How to Use Swimming as a Workout to Get in Shape

The form is everything in swimming. The pool is a fine place to work on technique if you’re seriously serious about learning to swim. Here’s how:

First, get a good swimming instructor. The kind of advice that if you can’t swim, don’t try to learn how may be a valuable and often instinctive piece of advice in a sports context, but it doesn’t have the same value in a swimming context. And, if you can’t manage to learn how, then you probably shouldn’t have become a swimmer.

Swimming is a head game. You can swim with the best of them, but if you can’t get your head right, you’re not going to be able to swim like that. A good trifactor swimming instructor can help you to learn to swim, but that kind of help can’t replace a job where you’re swimming across a mile to a buoy, competing for a medal, in a few minutes.

The best swimmers learn how to swim as they swim – improving, as their ability gets better, and learning new skills as they become more experienced. Swimming is a huge head game, a lifelong head game, and a very good one at that.

I’ve found some people think that their swimming isn’t so good, that they just can’t swim, that they would never become ‘swimmers’. Perhaps it’s because they didn’t learn to swim early enough, and become burdened by the philosophy (that if you can’t swim, don’t try to learn how) that often finds its way into pre-school swimming classes.

Or perhaps it’s because they spent their time learning to swim on a competitive basis, and then believe that swimming is all about winning competitions, and has nothing to do with the all-important element of technique and form.

You can learn to swim very well without spending all your time doing all-out competitions. There is a massive amount of scope for improvement and much room for growth that simply doesn’t occur if you’re swimming in a competitive environment. It’s all about learning to swim with the best swimmers the competition is a bonus.

It can’t be stressed enough how important it is to get a good swimming instructor. You need someone who knows how to swim and who is going to get to the bottom of why you don’t get on with your swimming.