This was written March 10, 2024
Introduction
Hello everyone, As I mentioned in Starting to Swim, I’ve recently been trying to learn how to swim. Since that post, I’ve gone swimming twice more, and plan on going weekly (I’m actually planning to go for a fourth time later tonight). Although I do wonder if I should start going twice a week (As a nod to a friend reading my blog, let’s not open up the bi-weekly vs semi-weekly vs fortnightly debate over here, haha). Since part of the goal is to also improve my physical health, I think going more often should be beneficial.
Welp, without further ado, let’s dive into it (pun intended) and discuss how it went and what I’ve learned. Do note that unfortunately, I didn’t take any notes, so everything is from memory.
Swimming
To start with, let’s bring up one issue I had during my first session: forgetting my towel. Well, both other times I made sure to remember to bring both a towel and cleaning products (e.g.: shampoo). It’s definitely improved my experience at the end of the session. As for the time spent in the pool, I believe I spent between 75mins and 90mins on both instances, although I’m not 100% sure.
One of the main things I’ve been trying to learn holding my breath underwater. This is because it’s something I initially found terrifying, have been struggling with, and yet consider an invaluable skill.
On my second session, I had definitely regressed a bit compared to the end of my first session, but it’s to be expected: There should be variance between sessions, and I need to warm up when it comes to new skills. But through practice, it gradually came back. Although it should be noted a lot of water found its way into either my mouth or my nose. Still, I must say the most important thing I’ve learned here is to keep my fear under control, and keep a check on potential panic. During both sessions, I ended up swallowing some water on a few occasions, but managed to stay calm. Instead of getting up and coughing out water, I simply brought my head above water and kept swimming, trying to get rid of the small amount of water.
Here’s another thing I realized while practicing holding my breath while pinching my nose: sometimes while underwater, I might have a reflex that feels similar to breathing, but which I think is just displacing air between different parts of my insides. It’s similar to a hiccup, but doesn’t necessarily result in swallowing/breathing water, as long as you don’t follow up with a proper breath. It’s definitely stressful the first few times, but it’s manageable.
Beyond holding my breathe while stationary, I also decided to combine it with swimming itself! So, thinking back over what I believe I’ve seen professional swimmers do, I decided to try to put my head underwater and turn it sideways in sync with my strokes to take a breath.
Yet, I’ve faced a struggle: the breathing time feels too short, having to both breath out and then back in. Thus, I amend something I’ve said in my previous post, it might be useful to breath out while underwater, reducing how much breathing is necessary while your head surfaces. As an addendum, practicing this resulted in my mouth gradually being filled with water. I didn’t swallow any of it, but it’s still something to adapt to.
Another thing I’ve decided to experiment with was staying underwater while stationary. This lead me to think about my buoyancy, and experiment a bit with it. While my lungs are full, my body naturally tries to surface, making it harder to stay underwater. Thus, if I want to stay underwater longer, I need to partially empty my lungs. Unfortunately, exhaling underwater would often result in my goggles filling up with water (I have yet to determine whether that’s due to the bubbles, or the way I move my face/frown). However, I’ve found ways to take a breath and exhale a bit before diving my head underwater. I found that an interesting experiment, trying to balance the amount out so I could last a decent amount of time underwater, while diminishing my buoyancy, but without sinking like a rock.
Due to heavy struggles with the “sideways head breathing technique”, and getting annoyed with it, I opted to look for an alternative exercise. Thus, I decided to try to dive into a dog crawl with my head underwater. Then, between strokes, I would pull my head out of the water (upright) and try to breath out and in quickly, sometimes a few breaths, before diving back underwater. I would stay stationary while breathing to avoid “cheating” the distance. Doing this, I aimed to train my breathing technique and lung capacity.
Speaking of avoiding the sideways breathing techniques, one extra experiment dealing with holding my breath came during my latest session. I decided to see how long I could go with a single breath, and so practiced using the front stroke with my head fully submerged. On good attempts, I managed to go for roughly 8 good strokes, and covered a little more than 1/3 of the pool, which I think shows a decent improvement to how I hold my breathe. I also tried to go back out of the water and limit myself to just a few breaths before diving back in and continuing while holding my breath. On most such attempts, I’d cover the entire length in about 3 dives, which isn’t bad. (If you’re curious, the length is of 25m).
Finally, other than practicing how to hold my breath, I also tried to practice some strokes. The main ones I practiced were the front stroke, the dog paddle and some personal version of what I imagined for the “froggy” (the breast-stroke). Looking it up online right now, my custom variation is definitely very different from what people do. Here are two things I learned from my experiments:
- With the front stroke, getting your hands above water really makes a lot of sense, since air has a lot less friction than water, so the forward motion of one arm barely has drag, while the other properly uses the underwater drag.
- For my version of the “froggy”, I realized that “finishing” the motion, continuing until my hands basically touch my body, was really important. There’s a lot of strength in the last portion, and it translated in good forward momentum for me.
I even decided to experiment with ridiculous techniques such as swirling my arms “like a tornado” (Sorry, no drawings for this one, this is left as an exercise for the reader’s imagination). I moved my left arm clockwise and my right one counter-clockwise (To prevent me from being dragged left or right). I experimented with both arms in sync, and also with both arms out of phase. These might not be very useful, but they were still fun. Moreover, I think experimenting, trying out new things and being imaginative can be really useful and important when learning something: it can help deepen your understanding, it keeps the mind active, and well…that’s the basis of discovering new things. So don’t get discouraged because something seems goofy, silly, or potentially useless. Try new stuff out!
Conclusion
Well, 3 weeks going on 4 is definitely a great start for this new habit, and I feel like I’m learning and improving a lot, which both is and feels great! And I think there are multiple reasons why I should keep on swimming: It’s a great full-body exercise, it’s a useful skill to learn (for example, I’d love to try kayaking, and being able to swim would definitely make it safer) and I find it relaxing. Unfortunately, as I’ve realized during my last session, while it can help manage stress, it can’t fully alleviate it, and it’s possible to stress about one’s life while in the pool (which can be a bit distracting and get in the way of the actual swimming). Regardless, I’m happy with where I am right now, and look forward to see where this gets me.
Take care everyone, and stay active!