Why it is better for a child to learn Crawl over the breaststroke
– a professional opinion by the swimming teacher and coach Boaz Oved Shalom.
Conduct an experiment – ask random people what swimming stroke they control under their skills – most of them will answer “breaststroke”. At the same time, ask a professional swimmer – “What do you think is the most technically complex stroke?” – most of them will answer the same. How do these answers sit together? How can we bridge the gap that arises from these results? Are most people such good swimmers that they master the most technically complex stroke? – Of course not.
The source of this paradox can be found in the past;
Correct a mistake
Until the 1990s, it was customary to teach children the breaststroke stroke first in educational institutions. The choice stemmed from the belief that looking ahead while swimming, would ease the average student’s sense of security, and through this it would be possible to impart more children, and faster, survival skills if they needed them.
Thirty years ago, this attitude changed, and for a good reason.
Why did the swimming professional world started teaching children Crawl instead of breaststroke since the 1990s?
Let’s try to condense things into three main reasons:
Reason No. 1 – Complexed Kick:
We tend to refer to Breaststroke kick movement lightly as “frog kicks” – as if we were all originally tadpoles and this action is natural to us as the sunshine, but for a person, let alone a child, this action is a quite complicated one.
It is better to emphasize that in swimming, learning the movement of the legs will always precede learning the movement of the hands – which stems from the need to maintain a line of flow. A minimal level of performance is achievable, but it is not certain that they will be able to achieve movement in the water. In addition, 15% of children suffer from a “scissor” movement in their kick, meaning – they are not able to perform the movement from a motoric development point of view until adolescence. That means that 1 out of 6 children will not be able to perform it correctly in the first place.
The advantage of Crawl – the movements of the legs are straight, like kicking a ball. Easy to understand and apply after a few lessons.
Reason No. 2 – Head Position:
Swimming is based on one initial and uncompromising condition – buoyancy. Just as one should not sail in a boat or kayak without floating horizontally on the surface of the water – so does the human body while swimming. It can be determined that everything that aspires to paddle on the surface of the water efficiently must first be a “floating object” and only then a “rowing object”; Just like in order to be riding a skateboard one’s should first be able to stand on two legs.
The head is the heaviest organ in the body, and therefore it is the main influencer on buoyancy. On Breaststroke – looking forward, which is supposed to happen only during the act of breathing, becomes a habit and even dependency. This is the main hurdle in learning to swim for children – to get them used to putting their heads down and looking at the bottom but not forward. This is the most important lesson in the early ages – head position & controlling the air. Unfortunately, not every teacher has this in mind or focus. The children continue to raise their heads while swimming, and this creates a lack of buoyancy that will negatively affect any swimming style.
The common result is that children learn to adopt the wrong posture.
The advantage of Crawl – the head looks down and the breath is sideways; maintaining the buoyancy throughout the swim. This is the most important habit that should be instilled in every student in the pool, either young or old.
Reason No. 3 – “Tabula Rasa”:
Anyone who knows children knows – they have the ability to learn new things faster than an adult. According to brain research, we now know that in order to learn a new physical activity in adulthood, we need to repeat it 4 to 5 more times more then a child. Just for example – if a child learns a correct movement in a 1,000 strokes, an adult would need 4,000-5,000 strokes.
Not to be teaching a child the basic principle of swimming is missing a wonderful window of opportunity.
Children can be taught the complex Breaststroke style, but it is best to do so only after they have applied the most important principles in swimming – buoyancy and movement in the water. Therefore the most basic stroke of swimming – Crawl – is the one from which everyone should start their journey in the water.
