Learning to swim – trouble breathing

I have been helping adults learn to swim for many years. As a physiotherapist, I also conduct various types of activities in the water. What used to surprise me the most, at the beginning of my practice, was that people in contact with water have very basic problems, which I no longer remembered, because activities in this environment have accompanied me since I was very young. There are a whole host of swimmers who are unable to dip their heads below the surface of the water. Many say they don’t swim crawl because they can’t coordinate their breathing.

Learning to swim – basic challenges

In this article, I would like to collect some tips and exercises that can help overcome these basic problems, so that more people can enjoy the ability to swim at a usable level, and in extreme cases save their lives. Of course, there is an abundance of literature and great courses offering swimming lessons using various methods. Here I have collected just a few supplementary tips that I use myself and pass on to the people I work with.

1 When one begins to swim in crawl, it is indeed sometimes difficult to coordinate breathing, because the rhythm of inhalation and exhalation is correlated with the work of the arms. Whether we can take in air well also depends on our body position on the water. So it’s worth doing various technical exercises to improve style without focusing too much on not being able to breathe. When we lie better on the water, catch a calmer swimming rhythm, and our body feels the water, it will be easier to coordinate our breathing work. This simply requires time, sometimes a year or two of regular practice. We can swim a few meters at a time and stop to take a breath. Let’s not give up in frustration after a few workouts. It will probably be a long process, but almost any adult can learn to swim crawl.

(2) If you feel that you are short of breath when krauling, you can spend some time learning to dive. Being immersed in water up to the waist, we make a full exhalation through the mouth, creating additional resistance (set the mouth into a pout or touch the palate with the tongue). After exhaling, we make the largest possible inhalation and lie face down on the water. We try to hold for a dozen seconds or a little longer. It is important to relax as much as possible and not to let the air out during the dive. We can repeat the attempt several times. If we are able to hold our breath for a longer period of time, it will pay off while swimming the crawl.

Sometimes due to a wave or other disturbing factor, we are unable to take in air. Diving exercises will cause us to miss one or two breathing cycles in the kraul and not feel breathless. All diving exercises should be done with assistance. It is always possible to faint, especially when hyperventilating: speeding up the breathing action or deepening breaths. Of course, you can also faint during normal swimming, so minimize the risks you take. When we submerge our head, we trigger the mammalian diving response (the diving reflex), which causes the heart to slow down, demand less oxygen and move blood from the peripheral parts of the body toward the center. This is our evolutionary adaptation, which we should take advantage of when learning to swim.

3 Spend some time playing in the water: jumping, tumbling, diving for fun. When learning to swim, it is important that not every part of the activity has a set structure. We should experiment and have fun with it. Our sense of balance and the parts of the brain responsible for processing equivalent stimuli need a lot of time to get used (again!) to the aquatic environment. An adult learning to swim probably experienced very little water play when he or she was a child.

4 If we have trouble dipping our heads, we can practice this at home. Just pour water into a bowl and, in a sitting or kneeling position, slowly immerse the face while performing the breath-hold described in point two, again with an attendant present. This method is also good for children. The head immersion problem is often linked to a childhood story. Someone was forced to dive or fell into the water in a non-delicate manner and became choked. Such an experience is interpreted as drowning. It also happens that some people realistically drowned, which became their psychological trauma. Now, before any attempt to dive, they feel a lot of anxiety and can’t control their own, often too fast breathing.

5 There are many breathing preparation exercises for swimming that we can do at home. One of them is silent breathing. We sit comfortably, keeping a straight spine or lie down on a mat and observe our breathing for a few minutes or so, without interfering with the process. We focus only on observation, try to quiet our thoughts and not judge what we are doing or how we are doing it. We should not intentionally influence the breathing rhythm. The effect of the exercise is usually calming and a feeling of pleasure. If we start to react anxiously while learning to swim, we can replicate the experience and, for example, calm ourselves by lying on our backs on the water. This is one of the basic exercises of the now popular mindfulness trend, and it comes from Buddhist meditation.

You should also try exercises that teach you to consciously influence your breathing rhythm. One of the most popular is square breathing, which you can download special apps from the Internet to train, or you can do it without using additional devices. In square breathing, you try to make an inhalation in a certain number of seconds, such as 4. Then you hold the air in your lungs for another 4 seconds, make an exhalation for another 4 seconds and hold your breath at the top of the exhalation for that time.

We can adjust the number of seconds to our ability and perform, for example, 12 cycles. This exercise is versatile, as we train both inhaling and exhaling, as well as stopping breathing in two opposing diaphragm positions. The excellent freediver Alexey Molchanov has proposed an interesting modification of this exercise. He advises not to extend all phases evenly in the course of training, i.e. not to practice, for example, 15 seconds. In this type of breathing, stopping the air after the exhalation phase is problematic. He suggests that inhalation and exhalation should be lengthened enough to feel comfortable, e.g. inhalation 5 seconds, exhalation 7 seconds. The breath-hold phase at the top of the exhalation is lengthened to a maximum of 5 seconds, while we work on lengthening the breath-hold after the inhalation. It can last, for example, 15-20 seconds.

When it’s easy for us, we lengthen this phase until we reach a full minute in one breathing cycle. Then only then can we begin to work on lengthening the holding of the breath at the top of the exhalation. This may sound complicated if you’ve never tried breathing exercises, but in practice these principles prove simple.

The last exercise worth mentioning is lengthening your breathing using a metronome. We set up an online metronome on our phone that beats out a rhythm every second. While relaxing, we try to lengthen the inhalation and exhalation phases, observing what proportions are optimal for us: inhalation and exhalation should be long, but not tiring while performing several cycles. As a general rule, breathing exercises on land are performed through the nose. If they come from sports diving, we use the mouth. We can, of course, experiment.

6 Some people can submerge their heads, but are afraid to lie on their backs on the water. This may be due to hypersensitivity of the semicircular canals in the ear and imperfect processing of equivalent stimuli in the brain. The solution may be to lie on land on a moving surface, such as a suspended platform, hammock or blanket that another person will gently rock.

7 In learning to swim, dive and with breathing exercises, the help of a coach or instructor is invaluable. The other person can quickly catch our shortcomings and react in real time, adjusting and modifying exercises. Swimming is a technical discipline. Most of the exercises should be aimed at improving your technique and feeling your body in the water environment. At least in the beginning. If we only swim consecutive lengths in the pool, we may never make progress. It’s hard to judge your position and how you move on your own, because your joints are subject to less pressure in the water than on land. Our proprioception is worse. A sure solution is to record what we do and analyze it later. This will provide us with the missing feedback.

Swimming as therapy – overcoming fears and building confidence

When learning to swim, we should set our sights on a sense of calm, comfort and pleasure. This is often a kind of psychotherapy. Many people work on reducing their water-related fears. When they are able to overcome them, the joy is twofold: they gain more self-confidence and freedom to move through the blue expanses.