Author: Andy
Category: Swimming lessons from a client's perspective
Learning-to-swim Front Crawl – Swimming Lessons From a Client’s Perspective
Struggle to swim a length of front crawl? Fear not. One of our clients, Charles offers an insight into his time swimming with Turner Swim. This blog is about his experience of lesson one, as he started his journey to learning front crawl. Charles learnt to swim front crawl in London and Turner Swim now also offer adult swimming lessons near Manchester and in Glasgow.
Charles – Blog 1:
“A couple of years ago, I watched my wife do a sprint triathlon and thought how much I would like to do that. However, the key problem was that I could not imagine how I would ever be able to do the 400 meter swim. Of course, I had learned how to swim at school. I wasn’t frightened of water, but there was no way I could make it a full length of the local pool in Clapham. My swimming was a classic “Head-Up-Breaststroke” mode, looking like my mother swimming trying to avoid getting her hair wet.
I had tried going to the pool and trying to swim further. However, all that happened was deep frustration, water up my nose and weeping eyes (nobody told me that everyone should wear goggles). Luckily, one morning on my way to work, Andrew from Turner swim was handing out flyers at Green Park tube station, and I thought, how bad can it be?
Lesson one:
Well, it wasn’t bad, it was wonderful. To begin with, Andrew very gently had me move around in the shallow end of the pool to see how comfortable I was in the water putting on floats on my arms, so that I was bobbing around like a cork. Once he had worked out that I really wasn’t afraid of the water (many non-swimmers are very fearsome at the start) but was just very bad at swimming, we started to learn.
Learning how to breathe:
The way that Andrew seems to work is to take every bit of a swimming stroke and try to get you to do it a bit better, lots and lots of times. When you are swimming, you have to move your legs, you have to move your arms, you have to move your head, and you have to breathe. You can muck up on the first three, but not the breathing! So we started to learn how to breathe, standing in the water. I was bending over and letting my breath out, head up, breath in, bend over, breath out. Lots. And Lots. And then some more.
Then, after what seems an eternity, he lets you swim a length of the pool, and BONANZA. It’s like magic, head up, breath in, head down, breath out, repeat. Who cares about the legs and the arms. I can make it to the end of the pool, and back without spluttering, choking, coughing and getting breathless.
That was my first lesson. In one hour I had learned two things; first, the basic idea of breathing, and second, far more important, that this was an attainable goal.”
Feeling a little inspired?
If you, like Charles, can swim more than 25 metres of a head up breaststroke then join us for our 5 x one hour ‘Head up breaststroke into front crawl programme’. We will teach you a face in the water, breathing-in to the side, front crawl. You can either book a package of five lessons, or as single one hour lessons.
Adult swimming lessons with Turner Swim are available in London, Manchester and Glasgow.
