Take to the Water with Swimming Lessons

Swimming isn’t a necessary skill to get by in life, but it can be enjoyable, social, and a fun way to keep fit and meet new people. Swimming lessons in London can be found at almost every public pool and offer classes to anyone from beginners to professionals.

Lessons for the Beginner

I would admit to being a fairly adequate swimmer myself, but my father broke his collar bone in a rugby accident as a child and never learnt. As a result, I know exactly quite how much stick he gets for being unable to swim, from his friends and from me and my mother while we tried in vain to teach him on holiday with the help of a beach ball and frequent rescue attempts. Being unable to swim is one of those embarrassing secrets that never really come up in conversation, until the day that you’re invited on a foreign holiday (or even to an English beach if you’re that brave). There’s only so long that excuses such as having just eaten and forgetting your swimming trunks will get you out of the awkward situation where you have to admit to it, so why not just teach yourself before you leave?

London is host to a wealth of beginners swimming lessons that will teach you the very basics, and even cater for people who are scared of taking the plunge. If you learn to swim in London, you have a pressure free environment to get to grips with the most simple of strokes and to build your confidence. Swimming is all about feeling secure in the water, because panic is what will bring you down. Lessons such as those taught by the London Swim School help you feel confident enough to splash about with everyone else by starting you off in the shallow end and easing you further down the pool only when you feel comfortable. If time is of the essence, Swimming Lessons London offer intensive 2hr training that guarantees that you will be able to pass swimming proficiency tests or that will get you ready for that tropical holiday.

Touch Up Your Technique

We don’t all flounder in the water, but for most people who learnt to swim at school, the swimming lessons only progressed so far. Breast stroke and front crawl are the default strokes that teachers rely on with a class of unruly kids, so many confident swimmers are lost when it comes to back stroke or butterfly. The majority of pools and leisure centres that teach adult swimming lessons cater for those who are just starting out and those who want to learn some more complicated strokes to add to their repertoire. Admittedly, knowing the butterfly stroke isn’t ever going to save your life, but it exercises a different set of muscles to the other strokes and can be a very challenging technique to master that gives you a lot of satisfaction if you can perfect it. Another water-based activity that never gets much attention at school is diving, which when done properly requires a lot more skill than running, curling into a ‘bomb’ and making as big a splash as possible.

Keeping Fit

SwimFit is an organisation created by the ASA and British Gas that concentrates on helping Londoners keep fit by swimming. Simple cardio activities like swimming lengths or muscle toning classes such as water aerobics can keep people healthy. As water is so resistant, you don’t have to do as much work to get the benefit because your muscles are working harder. The London borough of Hounslow website gives you a list of leisure centres and pools that give SwimFit lessons across central and greater London, and also the location of single sex swimming lessons if you have religious or personal objections to swimming in mixed sex groups.

Most properly structured exercise routines will include swimming of some type as a cardio exercise, but it’s often neglected for its relevance in toning a person’s body. More importantly, swimming can be as solitary or as social as you want it to be depending on which activity you choose.

The London Swim School is an organisation that works with public pools across London to provide lessons. Find more information at: https://www.sportscourses.org/home/swim.aspx.

The London Borough of Hounslow website is http://www.fusion-lifestyle.com/contracts/London_Borough_of_Hounslow/Activities and more information on SwimFit can be found at www.swimfit.com.

Sam is a freelance article writer who lives and works in the UK and specialises in creative writing and fiction.