SAMPLE: Did you know that you do not have to teach pupils to breathe to swim?
If I had a pound for every teacher I have heard who tells pupils that the most important thing in swimming is to be able to breathe, I’d be worth a few bob. This kind of comment is of course not only incorrect, but can put the wind up young pupils and make them fearful of the water.
They say this because they are not thinking about what you teach.
Everyone of us was breathing within a few seconds of being born and for the most part, haven’t given it much thought since – why, because it’s a Natural Stimulus that we carry out unconsciously – even when we are sleeping.
What we need in swimming is to do 2 things:
- Periodically get our mouth or nose connected to the air rather than the water so that we are in a position to breath stress free, and
- Understand the mechanics of breathing so that we can do so at the right time, in the right way depending on what sort of swimming we are doing.
Position: Each stroke if different.
In Back crawl, we don’t have to worry because our mouth is out of the water all the time, so all we need to do is breathe in the most efficient way.
Front crawl, requires us to rotate our bodies. How many times have you heard teachers or tutors or books etc. say turn your head? Again, not a lot of thought applied. You can’t get your mouth out of the water just using your neck, we are not owls!
In Breast stroke and Butterfly, we need to get our mouth out of the water in front of us. Questions then need asking, do we lift our head? do we look forward or down? when do we breathe?
The answers ore many depending on what sort of stroke we are swimming and at what level – are we just learning or are we competent or competitive?
I will cover each stroke in more detail in future articles and videos, but for the moment lets look at the mechanics of breathing.
Mechanics and Timing: Yes, you’ve got it, each stroke is different!
The muscle that gets air in and out of our lungs is the diaphragm and if we can use this effectively, breathing efficiency is massively improved.
Try this:
Stand up and exhale all the air in your lungs and you will feel your chest deflating as your diaphragm rises. Now hold your breath for a bit (not to the point of blacking out of course!) until you feel the need to breath and just open your mouth. Note how your powerful diaphragm muscle drags loads of air into your lungs without you actually doing anything!
So, the trick is to get rid of the air not to get it in (we all know about ‘blowing bubbles’) and depending on the stroke, swimming level and breathing style, more or less conscious effort is required.
Get your pupils to be in a vertical position holding the bar and ask them to push themselves underwater (straight down) and do this exercise – they will beneficially start to understand what this is all about.
A full version on this Article is available by logging into the Learning Zone