The Fastest Age

Originally posted by SWinkleblech As a music teacher it is well known that children can learn something much faster then an adult. You can start teaching a child and an adult to play the piano at the same time and you will find the child picking up on playing much faster then the adult. I coached at a swim camp last summer where we observed much the same thing. Although the teenagers were, in general, better swimmers than the younger kids when they came into the camp, the younger kids picked things up much more easily. But it appeared that a lot of the problem was not so much that the teens had a harder time learning - it was that they had more wrong things to unlearn. My five year old daughter just the other day told me to watch her and she did a backstroke flip turn. She learned this just by watching me do it in my workouts. No one ever taught her. No one ever taught me, either, and I was a lot older than your daughter when I started doing them (I won't say exactly how old, since I still don't admit to being that old!) Yet a member of my masters team as trouble even thinking about learning to do the backstroke flipturn. She was never taught how to do it when she was younger. She quit swimming before the backstroke flip turn was allowed in swimming. Now that she has returned to swimming she says she sticking with the way she knows how. I think this would give the "late-bloomer a disadvantage" along with a million other factors that have been mentioned in this never ending thread. Luckily, I didn't have that problem. Since I didn't do competitive swimming when I was younger, I never learned or even saw the older way of doing backstroke turns. That may be why I was able to learn backstroke flip turns without much trouble. Bob

Originally posted by SWinkleblech As a music teacher it is well known that children can learn something much faster then an adult. You can start teaching a child and an adult to play the piano at the same time and you will find the child picking up on playing much faster then the adult. I coached at a swim camp last summer where we observed much the same thing. Although the teenagers were, in general, better swimmers than the younger kids when they came into the camp, the younger kids picked things up much more easily. But it appeared that a lot of the problem was not so much that the teens had a harder time learning - it was that they had more wrong things to unlearn. My five year old daughter just the other day told me to watch her and she did a backstroke flip turn. She learned this just by watching me do it in my workouts. No one ever taught her. No one ever taught me, either, and I was a lot older than your daughter when I started doing them (I won't say exactly how old, since I still don't admit to being that old!) Yet a member of my masters team as trouble even thinking about learning to do the backstroke flipturn. She was never taught how to do it when she was younger. She quit swimming before the backstroke flip turn was allowed in swimming. Now that she has returned to swimming she says she sticking with the way she knows how. I think this would give the "late-bloomer a disadvantage" along with a million other factors that have been mentioned in this never ending thread. Luckily, I didn't have that problem. Since I didn't do competitive swimming when I was younger, I never learned or even saw the older way of doing backstroke turns. That may be why I was able to learn backstroke flip turns without much trouble. Bob