kick in butterfly are fairly powerful for moving forward. I’ve never found that the flutter kick that you use in the crawl pushes you very hard - even though many people say otherwise. I’ve found that in the crawl, the main purpose of kicking is to keep the rear part of your body near the surface, and therfore reduces drag while you power things with your arms.
Wow BChad. What don’t you know?
Thanks for the inside knowledge. I wonder how many sessions it will take for me to get comfortable with it. I wish I could just learn the Matrix way.
I think you could know the basics of everything after a few hours. I learned as a kid because I was chubby and my parents thought it would help me lose weight. It didn’t really, but I’m glad I learned anyway.
I think I learned all of this after a week of 1 hour classes - nothing at a competitive level, but certainly enough to feel comfortable in and around the water. That’s probably better than learning it all at once, because you need a little practice to get the muscle memory. In the beginning it can be a little tricky to learn to coordinate your upper body and your lower body as they do different kinds of things (actually, not unlike the tango stuff I did in Buenos Aires), and so several days of 1 hour lessons are probably better than 5 hours on a single day.
Swimming is one of the few exercises you can do every day without risk of damaging your body. Well worth it to learn. Continuous movement and natural water resistance. It’s a non-impact sport (unlike running), so no risk to joint damage, or burning up muscle (weights)
Your only risk is crashing into a wall or drowning
As iteracom said, it’s a great workout and good life skill. I would recomend going to YMCA and getting adult lessons a couple times a week for a few months. That’ll take you to where you’ll learn an assortment of strokes (and how to actually do them well) and the large amount of time in the pool will rid you of your fear of water. Learning to tread water is also extremely useful so you don’t always have to be either swimming or sinking if it’s too deep to stand.
Same boat bro.
I think I have negative bouyancy. I sink faster than a rock when I jump into water deeper than my height. Once, I almost drowned in 6.5ft deep water because I couldn’t get back up to take a breath.
swimming is good for asthma too!
Learn to swim. When global warming finally melts all the ice caps, it may come in handy. Ever see Waterworld?
Yeah, not everyone is naturally boyant, especially in fresh water.
If you have high muscle density, you’ll likely sink rather quickly. I have an older brother who was a pretty good college linebacker. He could sprint 40 yards as fast as their running back and weighed 240, squated 680 and benched 475 at his peak. He was a freaking monster.
Anyhow, so when we would go scuba diving, a standard peice of everyone’s gear is a weight belt because with the added gear, you tend to be a bit boyant or at least neutral in salt water. So by adding weights you can slightly inflate or deflate the vest to move around quickly and efficiently under water.
So long story short, he was the only guy I’ve ever seen that didn’t have to wear a weight belt when he dove because he would sink like a rock even in salt water with all that bouyant gear on. So it definitely varies.
My husband helped me in learning swimming. In begining, he taught me how I can start floating my lower body first. Later on, he started poking on my style over and over again. One day I got irritated and put on the life jacket and jumped into pool.
I did not know that muscle density could make the difference between sinking or floating. It makes sense in terms of the physics, but I never realized that we were that close to bouyancy neutral. However, given that we evolved from sea creatures (for which being close to neutral bouyancy would be an evolutionary advantage), I can see how that would work.
I would think that land-based mammals would have an evolutionary advantage from being buoyant, since this would reduce the likelihood of drowning.
Right. But if a fish is bouyancy-neutral, it then requires less energy to move around than if it has to maintain itself through effort. That means that there is more energy available to chase prey or run away from predators.
For land animals, there’s probably a trade-off. Yeah, being bouyant means you are less likely to drown, but if you aren’t in the water a lot, it may make more sense to muscle up to outrun or outgun predators or prey. All I’m saying is that our ancestry as fish may simply have made the baseline for our bodies pretty close to bouyancy neutral.
Muscle mass and bones relative to fat and lung capacity basically determine how bouyant a person is. Someone who is very muscular and/or has thick bones will actually sink because their body weighs more than the water it displaces. This is why people in general float better in salt water because salt water weighs more than fresh water per unit of volume.