Bye Bye Fear

Teaching an adult who is scared of water may be rather difficult. Some adults that can’t swim had some sort of traumatic experience at some point in their life to make them scared of the water. For others there was not a traumatic experience but rather it is a fear of the unknown.  They had never tried to swim nor had they ever had a want to swim. Now, many adults will decide they want to learn for many reasons. One being, their children know how to swim and they want to be able to confidently take them to water parks and such. Another reason might be that they are tired of watching everyone around them have fun in the water and they can’t enjoy it themselves. I have personally heard many different types of reasons and fears, but no matter what it is I still do my best to help them learn to swim confidently.

I have taught quite a few adult private lessons. One of my favorites was a woman named Kerri. Kerri had an accident when she was a young girl where she was pushed into the deep end of a pool. She didn’t know how to swim and ended up sinking straight to the bottom. Kerri was terrified as she never took in a breath of air before her head went under. Luckily for her, there was a parent nearby that saw and quickly went under to retrieve her. She would not step foot in another pool after that, whether she could touch or not. With Kerri, I had to be very patient. I could not push her too much or she would lose faith in herself and give up. We started on the stairs. I let her sit on the top stair and I just talked to her about things that didn’t relate to swimming. She had two children, Kevin and Lacy, so we talked about them. I told her that as she got comfortable to continue moving down the stairs. As we talked, I watched her scoot her body down step by step. We were in the shallow end or three feet deep. The water was just above my waste and about the same height on Kerri. It took Kerri a full twenty minutes to get into the water and where she was standing. That was a lot of progress. She had not been in a pool since she was a little girl. We took the last ten minutes to work on paddling her hands in the water while standing.

The next few lessons were very similar to the first. She took her time getting in, and then we would end with either paddling or bending at the knee to get more of her body wet. Once she was a little more comfortable, I was able to get her to walk around the shallow end. She would walk back and forth from five feet to three feet. She was improving so much and I could see that her fear was getting a little crack in it. I told her it was time to start getting her face wet. We would do mouth bubbles and I let her plug her nose to get her eyes wet. It took more lessons to learn to blow bubbles from her nose, but she did get it!

I always start with learning how to swim on your front when teaching someone who has a fear of water. People tend to be more comfortable on their front because they feel like they have more control since they can see where they are going. However, we did still work on back floating. I gave her a float belt (a think piece of foam that wraps around a person’s waste) and two noodles that she held under her armpits. I had her practice on the wall first before having her try in the open shallow end. She placed her hands on the wall and slowly let her legs lift behind her. Again, this is a big step for her to lift her feet from the ground for the first time when she was so scared. I let her lift and then put her feet back down until she looked comfortable. After a few times of practicing this, we tried it off of the wall. I held her hands instead of her holding the wall and we tried it a few times. She was already much more confident in herself, and even though she would never admit it and would say things like I can’t  or it’s too hard I remained positive and told her she could.

Once Kerri was able to successfully pick her feet off of pool ground and place them back down, we worked on kicking. She first sat on the wall and kicked her feet. She worked on keeping her legs straight. New swimmers tend to kick their legs like they are riding a bike and then don’t move anywhere. They don’t move because their legs are too bent and they aren’t pushing enough water. When she got the hang of kicking with straight legs and only a slight bend at the knee, she practiced in the water on the wall. We then moved to me holding her hands while she lifted her feet and kicked. I would walk her around the shallow end as she kicked her feet. I would also help her move her hands in a paddling motion. We did this for a few full lessons before I started taking away parts of her floatation devices. I first took away one noodle, next came the other noodle, and eventually the float belt. We also continued to work on floating and kicking on her back as much as she hated it, because it was something that she needed to know. Soon enough, Kerri was able to swim across the shallow end without me even touching her. I waited until she was completely comfortable swimming in shallow water before introducing her to water where she couldn’t touch. I gave her back the float belt before having her swim across the whole pool and I made sure to stay in front of her. After a few times swimming across, I took away the float belt again and I had her swim as far as she could go without grabbing the wall.

She made it a little further each time until eventually she could make it all the way across without my help. For Kerri, it took about a year of consistent lessons for her to get that comfortable. She would also come in on her own time to practice. Kerri was very determined to overcome her fear and she did! She is one of my success stories.