The swimming saga
I tried to learn swimming, as a pre-teen, but never really made progress. It was a summer swimming course, with a large number of students, and the coach wasn’t really bothered to check on each individual student. If you learned, good for you. To make matters worse, I had a lot of anxiety issues, and the coach’s idea of a solution was to just push me into the water and hope I’d learn. I didn’t.
Cut to a few years later, I tried practicing by myself, to try and learn to swim, and I got good enough to trash my way across the length of a pool, but this was by no stretch of imagination an efficient or effective way to swim; I could not enjoy or relax in the water in the least, and I basically would go all-out and could somehow manage to get across the length of a pool, and maybe eve get back to the other end, but then, I’d be totally out of gas. I tried several times, to try and learn to swim in a more effective manner, so I could actually relax i the water, but nothing worked.
In 2021, a good friend of mine, Arun, who swims very well took it upon himself to give me and a bunch of others, including my wife Shruti, swimming lessons. Unfortunately though, we stopped the lessons not long after, and that too became another failed attempt to learn to swim, for me.
Towards the end of 2024, I realized that I had unused credits paid for by my employer that I could use to pay for a gym membership, or a swimming lesson, and I decided I’d sign up for a swimming course, so I could finally try and learn to swim. I also bought a set of 12 clip-passess that would allow me to train at the pool, by myself.
My Stage 1 swim course for adults started from the 8th of January, 2025, and would consist of eight lessons. I ended up missing two of those eight lessons, the very first lesson due to my having forgotten the course start date, and the other missed class being due to a bout of the flu. The six lessons that I took though made me realize that I was getting nowhere. Once the lessons got over, and I’d barely made any discernible progress, I decided then to sign up for a second set of eight lessons at the same level, to try and make some progress, but this time, I also wanted to practice on my own, using some of my prepaid tickets to get some much needed practice, as I’d realized by now that a single lesson in a week was far too less to help me to both overcome my anxiety, and to actually learn something.
Even during my second iteration of the stage 1 course, I realized that progress was still pretty much slow and close to imperceivable, and that’s when I started to seriously hunt for videos on youtube, and to also try and get some ‘dry-land’ practice for the breaststroke kicks, which I was having a lot of difficulty with. I decided also that it was time to start using the clip-passes, to try and practice by myself, and that started to make a difference. While the one class a week by itself was not something that was making a difference, when I started to practice by myself what I’d learned during the classes, I was able to realize what worked (very little), but I was able to understand a lot of stuff that wasn’t working. After each outing, I pored over more youtube videos, to try and realize what my mistakes were, so I could try and eliminate them.
One of the bigger problems that I faced while in the water is my inability to properly relax, and this was causing many issues with my form. Having a stiff upperbody also led to back strain, when trying to practice breaststroke with a kick board. One of the tips I got from my swim instructor was to try core exercises such as planks, to try and get better muscle tone around the belly, which in turn could help me stay closer to the water surface, without straining my back.
Some videos that I found helpful