I have been swimming for a long time, but just recently took up teaching. This happened after speaking to the leisure centre manager in my area and asking him to provide adult swimming lessons. His reply was we can't provide one but maybe you should start teaching.
So I've started by teaching breaststroke - as we do in Europe. I find that people with little experience in water can find their balance in the water a lot easier with breaststroke.
However, I think my question applies to all strokes, is it a lot easier to teach someone to swim badly than to swim well? It would seem that teaching people to glide properly in breaststroke and glide between strokes, is harder than teaching them to just do the type of breaststroke most people do (i.e. head up - constant movement of arms and legs).
Any tips from anyone? Sorry if it a bit disjointed!!
A Mayim
Former Member
Steve Haufler's teaching progressions over at GoSwim.tv are an excellent resource for entry level teaching. While the students in the presentations are children, the progressions should transfer to any student.
As far as the glide in breaststroke goes, I was never taught a glide in my age-group days (30+ years ago). My current coach explained the glide and with a few drills I had incorporated it although it still feels like I'm slacking.
thanx for the idea. Like you I learnt to encorporate the glide only after years of swimming the old style. For people like us who have lots of confidence in the water I suppose it's easy to adapt. I'm just surprised at how long it's taking them to learn. Mind you they only swim once a week and they're not the most coordinated of folk,
Thanx,
A Mayim
Confidence in the water plays a big part. When I first came back to the pool after being a couch potato for 30 years, my stroke was horrible, I was sputtering for air - it was horrible. Its an environment that they are not used to and there maybe some amount of fear in them.
I taught Red Cross swimming back in the day. One problem I had with the adults was that they would give up if they hit a learning wall for too long. After losing (quitting not death) several adults from my classes, I changed my approach so that we would change the taught technique if anyone appeared flustered for too long and then return to that technique a bit later. It did slow down the class as a whole but we stopped losing students.
