“I'm Afraid of the Water.”

If you’ve had a traumatic experience in the water, know someone else who has, are afraid or tense when you try to swim or can’t answer because you’ve never been in the water, we’ll start with the basics: breathing, floating and getting from a floating position to a standing position with confidence. When you start to feel comfortable in the water we’ll dive into learning the four competitive strokes: Freestyle, Backstroke, Breaststroke, and Butterfly.

If you’re extremely aquaphobic we’ll start you outside the pool and teach you how to breathe into the water using a salad bowl; if you feel comfortable in shallow water we’ll start you immediately in the Endless Pool—only 3 feet deep.

The goal of the following sequence is to get you over your fear of the water, teach you the basics of the four major swimming strokes, and open the door for more advanced swimming goals like swimming for fitness or triathlons. Your class progression is (click on any class for a more detailed description and registration):

• Basic Track: Swimming Foundations
  • Level 1:  Water Adjustment and Basic Skills
  • Level 2:  Advanced Swimming and Safety Skills (Freestyle/Backstroke Foundations)
  • Level 3:  Stroke Development I (Freestyle and Fitness Strokes)
• Advanced Track 1: Triathlon
  • Freestyle 1
  • Freestyle 2
  • Freestyle 3
  • Open Water Skills
  • Triathlon Swim Training
• Advanced Track 2: Fitness Swimming
  • Level 4:  Stroke Development II (Backstroke, Breaststroke, and Butterfly)
  • Level 5:  Stroke Refinement, Starts, and Turns I
  • Level 6:  Stroke Refinement, Starts, and Turns II (Fitness Swimming)

If you have a fear of deep water, we complement our classes at the Swim Studio with large group classes in a deep, conventional pool. We will teach you skills like treading water, water entries and exits, and swimming through deep water.

We’ve taught many students using this track, including Annette, a non-swimmer and Aquaphobe. A runner with a nagging knee injury, Annette began our Water Acclimation sequence afraid to breathe in the water. Six months later Annette completed her first super-sprint triathlon and left the water with “a smile on her face.” Having used swimming as a cross-training exercise to maintain her fitness during knee rehab, Annette recently dropped 2 minutes off her 5K run, won her age-group is training for the marathon, and swam 1.5 miles in our annual Hour of Power, a 60-minute continuous swim for distance. Her 2009 goal: Completing a Half-Ironman!