lyrrad wrote:
Give me a non swimming 5 year old kid and 2 weeks for half an hour after school and they will be swimming competently with relaxed recoveries, good body alignment and timing and a decent ability to scull.
That's all it takes and then throw them into squad.
They have learnt the fundamentals, then the stroke can be refined as they develop power and endurance in the squad environment.
But they have learnt the most important lessons already so most kicking sets etc can be done with boards etc as that is a much more sociable way for kids to spend time in squad. It also puts vulnerable ears in the water less.
That is why if you turn up at any pool and watch squad, the first thing you notice is that they all are flat on top of the water.
They have been taught from year dot to swim properly.
Unlike the many LTS pools that basically teach younger kids to stay alive but also make the mistake of trying to teach the full stroke when it cannot be done properly due to the relative proportions of small children.
They end up with straight arm recovery and weird timing due to the overly large head and relatively short limbs.
Sort of works as they are a ball of buoyant blubber, but it sets in motion poor habits that are hard to break later.
When I teach kids to swim it is exactly what I outlined in the previous post.
The difference is the smaller ones will use small fins and cut down pull buoys for the streamlining arm until kicking on the side become competent.
The kicking on the side is the single most important thing they learn, after that it is easy.
I think that kicking on the side first become popular in a widespread fashion with the first publication of Earnest Maglishco' s most excellent book called 'Swimming faster' in the 90's?
It was the first reasonably scientific approach to swimming analysis ever written and you find those same exercises I have mentioned quite highly recommended by him.
He was the first to really put instrumentation on swimmers and do velocity graphs on bodies and limbs and put forward that it really is critical to roll in swimming freestyle, basically suggesting that freestyle is best swum on your side and the many high speed photo sequences he painstakingly took proved once and for all how far the best swimmers actually roll.
He was also the most public proponent of the swim stroke being comprised of sculling movements.
He then went on to update the book to 'Swimming faster' and then 'Swimming fastest'.
All of these editions being considered by coaches as 'the bible' for swimming technique.
Now the really stupid thing is that a 5 year old kid can learn to swim well in a few weeks but adult onset triathletes spend years making the same stupid mistakes and thinking up more and more creative excuses as to why it is not their own stubborn fault for not simply stopping and starting again from scratch and building good stroke fundamentals before trying to progress any further.
Actually, i have "Swimming Faster" and "Swimming Even Faster" on my bookshelf but had forgotten his emphasis on the roll in freestyle.
"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."