Swimming is something that a lot of people across all age groups enjoy doing and it is also a great exercise for losing weight and keeping fit. Unfortunately, so many people lose out on the great benefits that swimming has simply because, well, they don’t know how to swim or they use improper swimming technique.
Learning to swim will take a lot of dedication but it isn’t rocket science. For beginners, once you lose your fear of water, everything becomes so much easier and rather straightforward. We’ve found that for a lot of people looking to learn things on their own, learning how to learn is just as important as acquiring knowledge. So we’ve come up with a simple six-step guide to show you how you can learn to swim like a pro.
- Learn about water
Learning about water before plunging into water probably makes a lot of sense so it’s amazing that so many swimming instructors skip over this point when teaching beginners. You should spend as much time as you can, watching tutorials on swimming and understanding the laws of physics that make swimming possible. Even for more established swimmers, understanding water makes it possible to improvise quickly when the situation might call for it.
- Learn Swimming Techniques
Before you get to actually swim, you’ve got to do a lot of learning. Think of your high school or even college level science classes; before you got to try out interesting but possible dangerous experiments, you had to learn a lot of sometimes boring stuff. It should be the same with swimming. Although you’ve probably heard countless tales of people who just jumped into a pool and learned how to swim in five minutes (yea right) this approach might not work for everyone, especially if you already have a fear of water. You should spend a considerable amount of time learning all the different techniques for swimming, and understanding why they work the way they do.
- Start out in the shallow end
Once you’ve learned enough about water and swimming, you should be ready to step into the pool. By this stage, your increased knowledge would make you feel much more confident but you probably should not jump into the deep end just yet. Start out in the shallow end and practice all the principles and techniques you have learned. As your confidence grows, you will feel naturally ready to move further and further down the deep end of the pool.
You probably should not try this step on your own though; it might be a good idea to have a friend or group of friends with you, just in case.
- Get swimming lessons
Everything you’re going to do in the previous 3 steps will help you prepare your body and mind for swimming but if you really want to learn how to swim like a pro, we would recommend that you sign up for professional swimming lessons. Even though you could probably learn how to swim passably well on your own, the greatest benefits of swimming come when you use proper form and technique so an instructor (a good one) will be well worth the cost at the end of the day.
- Swim a lot!
Practice really does make perfect so if you want to be a good swimmer then there’s no substitute for swimming a lot. The good thing is that swimming is rather unlike most other sport activities in the sense that you takes much less effort to perform since the water bears the weight of your body, so swimming wouldn’t feel like so much of a monotonous chore.
6. Study the Experts
Once you know how to swim well enough, studying how expert swimmers swim will probably shed some insight on what you can do to learn how to swim better. You might not exactly become the next Michael Phelps just from watching him swim but you are likely to improve significantly if you do.
Conclusion
Being a better swimmer has a lot of benefits from improved health and fitness to better performance if you’re into competitive swimming, or simply impressing your friends with your superior technique. Regardless of whatever “floats your boat”, the journey to becoming a better swimmer could be very rewarding; so follow these six tips with hard work, consistency and patience and you will reap the rewards.
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