How to SWIM and FLOAT [Beginners Tutorial]

Welcome to paradise and welcome to Wet Souls. This is our beginner tutorial on how to float and swim. Let's go. So you decided to learn how to swim. Excellent choice because it will improve your life in the long term. But remember whenever you go to the water and practice, always have somebody proficient there with you looking after you at all time. And if you are a complete beginner, click and watch this video. It will greatly improve your swimming skills. All right, boys and girls, let's get going. And thank you very much to Armando. Enjoy helping us out today. Always remember to start off from the shallow end of the pool and go really nice and slowly wet your hands first, then your neck. Take it real easy. Get acquainted with the water. That's very, very important. Step in ankles, knees, thighs. Just get comfortable. That's all that matters. You should really feel comfy in the water. And just don't worry, because the water is not going to bite you for sure. What I like to do next is usually something called greeting the water, which is basically nothing but just putting your face into the water once and saying hello. Goggles or no goggles? Well, if you feel comfortable with them, wear them. That's OK. I actually prefer not to wear them, to be honest, because you get a better feeling for the water. Next exercise is hold your breath. Just very simply put your hands on the edge of the pool. Take a nice deep breath. Plant your feet and lower your face into the water. All we want to do right now is just hold our breath. Get acquainted with being face down into the water and just relaxing, holding our breath for five seconds. Next exercise, same thing. Hands on the edge of the pool. Take a nice deep breath. Lower your face into the pool and just hold your breath for a bit and then start exhaling through your mouth. Count to five. One, two, three, four, five. And as you do, exhale slowly through your lips. What you can do, you can also, as you can see here, exhale through your nose. The key of the exercise is actually understanding that you can take a nice deep breath out when your face is in the water as well. It might feel uncomfortable. You may feel bubbles around your eyes, but it doesn't matter. Just go nice and easy with it. The next exercise is going to be your first full body float. So same position. Stand up, take a nice deep breath and then hands on the edge of the pool and lower yourself down facing the water. Kick your legs up and try to relax your body fully. Let your legs come up. Let your body come up and really use that air that you have inside the lungs to make sure that you float. And same thing again. Same exercise, only this time we're going to try to do it on our backs. So again, key for floating is filling your lungs with air. Fill your lungs with air and lower yourself down nice and gently. And kick up with your legs. Let yourself fall backwards. Trust the water and relax your body. You will see that in just a few seconds you will start to float on your back. Just let it happen. Some bodies are less buoyant than others. So if you need some support now is the time to ask your body. Just relax. Lay back. Ask your body to put one hand underneath your shoulder and one underneath your knees and just support you. Take a nice deep breath. Relax into the water. Trust the water. Let it carry you. And just try to feel that supportive feeling coming from underneath you. Next, we have the forward float. Start from a standing position and lower yourself down and take a nice deep breath and push forward. Holding your breath, face in the water. You can keep your eyes open or closed. Just hold your breath. Relax your body. Let your legs come up. This is all about relaxing the body and trying to get up into the water. Really feeling that full support. This is a key exercise, guys. Try to practice this one, because if you can master this one, you'll have most of your floating skills actually sorted out. If you have the feeling that you're losing your balance, one skill to have is called the safety stand. The safety stand allows you to always go back to your standing position. And what you can do to achieve a standing position is exactly what Joy and Armando are doing here, which is starting to push from the water edge just down towards your knees really strongly. And this will help you to actually propel yourself back in a standing position. Imagine you're floating face downward and you want to turn back on your back, which is actually the easiest position to float with your face out of the water. You can do the safety turn. This is a 180 degree turn from down facing position right to an upwards facing position with your face out of the water. And this is achieved by a fast thrust with your hips, a turning thrust with your hips from downward to backward and facing up, just like the guys are doing right here. In the next exercise, we're going to start using the legs. This is extremely important when swimming because the legs are really one of the two things that will help you propel forward. So first thing is the flutter kick. Extend your leg fully. Keep your knee rigid and work from the hip. This is a full leg kick using the whole leg, working from the hip. Really feel how that water is being moved up and down by your extended leg. Remember to keep your foot nice and pointing forward and outward. That's very important. You want to move as much water as you possibly can. Next is the breaststroke kick. This is a backwards kick with both legs simultaneously After drawing your heels in up towards your buttocks, you just kick them out and that's how you propel yourself forward. Next, learn to use your arms. Understand that if you push down with your arms, your body in the water is going to go up. Or if you start from the front and you push backward, your body is going to be going forward. So just try practicing these steps to see how your body responds. Do this in shallow water and starting in a kneeling position is an excellent way to understand how moving your arms affects the movement of your body. Next, we're going to be gliding forward. So just stand, take a deep breath and then lower yourself down on your knees and push forward with the arms extended. We go from the center of the pool towards the edge of the pool. All you want to do is hold your breath and just float on the surface and glide forward. You can practice that in different ways. A variation is just having somebody standing in front of you and you just glide towards them. And finally, what we want to do in this basic tutorial at the end is trying to combine all the skills we learned. So holding your breath, getting yourself into the water, pushing off and then really using your legs and your arms. The legs are pushing and the arms are pulling. It doesn't matter whether you use the breaststroke kick with the legs or if you use the flutter kick. Just do it as you feel comfortable for now and then use your arms to move. This allows you to swim for a short distance because you're going to have your face in the water. You can try next would be to get your head out and take a breath as you're swimming and then exhaling into the water like you learned at the beginning and then carry on going. But we will look at that in a different tutorial. So well done. Excellent work. Keep practicing these steps because they will make you perfect. And see you next time. So, guys, this is it. Beginner's tutorial. Hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, give it a thumbs up and remember to practice all the time. 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