Swimming Tip Tuesday: Backstroke Finger
Our Aqua Speed back crawl #TipTuesday of the week: Lead with your thumb as your arm comes out of the water.
On this week’s Swimming Tip Tuesday we’re going to discuss back crawl! Our focus is going to be on the positioning of our hands as they exit the water. A common beginner mistake is to have the hands lay flat as they exit and enter the water. Due to the resistance upon exiting the water, and impact when entering the water, keeping the hands flat (horizontal) can cause the swimmer pain. As well as create drag, which slows the swimmer down.
To eliminate the pain and increase our speed it is important to monitor and maintain how our hand exits and enters the water. The swimmer wants to lead with your thumb as your arm comes out of the water. The arm should be lifted out by the movement of the shoulders – not the other way round. By keeping the thumb up and pointed towards the ceiling we reduce the amount of water resistance upon exiting the water during our backward rotation of the arms.
Now as you may know, the shoulder can only rotate the arm backwards to a certain point with the thumb pointed towards the ceiling. As we re-enter the water the swimmer will face the palms outwards away from the body and let the pinky finger enter. Again, by doing this the swimmer minimizes resistance and drag by making the entry surface of the water smaller.
When we enter the water with a flat hand, the surface area the swimmer must push through is larger. Therefore the swimmer will need to work much harder against the force of the water. Swimming is all about efficiency and effective movement for our desired outcome. Which in the case of back crawl is to move quickly while maintaining our body position on our back. As you progress through the levels mastery of this stroke can take you to many competitions. Those who are the very best at this skill can compete for national and even olympic standing!
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See you again right here for another Swimming Tip Tuesday!
Swimming Tip Tuesday: Goggles
On this week’s Swimming Tip Tuesday we’re going to talk about swim equipment, specifically goggles!
It is important to be comfortable without them. However, as we progress goggles are a great piece of swim equipment to help enhance our swimming. How do goggles enhance our swimming? Firstly it will allow the swimmer to see clearly underwater. This is important for many different skills: from “bobs,” also known as submersion in our preschool levels, to surface dives and rescue drills in our swimmer and bronze levels.
It is also helpful during strokes performed on your front (or stomach). From breaststroke to butterfly, all strokes require the swimmer to swim in a straight line. Being able to focus our sight under the water at the wall ahead will allow the swimmer to travel forward without deviating into a wall or lane rope.
When choosing this piece of swim equipment you want to ensure that there is good suction around the eyes without the use of the strap. Press the goggles to the eyes and hold for about 5 seconds then release your hands. If the goggles are still stuck and suctioned around your eyes these are the pair for you.
Another thing to keep in mind when selecting a pair of goggles is the swimmer’s face shape. Everyone has a different face shape, some of us have bigger eyes than others, or our eyes are closer or further apart. Some of us need the lip of the goggle to sit differently over top the cheekbones. You want to pick the right goggle shape for your face. It is easy to pick up the pair everyone already owns. However that style might not be the best choice for the swimmer. Always try them on and get what works for your face shape. A great brand I like is called Aqua Sphere, as they have a variety of shapes, they suction well, and they are a bit softer around the eyes. For those of you who like to yank the straps very snug around your heads, these are kinder to your face.
Another helpful Swimming Tip Tuesday tip for you swimmers who wear glasses, prescription goggles exist! They are typically a negative prescription, and are the same prescription for both sides of the goggle. An example would be -5.00 or -3.50, they increase or decrease by half.
Well that’s it for this week’s Swimming Tip Tuesday! For more tips and tricks for success join us next week, or register and train with one of our brilliant swim coaches!
Happy Swimming!
Swimming Tip Tuesday: Backstroke Body Positioning
On this week’s Swimming Tip Tuesday we’re going to discuss backstroke and a unique aspect of our body positioning. Often you will hear your instructors refer to the streamline position. What 
this entails is that the body moves through the water with the least resistance. From the tip of the hands to the tip of the toes, the swimmer’s body lays flat as it glides across the water. Now, contrary to our understanding of the streamline body position, laying flat on the water does not require one to be perfectly horizontal to the water. As a matter of fact many strokes will cause the body to slope slightly.
When performing any stroke, the goal is to minimize drag. To do this the swimmer should avoid dramatic bending at the hips, neck, and knees. When we bend at the joint we create pockets for the water to get trapped in and push the body down. This ultimately slows the swimmer down.
When performing backstroke slight bending is necessary, due to the nature of the stroke. During backstroke the body will slope slightly from the hips to the toes. You’ll notice that this causes the head and arms to be slightly higher in the water than the legs and toes. By slightly sloping the body, and the slight difference in height between the hands, head and toes, the swimmer breaks streamline position less dramatically as they swing the arms to generate power.
Furthermore, with the hips slightly sloped down, we can now capitalize on the flutter kick. The legs will remain underneath the surface of the water, as to not break our streamline position and reduce the effects of drag.
By making this adjustment with our body position the swimmer can increase the speed and precision of the stroke.
Want to learn more? Sign up on our website with one of our brilliant swim instructors! We’ll see you next Swimming Tip Tuesday for another fun tip on how to perfect those strokes! Happy Swimming!
Tutor Thursday: Paraphrasing and Math
On this week’s Tutor Thursday we’re going to discuss math, specifically word problems. As many of you know, math can be a weak point for students. Word problems can be especially tricky. Not only does the student have to read and understand what the paragraph says, but also find out what information is going to be useful to help solve this problem. In the following article, our Academic Director Sofia demonstrates how she uses the power of paraphrasing to help our students with word problems!
Using Paraphrasing as a Tool to Solve Word Problems
Another mathematical discourse tool that I used in order to help the grade six students solve word problems was the paraphrasing activity that was described by 
Cathy Marks Krpan in a graduate course at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). Paraphrasing constitutes students explaining mathematical problems in their own words and without the use of quantities. Word-problem-paraphrasing allows students to focus on understanding the context first rather than trying to extract numbers from the question and aimlessly come up with a solution. To model the paraphrasing process I used question #10 from the students’ booklet:
A store has 11.2 kg of potatoes. Maria buys 572 g of potatoes from the store and Colin buys 1.42 kg of potatoes from the store. After these two purchases, how many grams of potatoes does the store have left? Show your work.
A student volunteered to model the process and paraphrased it as follows:
A store has potatoes. Maria and Colin come buy some. How many potatoes are left at the store?
This paraphrasing activity makes word problems look simple and easy to comprehend. Furthermore, paraphrasing can provide an opportunity to link students’ use of everyday language and mathematical terms. According to Kotsopoulos, for a lot of students the language that is used in mathematics is “like hearing a foreign language” (2007, p. 301). Findings showed that students were unable to understand mathematical terms due to teachers primarily speaking in the mathematical register, even when introducing new concepts (Kotsopoulos, 2007). Thus, these findings illustrate the importance of using paraphrasing activities in a mathematics classroom in order for all students to have access to comprehensible mathematical language, which allows them to move forward in their learning.
We hope that was helpful and we’ll be back to break down more with you on our next Tutor Thursday!
Swimming Fit Friday: Expanding Routines
Hello Everyone! On this week’s Swimming Fit Friday we’re going to continue our conversation around forming habits and also talk about expanding our exercise routine.
The KISS principle, also known as “Keep it simple, silly!” is our key component to making this work! It is easy to get discouraged when we add too much onto our plate. Though we have good intentions, our ability to stay committed can wain when we simply have too much. My dear readers, our magic number is 3!
I want you to pick 3 simple exercises! I assume some of you are showing skeptical faces, hold on I know what you’re thinking! What is a simple exercise,
Maintaining form is crucial.
walking, squats, bicep curls? A simple exercise is one you can do by yourself, and that you can perform with proper form. I highlight that it should be an exercise that you can perform with proper form, because most injuries come about from doing various moves wrong. Injuries are not welcome on our exercise expansion journey!
Have you picked your 3 exercises? EXCELLENT! Now that you’ve chosen your 3 exercises we’re going to factor in that we want to keep our intensity low to start off. If you remember when we were working towards forming the habit last time, we want to increase the intensity in increments. This is to help us maintain the challenge and keep us away from burn out.
Let’s look at different forms of measuring intensity for different activities and exercises:
- Walking or dancing – we can gauge that through the length of a song, or the pace at which we choose to move at.
- Lifting weights – can be measured in reps, or through the duration of a song like “Flower by: Moby.”
The idea is not to take on more than we can chew. Keep it super simple, and really easy. As we get into our groove, we can make adjustments and expand our repertoire of exercises as we go. Making use of our calendar method, mark off when you complete your routine for a week, making note of your intensity. Remember to change up the intensity to keep your routine effective!
Hope that helps give you a strong foundation to beginning the expansion of your exercise routine. Until our next Swimming Fit Friday!
Swimming Tip Tuesday: Breathing
On this week’s Swimming Tip Tuesday we’re going to be discussing the important of where to breathe when performing front crawl!
Now I know some of you are thinking, breathing, bah! How hard could this possibly be! However, fine tuning our strokes is not about making a skill more
The bow wave forming in front of a moving yacht. Swimmers form a similar bow wave during front crawl.
difficult. Actually, it’s quite the opposite. We change the way we do things to make the overall stroke easier on the swimmer. Working against the water is difficult, and in order to make it across the pool with ease, instructors like myself break down strokes so they can be mastered and performed well.
What many swimmers do, both new and experienced alike is that we create something called a bow wave. What on earth is a bow wave? A bow wave is the wave that forms at the bow of a ship when it moves through the water. As the bow wave spreads out, it defines the outer limits of a ship’s wake. Well, just like a ship’s bow wave, a bow wave is the shape the swimmer makes as they point the elbow up and as they reach forward during front crawl (check out the image below)!
As we create this shape, the swimmer does not need to lift the head or focus on dropping the shoulder. The creation of the shape includes the action of a slight shoulder roll and head tilt. This is important because it provides the swimmer with the perfect window to breathe. That window is the trough.
The bottom of your bow wave is the trough. Breathe into the trough for maximum efficiency.
A common mistake occurs when we are blissfully unaware of the bow wave. The swimmer trying to find a window to breathe will lift their head causing them to sink and put extra effort into returning back to the surface. This head lift as instead of tilt also causes the swimmer to over-rotate head and shoulder.
Both actions push the swimmer down into the water, making it harder to breathe, and harder to scale the length of the pool. Remembering to breathe into the trough (shape), will allow the swimmer to smoothly transition from exhaling to inhaling as they complete the stroke from one of the pool to the other.
Want to learn more? Sign up on our website for personalized training with one of our instructors. Hope to see you at Aqua Fun Academy, until stay tuned for our next Swimming Tip Tuesday!
Swimming Fit Friday: Forming Habits
On this week’s Swimming Fit Friday we are going to tackle a topic that will assist you in making exercise a regular routine in your life. Specifically, I want to discuss the concept of mastering how to form habits. With this skill mastered, we can help ourselves. Whereas in the past we may have struggled with starting 
and sticking with our exercise programs, with forming habits, we can maintain them as a regular routine.
A common mistake when people re-approach exercise is that they go too hard too fast. A key component of making this re-approach work is to “Keep it Simple Silly”, also known as the K.I.S.S principle. If you’ve stuck with me this far, you’re ready for these tips!
- Start in the morning;
- Set your alarm 1 hour earlier then you normally would;
- Do that for 7 days, just wake up one hour earlier;
- Check this activity off on your calendar.
Checking it off will demonstrate to you that you are serious about forming this habit. Once you have been able to do this for 7 days, schedule an exercise.
For example after walking up an hour early, you will schedule a five-minute walk. This activity may be easy, but remember we’re keeping it simple silly! Right now you are forming a habit, without burning yourself out! I would say to do this five-minute walk for a week, again checking it off as you complete this habit everyday.
Okay, okay, so we’ve walked…now what? For those of you who remember the F.I.T.T principle, we’re going to focus in on the letter “I”. We’re going to INCREASE THE INTENSITY!
How? Download a short podcast, playlist or 2-3 songs you enjoy, and walk for the duration of those songs. The first time, you may stop after one song, the second time you may stop after two songs. Along with your check mark, record how long far you got through your playlist. Before you know it you’ve started to build your own exercise habit.
Well, where do we go from here? For more on that, tune in next Swimming Fit Friday for our segment on expanding our exercise routine.
Swimming Tip Tuesday: Diving & Splash back
On this week’s Swimming Tip Tuesday, we’re going to discuss diving, the types of splashes that come from entering the water and why it’s important to maintain a streamlined body position when entering the water.
Think of your first entry into water, slipping into the water from a ledge is not always the most graceful action often resulting in some splash back. Which for
young ones, or those of us who prefer not to get our face wet can be an adverse experience. However it is one of the easiest ways to enter the water without creating an undesired amount of splash.
As we progress in our swimming abilities one will learn to jump into water, roll into water, and cannon ball into the water. All of these moves create a large amount of splash. Though at this point in our swimming lives, water in the face is the least of our problems. So why mention the splash back? It comes back to body positioning. Objects that are streamline cut and move with the water, creating a fairly uniform flow. However when an object disrupts the flow of water we create splash.
The greater the surface area the object takes up, the larger the disruption, and the greater the splash. Fun tip: if 
you want a larger radius of splash spread the body away from your core to hit a greater amount of water. If you want to create a splash with height, do a cannon ball, keeping the body tucked in.
When diving we want to cause the least amount of disruption to the water, by maintaining a tight body position. Hands pressed firmly together, legs held firmly together, and toes pointed back. We create a small area to enter the water reducing the amount of splash back. The better we maintain our body position, especially of our feet since those are the last part to enter the water, we can enter the water seamlessly.
This is important for the following reasons:
- Requires less effort to resurface;
- Easier to attain distance and depth;
- Competition judges at the national and Olympic level judge divers based on this tiny piece of criteria.
For more on diving, and other useful swimming tips, stay tuned for our next Swimming Tip Tuesday!
Swimming Fit Friday: Building Abdominals
On this week’s Swimming Fit Friday, we’re going to discuss how to develop abdominal strength, both in the water and on land. By strengthening our abdominal muscles, we can enhance our ability to perform strokes like butterfly.
As mentioned earlier on last week’s Swimming Tip Tuesday (link here), when a swimmer wants to really develop a strong dolphin kick, they start by engaging the abdominals. Push your chest downward, and engage the abdominals to push your hips up.
Below you will see some moves you can execute in the water to challenge your core strength.
Please note, exercises may be done with the assistance of a pool noodle or a buoyancy belt. Even advanced aqua fitness participants will use a pool noodle, floating dumbbells or belt to increase the number repetitions done per set. Furthermore not every body type will float with ease. I personally use the belt to assist with my buoyancy.
Exercise: Suntan – Superman
Focus: lower abdominals
Starting on ones back in “suntan” position: legs straight and arms sculling* at the side of the body. The swimmer will then tuck their knees towards the chest to make a ball. In this ball the swimmer will rotate forward so they are now on their stomach, extending the legs back and arms forward to resemble the hero superman. Once in superman position the swimmer will tuck the knees to chest again, rotating backwards so that the swimmer rolls back onto their back returning to suntan position. The swimmer should repeat the transition from suntan-superman-suntan, 3-5 times as a beginner in aqua fitness, 5-8 times if intermediate, and 10+ times if advanced.
However the ease with which a swimmer does this will depend on their comfort in the water, as well as starting abdominal strength. Those with less abdominal strength will initially roll onto their side, and have difficulty when transitioning. Like many things, this will get easier with practice. Regardless of skill level swimmers may scull through transition to help maintain rolling direction.
*Sculling is a figure eight motion done with cupped hands at the side of the body to keep one afloat.
Exercise: Pendulum
Focus: oblique and lower abdominals
With the use of the pool noodle or buoyancy belt or dumbbells, the swimmer will position themselves vertically in the water. Then, the swimmer will move the legs so they move horizontally up towards the top of the water. Afterwards, the swimmer should let the legs fall back so the body is vertical. The swimmer should do this to left to center, then right to centre, for a timed duration of 30 seconds.
As I mentioned above, the amount of repetitions will depend on how well conditioned the body is, as well as how comfortable one is in the water.
Swimming Fit Friday: With knees on the ground, and hands placed on the handles of the wheel, roll forwards elongating the body, and then engaging the abdominals pull the body back in.
Listed below are common land exercises:
Exercise: Sit-ups
Focus: upper abdominals
Exercise: Leg raises
Focus: lower abdominals
Exercise: Planking
Focus: entire core
Exercise: Rollouts
Focus: entire core
Well that’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
Swimming Tip Tuesday: Breaststroke & Slow Down
In this week’s Swimming Tip Tuesday let’s talk Breaststroke!
Maintain glide position until you feel deceleration.
Breaststroke is one of the more complex skills one can learn. To properly execute breaststroke, it requires the brain to coordinate multiple motor functions, as a result of its complexity. This promotes brain health, and strengthens neural pathways. To demonstrate the complexity of breaststroke, we will compare it to a stroke like front crawl. The legs involved in front crawl are a quick and repetitive motion, requiring minimal engagement from the lower leg. This simple motion is coupled with a more complex arm movement. This arm movement is where intermediate swimmers engage the majority of their focus.
In contrast, during breaststroke both arm and leg movements require high levels of focus, and coordination. For example, prior to the execution of the whip, the arms begin a sequence of two main movements. As the arms move into their third main movement, the execution of the whip is completed.
Swimming Tip Tuesday: An example of a swimmer entering the glide phase.
It is at this point that the body is in a full glide position. Many beginners have difficulty micromanaging these movements in proper succession. As a result, they never enter the glide phase. If the swimmer never enters the glide phase, they lose overall forward propulsion, and use too much energy to move a short distance. It is during the glide phase that we achieve our highest forward momentum.
A common beginner mistake is to put too many whips in succession without a proper glide phase. The reason this is not a desired movement is because the water acts as a vacuum and either leaves the swimmer in a relatively stationary position, or pulls them in the backward direction. If this continues, the swimmer’s body will eventually sink. This is due to the large break in streamlined body position, as well as swimmer fatigue. Swimmer fatigue often happens due to the lack of efficiency in a stroke, in this case by putting too many whips in succession.
For all these reasons it is important to enter the glide position and wait until the body starts to slow down or decelerate. It is at this point that we can generate a large amount of forward propulsion, without fighting water resistance. This water resistance is generated by the aftermath of our previous whip.
In conclusion:
- Whip one time, and one time only!
- Enter the glide phase, and;
- Hold glide ‘till Slow!
Until next week’s Swimming Tip Tuesday!
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