Why I am wearing a Twiband for Drowning Prevention Week - 27th june 2013

                             Why I am wearing a Twiband for Drowning Prevention Week    

Years ago I was walking towards a step ladder in a pool wanting to climb out when I saw a stationary child hanging in a vertical position in the water. It was an open public swimming session and I was there with my children to play in the water.There was simply something wrong with the image that was before me. I cannot put my finger on exactly what it was but I elected to act and lifted the child up from under the arms into the air. As their face broke the surface of the water they burst into a life giving gasp and thanked me profusely. They had wanted to get into the pool as soon as possible and had run away from their family to jump in with no thought for the depth of the water. The child's family came up as I was talking to them and expressed their deep gratitude in a few short moments. They all walked away and I thanked myself for following my instincts when I had risked a torrent of affront if I had been wrong.

The remarkable thing about the whole experience was the rapidity of it and the silence with which it started and left me contemplating it. Someone was going to drown sadly right under the chair of a lifeguard who did not know anything about the whole event because there was a staff change-over as the grateful family talked to me and then whisked the child away. I did not blame the lifeguards. I felt RELIEF I was there to back them up unseen and that I had fulfilled a duty to my fellow man. Lifeguards carry such weight on their shoulders and they enable us to enjoy the water. They deserve great respect and I actively encourage everyone around me to do the same. They are our stalwarts.

The experience has never left me and I hope it never left the child or their family but I also hope that they turned it into a positive reason to ensure a resilient swimmer developed and did not end up avoiding water altogether. So whenever there is a chance to prevent accidents in water I speak up and spread the word. As humans we should all aspire to fulfill such duties and be shown how best to help SAFELY.

The Golden Car With Infinite Gears

Imagine if you had a car with infinite gears? What would it be like to drive? As you drive up a hill in a real car you need to go down the gears and as you go down hill you can coast or change up the gears to maintain control. Sudden gear shifts are needed all over the place in mainstream swimming lessons all of the time because everyone is unique but forced into a group situation. What is common to every lesson? Me saying to myself, am I going slowly enough for everyone here? Is there anyone who will not cope with what I have in mind to try next? How can I make it easier for them to join in in some way? How do I stop them feeling left out if everyone else is ready? All of this sounds complex and too brainpower consuming however it is nowhere near as hard as it sounds.

There are literally thousands of ways of approaching the exploration of a skill in water, some are counterintuitive and connected to other fronts of learning and when you understand that each skill lies furled inside everyone already, waiting to flower in the right conditions at the right time then you can afford to bide your time and pick your moments in a myriad ways. This is how I would describe the approach I and my business partner Zoe now use to show people how to learn to swim. Having the skills to show someone what to do is one thing but letting what is inside come out is another altogether. It is like driving a gleaming golden car with infinite gears rather than a battered old silver model with dodgey brakes.

The Power of Doing nothing

                                                            ZERO

At stage one children are just coming to the pool for the first time and finding out what it is like to be in a new and challenging environment without being able to hold their parent's hand. It goes without saying that they can find it too much. This is why my stage one lessons are such a pleasure for me to run because I can reassure these young people that the pool is the place to come back to for a highly rewarding experience. It is always so fascinating to see "the power of doing nothing" working it's miracles over and over again. By this I mean establishing the idea that there are no expectations for what the child has to do other than to be safe, feel safe, have fun and listen to friendly advice about the environment and the other little people that they know so little about at first. The term length is 14 weeks, the lessons are only half an hour long and yet the children make progress at an exponential rate when this simple rule is applied rigorously. After all it is about building trust and that can only grow under a warm shower of consistency and honesty. Typically very tense children take between 2 and 4 lessons to be able to start engaging with the water and as long as you stick to your lack of intervention guns they will delight in coming and then really begin to tackle the meat of their learning. What small price to pay, just a few weeks, or rather just a few water hours. Some take much longer but their issues and how to solve them become clearer when you are mentally travelling slowly enough in your observations to see.

I yearn for the day that all swimming lessons are longer as progress rates would increase yet again but for now I have to work with what I have available to me and help people to the best of my ability. I would also like to call the first stage of learning to swim stage Zero as it gives the parents a clear message about the expected lack of application of ANY pressure to the child. Then once firmly established I would like to allow this golden thread to run through all of the other stages so that it is no longer confined to the preschool domain. To be in charge of yourself is to be a powerful learner and free to choose to never stop learning. It is something that has been missing from so many lessons for so many years and I spend my time fighting for the rights of my students to have it. Zero is one of my heroes!

Google, doodle, woggle, noodle, gubbles........bubbles 21st June 2013

I love this Google Doodle by Christopher Niemann and particularly as the wave moves over the little figures. It's Fabulous! Today I was running a preschool swimming lesson and one of the children said to me in all earnest "I have a pair of gubbles at home too" It made me chuckle inside and store the scenario away as a precious moment to counteract the other times when they ignore me and ping around like dried peas on a drum. However my occasional diffculties at getting a preschooler's attention can be viewed as being perfectly natural. They are wired to explore their environment and delight in changes of pace, seeing how things work and watching what others do. It is afterall how they learn. I have built up a vast collection of activities connected with woggles (long foam pipes otherwise called noodles)

Three of the children's favourites are described below:

"Wiggly worms" or "The Fishing Game" or "Chase the woggle"
Row them all up in water that does not come over their waists with lots of room to run and turn and challenge them to catch the ends of two woggles that you snake around the surface of the water. The woggles can move with great sinuousity if you move your hands horizontally and you can end up running all over the place teasing the shrieking catchers like fish with tasty worms on a line. The faster you go the more they like it as it raises the stakes and draws attention from onlookers. Ensure you enlist your peripheral awareness as you will need to face the children to judge when to tease the woggle end away. When one makes a successful catch slow down and let them all hold on in a row to each woggle. Once skillful at this game you can ensure that they are all aligned in two teams on each woggle, ready to stretch and kick together to be the first team back at the wall. They love this game and it has so many benefits but some main ones are to release tension, remove excess energy, work as a team with weak kickers still feeling some forward movement and to raise heart rates. It is a tiring game, it raises my heart rate too and we often follow it with soft back floats as though we are exhausted flies.

"Feeding the fish" or "Hungry fish"

This involves holding two thinner woggles at their ends to form a hinging mouth with the lips pointing at the child. You can hinge the top woggle up so that the child has the option to porpoise through the "fish's mouth" or they can go "underneath the belly" if they are uneasy about catching their feet on the lower lip and "being chewed by the fish". The skill is in ensuring the child does not stay long pivoting on the lower lip by pressing the hinge down and moving the mouth towards their feet. After very few goes many children perform beautiful flexible porpoising and you can ask them to pretend they are going through the fishes mouth a little further to enjoy their new found skill without any pressure. They will move past your legs to escape the fish's gullet. It works because they are engaging their imagination and seeing the smiles on the faces of those who have tried it before them. Laughter not threats for this one obviously. Always start with a confident child and never pressurise anyone to do anything. They can always just stand and laugh after all. It teaches them something even if they feel unable to take part and they have the right to enjoy some schadenfreude as a skilled child has to concede with giggles while being chewed by the fish, contemplate how they can feel ready to do such a thing and take the easy option until they are ready. Other skills will also help them feel ready to do this one.

"Sheep pens"

This is to encourage those who are nervous of submerging to do something unseen by pressurising eyes.
They can choose to cheat or they can chose to try without being "WATCHED" This is very important to them. Pen them at the wall with two woggles (you can see how this one happened first) and then tell your naughty sheep that you trust them to stay in the pen while you shut your eyes (all must be relatively steady on their feet for this game) Shut one eye first which makes them laugh and also allows you to check they are happy then close both. You will sense where they go and what they do and may know their characters well enough to predict. The more competent ones will effect beautiful push and glides below the water. After they have all got out (some slip around the ends and don't even go under and that's fine, it's what they need to do to be happy at that point in time) open your eyes and say "Oh no where have my sheep gone?" They love this most, the fact that you have lost your naughty sheep. Then you can ask them to sneak back in without disturbing the water or giving you a sign they are there. When you open your eyes they are there grinning at you. This game obviously has to be played where your lessons are closely life guarded, or you have an assistant with you in the water. They must also be able to safely stand and effect a standup at their own comfortable depth. Too much uplift can unbalance them and make them flap about. You need to know that they will all feel easy with it. If one is uneasy move them so it is shallower for them. Only do what is safe and feels safe for the participants.

I am lucky enough to be able to play these games in a lovely shallow beach area with lots of wall space and woggles. These games are great for me and you may not find them suitable for you to try. However they serve to illustrate that you can present children with in-depth fun and engage them with highly productive games. They love a change in pace and need some faster moves unlike adults who while learning are unable to identify when their heart is racing with fear and when it is exercising.

"Laughter is a smile bubbling over"

Learning to swim from the bottom up - 14th June 2013

Today I had alot of fun at the pool asking the children to find out what happens when you push a thin foam sheet to the pool floor to stick it down like a plaster. I routinely use these thin colourful sheets to build a thicker float, to stick on the free board wall, to curl into telescopes, to be hats for making waterfalls before your eyes or over your ears, to act as a sensory face cloth on the water surface or a pillow.....the children find more every time and never cease to make me smile at their inventiveness. So today it was to test their understanding of what will happen when they try to stick one to the pool floor as they can on the wall above the water. Of course they can't get the sheets to stick because even though they are very thin they float to the surface. They are only little in toddler splash and their parents love to see them learning something new and often ask them questions as they experiment.

Learning about water from the bottom upwards is so natural and so useful to the body. It is almost certainly how we first learned about water in our ancestral past when we were hungry and wanted to retrieve something to eat from the bottom. Just like the female Japanese macaque who first picked food off the bottom of a thermal pool and now her descendants spend the snowy winters in the "hot tub" and the expressions on their pink faces would not look out of place in the local spa! Sinkers in swimming lessons are attractive to some and others probably feel a pang of apprehension if it goes too deep for them to retrieve without putting their face in the water. It's all about having room to engage with the water by no longer being concerned with survival. For the macaques that is because they are being fed by the volcanic park workers and for humans it is about knowing enough about water to feel happy submerged inside it.

Older children can benefit enormously from experiencing the bottom of the pool at a crucial point in their learning path too. A little 6 year old I was teaching was very slight in stature and not very buoyant so I began to check what her knowledge of the uplift on her body was like by placing sinkers at the bottom of a slope into deeper water. She found it very hard to get down to the sinker so after we had played at exchanging our footprints with handprints I held her hand and we swam downslope together to get the sinker. This was a door opening into a new realm for her as she never looked back. It was the view she needed to understand that she can own the water column as well as that golden zone of breathing at the top. Infact she treasured the water column more than the golden zone that had put so much pressure on her to hone the efficiency of her movements. We spent lots of time repeating the dive stick routine as she wanted to learn more. Repetition, so crucial to the ownership of joyful skills. "Look at me" "Look what I can do" The results of her trips to the floor were extremely impressive in terms of cutting down the struggle time at the surface in pursuit of stroke perfection. Her tension was broken so she moved further, she had time to explore the thrill of the uplift and discover that bending her knees towards her tummy lifted her more. This is where the first inklings of breasttroke came from and I have watched this happen many times now with the thinner folk I teach.

So learning to swim from the bottom up may sound counterintuitive but that is only the case if you are trying to work out how to stay in the golden zone at the top. It's hard work sometimes up there, the world is noisy, splashy, you flick in and out of the singularity of air and water, trying to identify when to breathe and when to hold your breath. It need not be hard, learning need not be a fight, it can be fluid and effortless.

Flying over the aquatic landscape to see its features - June 11th 2013

What a stunning view of Poole Harbour with Agglestone rock in the mid foreground. I have so many glorious memories of swimming in Dorset's varied aquatic landscapes. Being able to get inside these landscapes makes you value them deeply and want to protect them for others to enjoy the same way. Where do you sit on your aquatic landscape? It matters to those who come after you in future years because it can determine how much they will be able to enjoy it. If you are unsure about what I mean it is because I am talking about two things. The first is obvious as all beautiful environments need society's active protection from unintended harm but the other is much subtler.What you can see from your viewpoint is personal to you but it can have a bearing on how others you come across form theirs. The full implications of this simple phrase are profound for them and the landscapes they come across.

Aquatic landscapes are places of reward and adventure as well as challenging and changing. It is this double nature of riskiness and high reward that we are attracted to for both recreation and inspiration. To enjoy them properly and safely we need to know what the rules are first and today we have the greatest opportunities to learn in the comfort of our safely controlled conditions inside warm, clean, guarded swimming pools. So why do so many of us fail to do so killing chances of making the beach our domain? The reasons become clear as we look at the "epi-aquatic learning landscape" in very safe conditions and see patterns of fearful disconnection with all water. It comes down to the fact that someone who is afraid of water will want to warn others of it's perils that loom particularly large to them before they do anything else no matter how safe the conditions really are. This is natural but it also has an impact on the person that came without any prior knowledge by heightening their sense of alert in a safe environment.

If someone cannot put aside their fears of water even in the near perfect conditions of a modern pool then what chance do they stand of gaining the greatest fulfilment out of the beach? There is no fault here as it is what it is and no person is the same as anyone else. What matters is that we recognise this and seek to resolve problems when they arise. So have a look at where you sit on the epi-aquatic landscape. Wherever you are you will not be alone even though it may feel like it. There may be someone in an adjacent valley and you cannot see them or their point of view because there is a ridge in the way. This is why there are arguments among aquatic professionals about how to teach / approach learning to swim and why scientists cannot agree whether we had a semi-aquatic phase in our evolutionary past. It is because everyone carries their own beliefs which lead to what they can see from where they are lying.

THE EPI-AQUATIC LANDSCAPE

(By Andrea Andrews - Based on Conrad Waddington’s Epigenetic Landscape 1957)

This diagram is based on Conrad Waddington’s Epigenetic Landscape (1957) and is a metaphor for how the underlying ethos of an aquatic learning environment modulates the development of water confidence. Each person starts off as a baby with the pluripotent ability to learn to swim represented by the ball at the top of the slope. As the ball rolls down the hill the route choices it makes determines which valley it will rest in. The valley to the left with the large ball represents an entrenched state of fear where submergence of the head is not comfortable and is avoided. The valley to the right with the ball poised at a bifurcation represents a state of aquatic confidence where the head can be comfortably submerged and the choice is whether or not to let go of residual fear for replacement with a proportional respect for local conditions. There are resting places across the landscape in cols lying around the chin, mouth and eyes. There are no tunnels in this landscape and proximity does not help those wishing to cross over into adjacent valleys.

This conceptual landscape illustrates the following:

a)      Why it can be perceptually difficult to view how someone else feels about water.

b)      Why it is virtually impossible for very fearful learners to gain water confidence without going back up hill to the beginning due to insurmountable barriers.

c)      The first sensory input to influence the ball’s trajectory is the ear. In other words what a learner 'hears' about the learning landscape determines the speed and direction of travel selected thereafter and can remain that way until first-hand experience overrides it.

d)   Parents, teachers and societal messages control ball speed via the tilt of the landscape.

e)     The nose is the highest destination point and as such can influence the ball’s final trajectory, representing a sensitive balancing point for direction of comfort taken in the water.

f)      We are not totipotent aquatic learners as we need to breathe air. We are therefore pluripotent (born able to learn to swim) relying on prior first hand aquatic knowledge of others for support in order to foster a fruitful usage and respect for the water.

g)       Terrestrial societies can benefit from lowering the landscape to make it less steep and tilted towards the right hand comfortable valley when aquatic learning conditions are safely guarded and controlled. In other words they can allow more time for learners to employ their own learning potential by: avoiding implicit warnings by dictating speedy travel before floating and standing has been felt, fixed schemas for breath control before facial awareness has been experienced and introducing narrowly fixed limb patterns too soon. Instead safe time can be used to build a self supportive team of individuals exploring water and sharing positive implicit knowledge in order to build an aquatic sense; taking advantage of a natural ability to gain resilience through safe enjoyable aquatic play first.

Old blocks change into new building bricks - 6th June 2013

Lately I have been revisiting the use of those lovely tactile black rubberised blocks in my swimming lessons. They sit for months untouched in the equipment room and although I wasn't particularly looking for inspiration they grabbed me en route to my stage 4 classes. The children's eye's lit up as they spotted them and proceeded to ask what we were going to do with them. "We'll see" I said, not knowing. We warmed up, sitting on the pool floor with our hands on our heads and rotating for fun before experimenting with side floats, side glides and super slow front crawl arms, "chicken wings" and rolling to backs for a breath. Then as this had led us to experiment with sculling headfirst it struck me that some children did not have very effective moves in this regard and "Underwater Jenga" was born in an instant.

Always out to point children in the right direction without giving the answer I set them a challenge to make a jenga tower with their feet. They laughed, loved it and succeeded and failed then succeeded and at the end I asked them what they thought the purpose of the game was. They said "To move things with our feet" and I said "Did you move your arms at all?" They didn't know it but they had been sculling around for ages in a vertical position with great skill to effect their precision lifting and parking. The skill of course evaporated as soon as some of them tried to scull on their backs by engaging their brains to do so. However the skill is in there, it hides inside their bodies and appears when they have turned off their intellect. The skill appeared again when we turned our back sculling into armchair sculling and that time it stayed, nailed down, owned, not demonstrated, perfectly comfortable and much wider in it's range of skill application.

A few days later I used the blocks again with another stage to act as something diferent to hold as they front kicked along. How it felt surprised them because they expected the block to make them sink further in the water. It did not and even the smallest swimmer could move effortlessly with it in their hands. Then I asked them to work out how best to carry the block while on their backs. This was fascinating as it led them to experiment with block position and speed / efficiency of kick. Boys struggled more than the girls to keep their faces dry until they found how to raise their hips or adjust their kick. Some didn't go far but they enjoyed the process, the concept , the change and my response to their efforts.

So old things can become new things when you open your mind to the possibility that there is more than one way to learn something. Infact there are so many ways and children are intrinsically wired to learn in mutliple ways like this. The skills they learn from these activities appear to come and go with the location of their intellectual attention and when they focus it can appear to evaporate. This is why parents who watch anxiously from the side for the preconceived patterns of strokes that they expect their child to perform immediately can be more disappointed than most purely because they have unwittingly placed unecessary pressure onto their child. The other children carry on adding their skills together subconsciously making the connections they need to succeed soon while the watched child struggles with itself to co-ordinate something that it is not ready to do yet. This can leave them behind and sad unless the parent is reassured that there is no need to worry and to let go of their detrimental overseership.

Joyful skills are powerful skills, they cost less energy and they lead to efficency and resilience. A little more patience and the end result is far superior to any deceptively pretty, rushed, overly imposed patterns of movement. What matters is how the pattern develops and how strong it is not it's immediacy.

What do we want for our swimmers? To be water cognisant enough to be able to make a huge range of exploratory adjustments for detailed fine tuning later or to be strongly constrained from the start to a narrow field of exploration that is unecessarily dull, bravely thrashed out or emotionally flat?

I know which I prefer for my pupils because I want safe swimmers not false swimmers.

Andrea's blog spot on how to help the afraid of water - 5th June 2013

Watch this space for information on how to help anyone who is nervous in swimming lessons.