Integrative Swimming Instruction: Swimming through Understanding

Background: In the past 2-3 decades we are witnessing a linear decline in children`s motor skills, coordination and aquatic adaptation. This is due to insufficient exposure to movement experience in the early developmental stages of life and insufficient exposure to aquatic environments. Therefore, old swimming instruction approaches are not efficient and they don`t relate to students` rising emergent needs

Conceptualizing the solution: Exposing students to challenging movements will improve their motor skills and coordination while overcoming those challenges. Aquatic adaptation should include a gradual exposure to this new environment thus developing basic aquatic skills like floating and breath control.

Integrative swimming instruction approach: The integrative swimming instruction (ISI) approach is a spiral evolving process. Although the rings are separated in their goals and teaching methods the transition between them is inconspicuous to the student. The goal is to achieve swimming through understanding (STU) by gaining the notion of efficient swimming in the swimmer`s mind. The advantages of the ISI approach are maintaining gradation, continuity, adjustment and timing principles in teaching. Such learning enhances motivation and the student achieves the ability to swim all four styles at once. The disadvantage of the ISI approach is that it takes longer for the student to swim.

Ring 1: Aquatic adaptation - adaptation to the aquatic environment by gradually exposing the students to it. The exposure will include water games and experiential learning using the multi-disciplinary instruction model.

Ring 2: Unique swimming style movements - instructing various movements in all swimming styles and composing them into unorthodox styles like freestyle legs and breaststroke hands, butterfly legs and freestyle hands, etc. Instruction process in this ring will be inter-disciplinary using experiential learning.

Ring 3: Raw swimming - combining various swimming movements learned in the 2^nd ring into whole swimming styles. The instruction process will be multi-disciplinary gaining linkage and conceptualization of the complete movement achieving STU.

Ring 4: Polished swimming - improving swimming quality using various approaches ranging between direct and indirect instruction achieving higher levels of STU.

Ring 5: Competitive swimming - improving quality, quantity and physiology of swimming to achieve best competitive performance. Mostly indirect instruction will be used along with experiential learning and self-feedback.

Take home message:

• An understanding swimmer is a better swimmer.
• High levels of STU can be achieved throw ISI.
• ISI is very beneficial in instruction two or more styles at once.
• ISI is a long-term swimming instruction plane relating to the rising needs of new age students.