How to Swim Underwater

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Phillip Toriello, and this is how to swim underwater. Swimming underwater is a fabulous experience it provides the sensation of flying when you get the hang of it. The first thing that I'd like to encourage people to do is to go ahead and warm up by getting in the pool and swimming a few laps, just to get the heart pumping and the blood flowing. This will help your body acclimate to the temperature and the rigors of swimming in general. Once you've become comfortable in the water, go ahead and return to the wall, and you go ahead and take a couple of breaths, nice deep breaths, hold it, slowly let it out, kind of exercise those lungs a bit stretch them out. Once you feel nice and comfortable, after you've brought your heart rate back down, go ahead and take a giant breath, inhale, hold it, use the side of the pool as leverage, push yourself down about two to three feet and then you can push off across the pool. You can utilize a pull or a breast stroke pull followed by a giant frog kick into a streamline, and just as you feel like you're about to slow down after the kick, go ahead and do a giant breast stroke, pull, and followed by a frog kick into your glide. This will conserve energy and get you across the pool quite fast. A couple of things you want to remember though when doing underwater swims is that safety is first and foremost. If at any point you feel like your lungs are about to pop, or you do need a breath, please surface, please break the surface of the water, take that breath, and then you can resume your underwater swim. This is really important because you can pass out when going under a hypoxic situation."