Swimming is one of the best, all-round forms of exercise. It boosts your fitness while protecting against the weight-bearing joint injuries associated with other sports such as running. Swimming tones your core muscles, arms and legs, as well as helping you relax. When done regularly, it can reduce your risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and stroke.
Despite these benefits, not many swim regularly, and quite a few are unable to swim at all. Of those that do swim, many aren’t doing it correctly and, in some cases, the way you swim can do damage. After years, swimmer and author of the book ‘Master the Art of Swimming: Raising Your Performance with the Alexander Technique’, Steven Shaw was left with neck and back problems, for example. He trained as an Alexander Technique teacher. It is a gentle non-invasive way of releasing tensions, which interfere with the optimal working of your muscles. It can teach you to deal effectively with issues of discomfort, stiffness or pain that are caused by the work you are doing. Shaw, after observing other people’s bad swimming posture while working as a lifeguard, has developed his own method, which he calls The Art Of Swimming. “The majority of people are doing more harm than good to their bodies when they’re swimming,” says he. “I often watch people battling the water, gasping for breath. They don’t get very much pleasure from it. Breaststroke is most people’s default stroke, but having your head up, as a lot of people do, acts like a brake, so your arms and legs need to work harder to defeat that resistance.”
Shaw’s speciality is in teaching adults to swim, whether they’re disabled, have a phobia of water or have just never learned to take to water. “People who have anxiety about putting their face in the water think it will take a few months, but within one or two sessions they can enjoy it,” he says. His technique includes learning to hold your head at the correct angle to prevent water going up your nose, while facilitating breathing. He believes that if you get this right, keeping the rhythm and breathing in sync is actually very meditative. “Swimming is like writing a sentence, and the breathing is the punctuation,” he adds. He’s been so successful that Shaw now spends most of his time training other people to teach his method. There are now 250 Art of Swimming instructors worldwide. Some of the teachers are physiotherapists, some are swimming teachers, some are Alexander Technique teachers.
Swimming is one of the few sports that you can do for your whole life. Every person has an inner mermaid or merman. Perhaps it’s time you found yours!
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