5 Beginner Swim Tips!

Everyone knows that if you want to swim well, you need to learn to swim when you're a kid. But what if you miss that boat? What if you're not so young anymore? Can you still learn to swim well? Well, we're here with some tips and tricks to help all you adults learn to swim well. Now, swimming properly is a complex and difficult skill to master. I mean, it can take years of dedication to get it right and perhaps a lifetime to perfect it. I mean, it can all but guarantee those swimmers that you watch effortlessly gliding through the water in things like the Olympic Games, have been swimming more or less every day since they were a young kid. That's right. But what if you aren't a little kid and what if you didn't learn to swim as a little kid? Can you still learn to swim? What if you've got your eye on a triathlon or a swim event and you want to not just not drown, but cover the distance comfortably and actually enjoy it? Well, don't despair. You can learn to swim. I mean, James, you're a good example. When did you learn to swim? I learned to swim when I was in my 20s, but I wouldn't say I'm that good of an example. I do know. I disagree. I mean, you were a pro athlete and you came out in the league group at Coen, did you not? I did. Yeah, and I'm sure you'd agree, it takes time and dedication to get to that point, but we're going to try and help fast track you on that to help get you started with swimming or simply improve your swimming. For today's video, we're going to focus on freestyle or front crawl. While beginner swimmers tend to gravitate towards breaststroke when they start out because you can keep your head above the water, which makes breathing a lot more easy, breaststroke is not the fastest stroke, unless your name's Adam Peaty, but if your name's Adam Peaty, you can look away now. We're going to focus on freestyle because it is the fastest and most efficient way to get through the water, and it is the stroke you should spend most of your time working on improving. Yeah, but if you are struggling with swimming, don't be disheartened. I mean, swimming is a really hard sport. Now, for starters, we, when we swim, are in the water, obviously, but water is more dense than air, which means that it provides more resistance to our forward motion, which is what we call drag. To add to that, we're also almost suspended in the water, so unlike something like running, where we have a relatively firm and solid base that we're pushing off to propel ourselves forwards, in the water, we don't. We have to use the water, which is also trying to stop us, and we can't breathe the water, so we've also got to focus on getting enough air to your working muscles while you're swimming, and this is the whole puzzle of swimming, reducing drag, providing forward propulsion using the water, and breathing, all at the same time. Luckily, humans have been figuring this out for years, so while we may not be particularly good at it, we do know all the principles that you need to focus on to swim well. Right then, tip one, body position. Now, essentially, you want to make yourself as small and streamlined as possible to pass through the water as easily as possible. Now, a good way to think of this is a firing at the circus. If the ringmaster was to ask you to dive through that firing, you'd obviously try and make yourself as small as possible, and the best way to do that is putting your arms above your head, making your shoulders as narrow as possible, and going through that firing, and the rest of your body following in line. And that is essentially swimming, like swimming through hundreds of firings. Now, but in all seriousness, you do want to make yourself as small and horizontal as possible at all times. Any deviation from that line, you won't necessarily catch on fire, but it will cause drag, which will slow you down. And to hold that horizontal position, you want to keep your head down. I often suggest just looking at the floor below you, and then just allowing your head to drift into that nice, natural, neutral position for you. Lifting your head, or holding your head too high, or lifting up too much when you go to breathe is going to result in the rest of your body dropping, and that is going to cause drag. When you do go to breathe, we often suggest just lifting one eye out of the water and leaving the other eye in. Similarly with your feet, you obviously want to make sure that you are keeping those up, and the best way to do that is with a nice, light kick. But again, think about that ring of fire, or hoop. You don't want to be kicking too much and extending outside of that hoop, because that is going to cause drag too. Tip two, rotate to breathe. The natural inclination when swimming and your face is in the water and you want to breathe is to lift your head. But as Mark's already mentioned, lifting your head will ruin your body position and cause your hips to sink. So what you want to be doing when you're swimming is turning your head to the air. And the natural inclination when we say that is for you to twist at the neck, because that's what your neck's for, right? Well, in swimming, forget that. What you want to be doing is rotating your entire torso. That way, you keep a streamlined position and you set up your arms, shoulder, and hips for the powerful pull after you breathe. When you breathe, it's a quick, sharp inhalation through your mouth before immediately returning your face to the water and immediately starting to slowly exhale. You're going to exhale throughout the stroke and finish that exhale just before you take the next breath. Never holding your breath at any point. Tip three, pull with your whole arm. Now, if you've managed to remain streamlined in the water and not lift your head too much when you breathe, then you've done everything you possibly can to reduce drag in the water. Now we want to look at how we propel ourselves forward in the water. And to do that, we can actually use the water to pull against. Now, if we were to pull ourselves up on dry land, we'd use our hand to grip or grab something and pull up against, forwards, whatever it may be. But in the water, to get the most out of our pull, we want to catch as much water as we possibly can. And that means using the whole arm. The flat of the hand, the forearm, and even the upper arm to push the water past us or ourselves past the water, as it were. To do this, we want to catch the water with our hand whilst keeping the elbow nice and high. And that's going to maximise the surface area available that's going to push against the water, or pull against the water. Keep pushing and pulling all the way through the stroke until you can't push or pull anymore and the hand will get to the end and naturally be able to leave the water, come round, and start another stroke. Tip four, recover without adding drag. Bringing your hand back to the start of the pull without adding any drag is another important way to increase efficiency. Although it might be the only thing spectators see, what your hand looks like when you do this is actually not that important. If you do it with a bent arm or a straight arm, it doesn't really matter as long as it doesn't throw your balance out. You do, however, want the hand to enter the water just in front of your head, not reaching too far, but also not too soon. And you want your left hand to enter at 11 o'clock, your right hand to enter at one o'clock. You don't want your hand to enter in front of your head, as this will cause snaking and is called crossing the centre line. You also don't want your hand to enter too wide, as this will prevent that all-important rotation that we spoke about earlier. Once your hand has entered the water, you want to extend your arm forward, reaching as far as you naturally can by rotating your shoulders and your hips towards that extending arm. This will set you up to start the next catch and pull as powerfully as possible. And tip five, kick effectively. Note, I didn't say to kick hard or to kick fast. In fact, the kick only really adds around 10% to your overall propulsion through the water. Instead, the kick's really there to reduce your drag through the water and to maintain your body position in the water. So think of the kick more as a flutter. And to do that, you want to have your toes nicely pointed, legs relatively straight, kicking from the hips with a slight soft bend of the knee. An overall oscillation of only around 50 centimetres. Try and avoid doing a big, deep kick that causes a lot of splash, whilst it may feel really strong and powerful. It can actually result in causing more drag. You'll notice that all the tips we've given you today tend to overlap. And this is because every part of the swim stroke works together with the other parts and they all affect the others. Yeah, absolutely. Now whilst working on the swim, you can use drills and some swimming tools such as paddles, pool buoys, kickboards to isolate individual parts of the stroke and work on those. But it is a good idea to have a good picture of the entire stroke the entire time whilst swimming. Swimming is a complex skill, requiring coordination and timing of lots of muscle groups and body parts. But it is something you can learn as an adult. It'll take time and dedication and quite a lot of effort to learn how to swim later in life. But you can do it. And it is very rewarding learning how to swim properly. And you'll get fit while you do it. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks guys for tuning in today. I hope you've enjoyed today's video. If so, please do give it a thumbs up, give it a like. And don't forget you can also subscribe to GTN for more videos like this in the future.