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How to Use an Elite Athletes’ Trick to Improve Your Kids’ Swimming

When you’re teaching your kids to swim, there are limits to what you can do. There’s only so much time you can spend in the pool. There’s only so much practice your kids can do before they get tired out. But there’s a trick that elite athletes use to break free of these limits, and you and your kids can use them, too.

Visualize Movement

Studies have shown that athletes get as much benefit from visualizing their performance in great detail as they do from physically practicing (up to a point—you’ve got to get in the water, too). Many elite athletes use visualization as part of their training. It’s safe. It’s portable. It helps build confidence and comfort. It doesn’t tire out your child’s body. It’s also a great distraction when you’re stuck in traffic or waiting in line. (Just make sure the driver isn’t doing the visualizing.)

Guide your child through a visualization of the skill you’re working on. Paint him a picture with words. Use descriptions of what he’ll be experiencing with all of his senses. Describe how the pool and the water look. Describe how the water feels. Describe the smell and the sounds of the pool. Describe how he’ll move his body and how that will feel. The more vivid the visualization, the more effective it will be.

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How Pavlov’s Dogs Can Help Your Kids in Any Tense Situation

When you’re teaching your kids to swim, there are going to be times when they’re anxious or nervous. Trying something new always takes and effort, and in this case, the cost of making a mistake could be an uncomfortable gulp or snort of water. That’s enough to make anybody nervous. There’s a way that you can help your kids to relax immediately when you’re teaching them to swim, or under any circumstances. Pavlov and his dogs are the key.

Pavlov rang a bell whenever he fed his dogs, creating an association between the sound of the bell and being fed. Eventually, the dogs developed a conditioned response: salivating at the sound of a bell. You can use the same technique to help your kids relax when you’re teaching them to swim.

Start on Dry Land

You can practice relaxation techniques on dry land. Learning to swim will be easier if your child is relaxed. Kids tend to tense up under the pressure of learning a new skill in the water. You can help your child relax by teaching him how outside the water.

  • Have him lie flat on his back.
  • Ask him to make his body tight all over. You can help him by touching his body if he’s having trouble. For example, you can touch his thigh and say, “squeeze this part of your body tight.” You can ask him to squeeze one body part at a time, working his way up from his toes to his face.
  • Have him hold his breath for a few seconds.
  • Tell him to let it all go at once, and teach him a word for this. It could just be, “Relax,” but a funny, made-up word that’s your secret is more fun.
  • After he relaxes his muscles, have him take a few deep belly breaths.

Move It into the Water

After you practice this relaxation technique regularly for a while on solid ground, you can transfer it to the pool. When you feel your child tensing up, say your secret, funny, made-up word for relax, and he’ll respond by releasing the tension from his muscles.

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Time to Play! Floating

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. You can turn learning to float on his back, a skill that tends to be stressful for kids to practice, into fun. Here’s how.

Instead of having your kids concentrate on floating the right way all the time, you can help them have fun with it by making doing it wrong a game. Have your kids bend at the waist and grab their toes. How fast do they sink? Doing the opposite of what they need to do to float will help your kids get a great feel for what not to do, and that will help them when they’re practicing doing it for real. As long as you’re there to catch them, this game will give your kids the confidence to explore different scenarios and sensations, and that will help them learn faster and more effectively.

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How to Leverage Your Greatest Advantage over Paid Swimming Teachers—Part 2

Yesterday we talked about using observation to leverage the advantage of access to your kids when you’re not in the pool. Here’s another way to use time out of the pool to help your kids make progress in the pool.

Practice Moving on Dry Land to Learn to Swim in the Water

You can practice lots of movements on dry land, giving your child the opportunity to focus just on his body and to separate his movement from the need to keep his head above water. He can sit on the edge of a chair to practice kicks and flexing and pointing his toes. He can practice lying on his stomach and rolling side to side to get a sense for the motion of his torso in the water. He can stand up to practice body positions and arm movements.

The feelings will be different than they are in the water, but the benefit of having the completely secure feeling of being on land will let your child experience the feelings in his body thoroughly and without time pressure. He can take the insights he gains this way into the water with him.