Afraid of Learning to Swim?

You can hold on to the water by means of using your head in the correct position in the water, this is called anchoring your head, this can be achieved by taking swimming lessons. Believe it or not your head is the heaviest thing in the water and keeping it in the right position, the rest of your body is stabilised.

This could be a scary thing for anyone who is fearful of being under the water but after having a course of residential swimming lessons everyone that goes through this programme with me on a 1-1 basis in my private pool is surprised how comfortable they can be in the water by using their head to keep their body in line with their spine.

You may think the water is not stable, but any water that is contained does not change. If you were to stand by an empty swimming pool what would the water being doing? Nothing, and contained water behaves the same way everywhere you go, that you can be sure of, but directly we get into the water it reacts to our movements.

This is the reason why so many people drown who are not used to being in the water, they panic and move their arms and legs furiously to try and get a hold on to something firm in order to push themselves up out of the water in order to breathe. That very movement causes the water to pull them down, instead of trying to relax (no one can when in a panic) they are stiff and unyielding.

As stated in the previous article, you have a powerful float in your lungs and this gives you buoyancy, so if in a relaxed state, the water pushes up the buoyant part of your body and you naturally rise to the surface. It is almost impossible for a person to push themselves down in the water unless they did a surface dive, jumped in or was held down by some one else, they would have to have heavy weights tied on them because the natural buoyancy is very strong and the water always pushes against it. Very much like a ball on top of the water.

Feel free to email me, Irene, to discuss this further.

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