I have always been comfortable in the water, took lessons when I was a kid, spent summers in the community pool, my grandparents pond, swimming in the Muskingum River, a lake, but was never what I call competent. Last winter I did an 8 week YMCA adult swim class, I wanted to learn the different strokes and have them look good and not use up loads of energy doing them. While that helped some, what I found was that the inst of that class believed that someone could become competent was working very hard, kicking like crazy and just struggling along. I found that by doing it her way, I was wearing myself out. I found a few books that have helped me a lot. Total Immersion Swimming, a book by Emmitt Hines, I also bought and rented the TI DVDs. Netflix has them for rent. It is a different approach to swimming. Not kicking and flailing about type of swimming. With this approach, I have made better progress. My next step is to visit a guy to works with swimmers and have him help me to refine my kick and stroke even more. One piece of advise, have her get a H2O wear swimsuit or some sort of polyester type, they last forever. I should have done that at the start and would have saved myself tons of money since I would not have had to replace parts of it every month or two due to being in the water so much. The other piece of advise, have her in the pool not only during class times but spend other times in a lap lane just practicing, doing drills and just swimming. I had a horrible time doing bilateral breathing, I drilled on that for months.
