Olympic Swimmer Darren Lange gives an insight into how to build the all important Body Position skill in the water:
The prone body position in the water is the foundation on which we build our swimming skill. Without a good, strong body position the swimmer will sink when trying to swim through the water. Body position is made up of two important skills, head position and kicking action. At the DLSA, you will see and hear teachers constantly working with the children to build these two very important skills.
Our keywords for these two skills are, Chin On Chest for head position (on our tummy) and Long Legs Soft Feet for the kicking action. Both sets of keywords are very important for our swimmers to learn and for the teacher to enforce. Only when a swimmer has both of these skills working to a high standard will they have a strong body position in the water.
We work on these skills and these keywords right from our Water Confidence 1 level and then throughout the rest of the program. Parents can help their children with progression by reinforcing our specific keywords when talking to their children about their swimming lessons.
Let's look more closely at the head position. We want the face looking towards the bottom of the pool not forward, so we say to the swimmers Chin on Chest.
Lifting the head forward will always result in the lower part of the body sinking in the water.
The kicking action keywords Long Legs Soft Feet. These keywords are designed to be emotive keywords. Long legs, soft feet, promotes relaxation in the water and a long leg kicking action. We never say straight legs to our swimmers, straight legs promote tense muscles in the legs and tense muscles won’t float.
We must maintain relaxation in the water.
The best way to build these skills in swimming lessons, is repetition repetition repetition.
So it is an important milestone for a young swimmer to increase their skill to a point where they combined a good head position with a good kicking action. Once reaching that point the swimmer will be able to develop their swimming skills to a much higher level.
Darren Lange OLY