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Teaching Popup Breathing: Stage 1

Being able to breathe at will in the water is a huge step toward water safety for kids. Until your child starts working on keeping his head in the water and turning it slightly to the side to take a breath, he’ll lift his whole head out of the water when he needs to breathe. Here’s how to teach your kids popup breathing.

Teaching Your Kids to Breathe in the Pool

In order to do popup breathing, your kids need to understand that to lift up out of the water they’ll push down with their arms.

Have your child sit on the steps so that the water is up to the tops of his shoulders. If this won’t work with the steps of your pool, hold your child gently around the waist and lower both of you so that the water reaches the tops of his shoulders.

Have him extend his arms in front of him and press down, cupping his hands. He should feel his body rise up while he’s pushing down and sink back down when he’s finished. Have him try doing it with his arms bent at different angles and with his fingers spread apart instead of closed. Discuss with him the effect the different ways he moves his arms and hands have on whether or how much his body moves up in the water.

Have your child practice pushing down with his arms, bringing his arms close to his body and lifting them up like arrows through the water, and pushing them down again. Discuss how making his arms like arrows going straight up through the water feels compared to the pushing down he’s been practicing. He should notice that it’s easier to move his arms through the water when they’re slicing through it like an arrow, and that his body barely moves when he uses his arms this way.

Have him practice this sequence repeatedly, so that he’s maximizing resistance while he pushes down and minimizing resistance while he brings his arms back to the surface. Have him push down, bring his arms to the surface, push down, and bring his arms to the surface several times without stopping. Discuss how that keeps his body lifted in the water.

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Teaching Kids to Feel the Water: Mastery

At each stage of the learning process and for each swimming skill you teach, devote some time specifically to feeling the water and its interaction with the body. When he’s learned to put his head underwater, to do the streamline position, and to kick, have your child experiment and explore.

What happens if you push off from the side with your arms or legs? What happens if you move your arms backwards? Forwards? Up or down? This experimentation is critical, because these things are all different than they are on dry land. Moving your arms backwards propels you forward in the water. Moving your arms down propels you up. Starting to understand this will give your child confidence and control in the water.

Have your child solve problems. How can you go backwards in the water? How can you go forward? Which movements and positions move you with the least effort? Which movements and positions move you with the least splash? Help your child learn to push back to go forward and down to go up.

Use play. Practice moving through the water like a fish or a ninja, disturbing the water as little as possible. How big a splash can you make for fun? How do you do it? Practice sitting on the steps and hitting the water with the flat, broad parts of your body. Okay, now how small a splash can you make? Can you slice your hand into the water without seeing any ripples at all? Practice no-ripple swimming. You’re learning to sneak up on Mom or Dad in the water, so that you can pounce on them.

Kids will discover these things on their own by playing in the water, but you can speed up the process by specifically guiding your child.

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Time to Play! Feeling the Water

Kids learn by playing. The more you can make learning to swim fun for your kids, the more they’ll like it, the quicker they’ll learn, and the more fun you’ll have teaching them.  Helping them learn what it feels like to move in the water is critical for making their experience learning to swim as fast and easy as possible. It’s easy to make it fun. Try these experiments for teaching your kids how it feels to move in the water.

What does being in the water feel like? Does it feel like flying? Like being an astronaut? Like going down a slide? Like jumping in a bouncy house? Like swinging on a swing? Like riding a bike? You can build a whole session of imaginative play around any one of these ideas.

You’ll have so much fun that nobody will realize you’re gaining body knowledge that’s key to learning to swim. It won’t feel like a swimming lesson. It will feel like a bonus at the end of the swimming lesson. In reality, though, it might be the most important swimming skill you teach all day.

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The Most Important Swimming Skill You’ve Never Heard Of

Without this skill, there’s no way your kids will learn to swim, but it’s not a skill we tend to talk about teaching or learning in a swimming lesson. What is this critical skill?

A Feel for the Water

The one thing that will contribute the most to your child’s learning to swim is his development of a feel for the water. Awareness of how his body feels in the water and reacts to the water and how the water reacts to his body is the foundation of every skill your child needs to learn in order to be water safe.

In the water, your child’s balance will be different than it is on land. Instead of feeling his center of gravity, he’ll feel a center of buoyancy. Instead of feeling a sense of easy movement through space, he’ll feel a sense of resistance. Instead of pushing forward to move forward, he’ll push backwards to move forward. Explicitly exploring and developing awareness of all of these differences will help your child learn each skill more quickly and effectively.

Most swimming lesson plans don’t explicitly teach this skill, but focusing on it can speed your kids’ progress in all of the other swimming skills they need to learn to be water safe. So how do you teach your kids this critical swimming skill? Tune in tomorrow.