February 14, 2008: Different Strokes
Do you know how to swim? It’s a simple question that elicits a “yes” or “no” answer. Unfortunately, the answer doesn’t take into account the swimmer’s capability in the water. In fact, a “yes” or “no” answer is misleading when one considers the five ability levels of swimming.
Among swimmers, there are five groups of people: those who already know how to save themselves in water whether shallow or deep, pool, ocean, river, or lake; those who cannot save themselves and want to learn; those who cannot save themselves and don’t want to learn; those who can’t learn because of a physical or mental limitation; and children.
You want every last person to be calm and capable if they are in a boat that capsizes, or a ferry that sinks. You want everyone to be competent in water if a flood washes them and their front porches down the street. You want everyone to know how to recognize a tsunami signal and move to higher ground, and how to have the best chance of survival if the tsunami bursts through an open window in the middle of the night. You want them to enjoy a swimming pool. All of this is possible. It’s the job of aquatic directors and swimming instructors to bring this competency to the public.
How Many Are Afraid?
Fear in water is a fact of life. According to a 1998 Gallup poll, most adults in the United States (64 percent) are afraid in deep, open water. Almost half (46 percent) are afraid in deep water in pools. An additional 39 percent are afraid to put their heads under water.
Most fearful swimmers and nonswimmers received their fear from their parents. Some took it from a frightening experience early in life from which they haven’t recovered. As a swimming instructor, you can’t just tell them to forget or learn on top of it. The fear is with them every moment in the pool, foremost in their minds, and it won’t go away until it has healed.
This doesn’t mean you have to be a trained psychologist. But you do need to know more than swimming mechanics. Think about it: To be competent in water emergencies, people need only to be able to prevent panic and float.
Many aquatic professionals are al - ready deeply committed to doing all they can for swimming safety and consider this part of their job. The only problem is, when it comes to teaching people how to handle the situations above, who knows what to do?
Few people would be prepared to ensure their best chances of survival if the tsunami came through a window in the middle of the night. But we know the response would not be back float or freestyle. It would be instead to deal with preventing panic.
For the people who can save themselves in all sorts of water, you only need to teach one thing: what to do when panic threatens one’s ability to use what one knows. You need to teach them panic prevention. This is something everyone needs to know. It’s unrelated to swimming skills.
For those who cannot save themselves and don’t want to learn, you need to gently persuade them to take one step forward for themselves, their families, and their communities. That one step might be to watch a demonstration of someone else who feels the same way they do taking lessons designed specifically for their needs. This would be difficult for them to decline.
For those who resist learning as well as for anyone who doesn’t swim, you want to make sure any possible swimming hole was as safe as possible. You should enact the “Safer 3,” a concept and foundation headed up by Johnny Johnson of Blue Buoy Swim School in Tustin, Calif. “This means safer kids and adults by teaching them to trust the water, through plenty of water experience and swimming lessons; safer water through lifeguard supervision, clearing obstructions, checking currents, and posting signs for unsafe conditions; and safer response through parental supervision— home, hotel, and public swim areas—and emergency protocol.”
For the people who cannot learn due to a physical or mental limitation, you can only empower their caretakers. Obviously, the caretaker is responsible for safety. Today, family caretakers are not required by law to be able to provide safety for their charges near the water. As Evie Christou of Family Caregiver Alliance in San Francisco says, “Only if a Medicare-certified agency is caring for a patient while a water emergency occurs is the (medical) caregiver responsible for the safety of the patient. Family caregivers provide billions of dollars worth of free care every year and are not expected to also undergo anything like lifeguard training.” Caretakers should be trained with at least minimal lifeguarding skills for their patients.
How Did You Learn?
The importance of feeling the water cannot be overstated. As a swimmer yourself, you may hardly notice all the sensations of swimming anymore. Your mind may be a hundred miles away when you swim. Or you may be focused on going fast. You take your buoyancy for granted. Perhaps you don’t swim anymore. But when you learned, you had to go slowly enough to feel how your body and the water worked together.
When you were 2 years old, did you hold your toy boat under water in the bathtub and smile gleefully when it popped back to the surface? You probably did it 50 times. That’s how you learned about the properties of water.
Using the concepts of these childhood experiences is a way parents and swim teachers can teach kids that water is a fun environment. We pour warm water over their heads when they’re infants in the tub. There are so many fun games to teach kids about water.
These same games can be used to teach adults who aren’t comfortable with water. Adults may have never had the opportunity to learn because of a negative experience with water earlier in life.
Give these swim students a ball, a pencil, or a water balloon. Talk about what makes these items do what they do in water. Lead the conversation around to, “What would your body do?” Some will say, “Sink!” Some will say, “Let me try.”
Every swimming student needs to start with the true basics. What are they?
• It’s not dangerous to have water in your face, eyes, ears, and mouth.
• Water can hold you up.
• If you’re a sinker and water doesn’t hold you up, it’s not an emergency unless you panic.
• You can prevent panic, and we’ll teach you. Everyone needs to know it.
• Once you’re in control in water, shallow and deep, and you know how to prevent panic, you can be competent in a water emergency. You do not need to know strokes or treading to survive.
Every swimming student begins with unfamiliarity about how the water works unless he or she played in a body of water large enough to feel his or her body’s buoyancy. But people who are afraid in water are blind to their buoyancy. Swim students cannot become water-competent or learn to swim if they can’t feel the water.
What To Do
How do you teach someone to float on his back if he doesn’t want to put his ears in the water, will panic if he can’t put his feet down, and is afraid of getting water in his nose and sinking? Swimming instructors should lead the fearful through the steps of how to remain in control all the time and understand how water works (see sidebar, “Steps to Erasing Fear”).
If you were in charge of the world’s swimming ability and you taught every last person to float and prevent panic, you’d be the one to thank for the people who fell out of a boat on their family vacations and lived; for the fishermen who walked off a drop off in the river and found themselves suddenly over their heads but calmly returned to shallow water; for the tourists whose boat flipped over in a lake and who said to themselves, “Oh, well, I’m getting wet today;” for the ferry that sank with 300 people aboard who waited calmly for transportation back to shore.
It’s time to build a worldwide team of aquatic professionals committed to teaching all people to be water-competent and to ending preventable drowning.
1. Have the students tell their stories.
2. Ask them what they can do in the shallow end that’s truly comfortable.
3. Meet each student exactly where they are in their understanding.
4. Tell them you don’t want them to do anything that’s uncomfortable. Make them promise they won’t.
5. When they ask, “How can I learn if I don’t push myself?” you say, “The same way you learned to walk as a baby: the natural, easy, go-at-your-own-pace way, so you remain in control the entire time.”
6. Remember, overcoming fear in water is about staying in control in water all the time. To become expert at staying in control in water, students need to practice staying in control in water—at every opportunity. No exceptions.
7. Squelch your tendencies to teach swimming skills. Students need to learn how to prevent themselves from “losing it.” No matter what happens, make sure no one loses it.
8. Develop an eye for “speed.” When people are tense, they’re speeding inside. They can learn easily and well when they’re calm and slow inside.
9. Take a comprehensive training to learn how to teach fearful students panic prevention.
