Learning to Swim Takes Time. Winter and Year-Round Lessons help children prepare for summer swim.

For a large majority of our city, and across the world, August is a time to prepare for children to head back to the classroom. But back-to-school time is about more than just pencils, markers, stationery and label makers—it’s also about making the switch from summer mode to fall/winter mode.

In Colorado, that often means we hang up our swim gear and wait for next summer, when pools re-open, and the sun begins to shine again. In reality, fall and winter is when we should be learning and growing, to prepare for the spring and summer swim season.

Learning to swim takes time.

winter and year-round Swim lessons will help your children build a upon their relationship with water.

When learning to swim, we don’t go from not being able to float to swimming laps. It’s more of a spectrum that’s composed of 3 main stages:

Gaining Water Confidence: Not everyone is comfortable in the water. It’s not unusual to be scared of getting into the pool for the first few weeks. A good instructor or coach will be able to guide your swimmer through this stage and instill the confidence to move to the next step.
Laying the Fundamentals: This is where your little one will learn the basic skills that can be transferred to any stroke. New swimmer's master how to float, how to control their body in the water, how to streamline, kicking on front and back, plus many more lifesaving skills.
Dialing in Technique: The final phase of learning to swim is learning swim technique. Swimmer's learn full strokes, breathing, and endurance in freestyle (front crawl), breaststroke, back crawl, and butterfly. Swimmer's also learn more advanced skills, such as turns and dives.

How long you’ll spend at different stages varies greatly based on several factors.

Factors Affecting How Long It Takes to Learn to Swim

Every swimmer’s journey is unique, here are 5 factors that can either speed up or slow down the learn-to-swim process:

Fear of Water: Acclimatizing, and overcoming fear of water can take time which lengthens the learning process. Overcoming fear is a process.
Consistency: Learning new things takes consistency. And swimming is no different. Keeping pool visits and lessons consistent will accelerate the learning process as skills compound on top of each other.
Frequency: The more lessons you have, the better you’ll get, and the faster you’ll learn. If you can take two lessons per week, naturally you’ll progress at a much faster rate than a new swimmer who is only taking one lesson a week.
Motor Skills: If you are a more athletic person, you’ll probably pick up swimming skills faster than somebody who is not as active.
Quality of Instruction: A great swimming instructor can help speed up the learning process through their experience, knowledge and teaching methods.

Drowning can happen in as little as 20 seconds. Consistent and Frequent Swim Lessons are important.

The CDC states that drowning is the #1 cause of unintentional, injury-related death among children ages 1-4, and this fact goes beyond seasonal constraints. Children are exposed to water on a daily basis, and the reality is that it takes as little as two inches of water and 20 seconds for a drowning to occur.

Continuation of swim lessons in winter and year-round will help your children build upon their relationship with water, giving them a healthy respect for it and establishing necessary boundaries for when they are in and around it.

We hope you have a wonderful school year, and we will see you in the pool real soon!