Great news! Your child is now confidently paddling across the pool on their own… with no woggles, arm bands, or floats in sight. They are over the moon! You’re super proud. What an amazing achievement!
Fast forward a few weeks, or months, though, and you turn up to your swimming lesson. Your child is asked to put a floatation – or swimming – aid on. Why on earth are we doing this?!
A swimming aid is for life, not just for stage 1…
“Why is my child being asked to use a swimming aid?”
This is a very common question from parents. If you’re sat in one of our viewing areas, you might not be able to hear what our swimming instructors are saying to the children in the water. All you see is somebody strapping a SwimFin to your child… your child who can swim without one!
At SwimNE – and at many other swim schools – we use swimming aids throughout the learn to swim journey. As beginners, they offer children support in the water, and help them stay afloat. When they move into intermediate sessions, swimming aids can still be used to provide support. Here, the focus is less on keeping your child’s head above the water – we know they can do this on their own – and more about allowing them to focus on a particular skill or part of their swimming stroke.
Even when they are in advanced swimming classes, we still use floatation aids. These aids can isolate parts of your child’s body so that they can work on perfecting their leg kicks, or their arm movements, for example. It’s not even uncommon to see professional – even Olympic – swimmers reach for a woggle every now and then when they are training. After all, swimming aids do a lot more than just offer that initial support when your child is new to lessons.
A changing role
We’ve tried and tested various learn to swim aids over the last 14 years, and we select the best of the best for use in our swimming lessons. You’ll see loads of super cool SwimFins around the pool, lots of brightly coloured AquaPlanes, and more traditional ‘tools’ such as woggles and kickboards.
Each of these swimming aids offer a different type of support, and that support changes as children become bigger, more confident, and more competent in their swimming ability.
Changing the way we think
Think of woggles, fins, AquaPlanes, and so on less as floatation aids, and more as learn to swim tools – because that is exactly what they are.
You’ll notice that, as your child progresses, the way that we use these tools will change. Once they can swim on their own, we use woggles to help children improve their body position in the water – which is crucial to becoming a great swimmer. We use AquaPlanes as kick boards, providing stability when learning or perfecting new swimming skills. We bring out the pull buoys to help develop your child’s core strength, and provide extra buoyancy around the hips.
Just keep swimming
We know that it’s natural for parents to have questions throughout their child’s learn to swim journey – and we are always happy to help. So, if you are ever unsure about anything, or if you or your swimmer need a little extra reassurance or advice, get in touch with us.
If you head over to the customer zone on our website, you’ll find loads more information too – about what to expect in each stage of the learn to swim journey, the skills we are teaching, and more. You can also find details of what your child is working towards via your Doddle account.
Our focus is helping your child to become a confident and competent swimmer. In order for us to do this, we need to make sure that they have a strong technique behind them. We don’t want to just see them swim an additional ten metres, or pass the next stage in record time – we want to make sure that they can swim well – really well – and this does mean that we will bring back learn to swim tools now and then. We promise, there is method – and two Swim School of the Year awards – behind the madness, and we are doing what we are doing to help your child become an awesome swimmer.