Teaching a Child the Front Crawl Swimming Stroke

Video Transcript

"Hi, I’m Samantha with Sharks and Minnows Swim School and I want to demonstrate a basic stroke. This stroke is called the front crawl. Any stroke starts off with a good glide and to glide you want to place one of your hands on the wall and both of your feet on the wall. When you push off you want to make sure that your body is streamlined, meaning that your head is down and your whole body is tight, hand together and feet together just like this. Once you feel comfortable with the glide you can add a kick, the kick with the front crawl is called the flutter kick and you want to make sure that you’re relatively straight and that your feet are very floppy. The flutter kick looks like this. It’s important that you keep your kick right below the surface of the water and that you make sure that your feet are nice and floppy like flippers and the front crawl uses a flutter kick and it also uses an alternating arm motion. When you’re doing your arms you want to bring one arm out of the water at a time and enter with a smooth entry, just like this. It’s important that you’re not smacking the water but instead that you’re cutting it. The other thing is you want to make sure that you keep your elbows up high just like this. So once you’re comfortable with the glide and you’re comfortable with the glide and the kick then start adding the arms. That would look something like this. Once you have the arms down you may wonder how you’re suppose to breath. For breathing there’s a couple of different ways you can do it. You can either pop your head up to breath or you can turn it to the side. The best way is to just rotate your head to the side, this is called rotary breathing. So for rotary breathing you want to pick a rhythm, maybe do two arms and breath or three arms and a breath or maybe even four arms and a breath. Today we’re going to do two arms and then take a breath to the side. When you’re breathing to the side you’re going to raise your arm and turn your head so you’re breathing almost in your armpit. I’ll show you, it’s important that you exhale underwater blowing bubbles so that when you do come up to take a breath you can take one quickly."