New to Swimming - need adivce

Lisa, I'm surprised you haven't been barraged with advice! Perhaps it is because this topic has come up in different forms in the past, and maybe people feel they've already addressed it. You might want to check some of the other threads to see. My own best advice is to hook up with someone who knows stroke mechanics and is willing to look at your swimming and provide some pointers. Ideally, this would be a masters coach because he/she is also presumably well-versed in the psychology of us mature athletes! But I've also found that most of the younger swimmers on our own team--i.e., those who have graduated from college within the past 5-10 years--have great knowledge of how to swim well. Are you currently swimming with a masters team? If so, buddy up with somebody who can help you. If not, consider checking out the various teams listed on the USMS site. Swimming is an extremely skill-intensive sport, and there's no once-size-fits-all approach, nor are all our bodies the same. It's difficult to coach yourself because you can't see what you're doing, and what feels right might, in point of fact, be wrong. Even though swimming is an individual sport, getting good at it requires some teamwork. Find someone in your area who can coach you, and I suspect your discouragement will quickly melt away as you make steady improvements. The good news: the less skillful your swimming is now, the more room you have for prodigious improvement. Good luck. In terms of breathing, specifically in freestyle, are you sure you are exhaling completely before inhaling completely? It's possible that you are taking quick, short breaths that never really rechange and recharge the gases to your lungs. How good are you at holding your breath? This could help tell if you have a normal need for/ability to uptake oxygen--or if for some reason your body needs more air than other people. One of the best things about aerobic training is not that your lungs necessarily get any better at taking in air, but rather that the muscles that need it get better at extracting air from your blood system. So: 1) make sure you are actually breathing in and out correctly--i.e., getting sufficient breaths; if not, concentrate on exhaling more completely and inhaling more deeply 2) check to make sure you can hold your breath a reasonable amount of time (for instance, is swimming 20 yards underwater breaststroke easy, difficult, or absolutely impossible?) (Note: don't do anything dangerous here--as I always tell my teammates, if you see a swarm of black dots in your visual field, it's high time to surface for air!) I suspect you are normal here, but if you have a markedly reduced ability to hold your breath, you might want to have a doctor check your pulmonary function. 3) train to get your swimming muscles better at extracting oxygen from your blood stream 4) learn to blow out only enough air on the flip turn to keep water from going up your nose. Hope this helps--and maybe spurs the more knowledgable posters out there to add their advice.

Lisa, I'm surprised you haven't been barraged with advice! Perhaps it is because this topic has come up in different forms in the past, and maybe people feel they've already addressed it. You might want to check some of the other threads to see. My own best advice is to hook up with someone who knows stroke mechanics and is willing to look at your swimming and provide some pointers. Ideally, this would be a masters coach because he/she is also presumably well-versed in the psychology of us mature athletes! But I've also found that most of the younger swimmers on our own team--i.e., those who have graduated from college within the past 5-10 years--have great knowledge of how to swim well. Are you currently swimming with a masters team? If so, buddy up with somebody who can help you. If not, consider checking out the various teams listed on the USMS site. Swimming is an extremely skill-intensive sport, and there's no once-size-fits-all approach, nor are all our bodies the same. It's difficult to coach yourself because you can't see what you're doing, and what feels right might, in point of fact, be wrong. Even though swimming is an individual sport, getting good at it requires some teamwork. Find someone in your area who can coach you, and I suspect your discouragement will quickly melt away as you make steady improvements. The good news: the less skillful your swimming is now, the more room you have for prodigious improvement. Good luck. In terms of breathing, specifically in freestyle, are you sure you are exhaling completely before inhaling completely? It's possible that you are taking quick, short breaths that never really rechange and recharge the gases to your lungs. How good are you at holding your breath? This could help tell if you have a normal need for/ability to uptake oxygen--or if for some reason your body needs more air than other people. One of the best things about aerobic training is not that your lungs necessarily get any better at taking in air, but rather that the muscles that need it get better at extracting air from your blood system. So: 1) make sure you are actually breathing in and out correctly--i.e., getting sufficient breaths; if not, concentrate on exhaling more completely and inhaling more deeply 2) check to make sure you can hold your breath a reasonable amount of time (for instance, is swimming 20 yards underwater breaststroke easy, difficult, or absolutely impossible?) (Note: don't do anything dangerous here--as I always tell my teammates, if you see a swarm of black dots in your visual field, it's high time to surface for air!) I suspect you are normal here, but if you have a markedly reduced ability to hold your breath, you might want to have a doctor check your pulmonary function. 3) train to get your swimming muscles better at extracting oxygen from your blood stream 4) learn to blow out only enough air on the flip turn to keep water from going up your nose. Hope this helps--and maybe spurs the more knowledgable posters out there to add their advice.