The Point of Buoyancy
Everyone knows someone who learned how to swim the “old school” way: a tough-loving parent threw them into the pool and waited for them to thrash up to the surface and “figure it out.” Variations of this method are often cited in our lessons with adults as the source of their life-long fear of swimming. When the practice goes wrong, it goes really wrong. And yet, this childhood anecdote is just as often shared with a laugh and a shake of the head, because “well, I didn’t drown!”
The most challenging part of our job as swim coaches is finding the balance between lifting a swimmer up and letting a swimmer sink. Yes, you read that correctly.
Of course, no one is ever in danger in our lessons. Not only do we have a lifeguard watching carefully over us, but the majority of our coaches are lifeguard certified as well, and kids who aren’t safe in the water on their own are always in a private lesson. Our method isn’t “sink or swim – but sometimes it is, “sink…and then swim.”
Coach Adam has taught a lot of kids how to swim over the years, and he has developed a sixth sense for knowing when a swimmer needs to be scooped out of the water and when a swimmer is just about to “figure it out,” as long as they are given the opportunity.
He recently shared an anecdote about a swimmer who was what we call a “mover” – essentially a kinesthetic learner, someone who needs to feel and experience and find things out for themselves. Adam learned that over the summer, this swimmer had been “rescued” by the summer camp lifeguard after jumping into the deep end. After being pulled out of the water, the boy was confused. “Why did he get me?” he asked his mother; “Is it because I’m too short?”
Lifeguards are trained to jump in at the first sign of struggle, and of course, that’s what they should do. But Adam had taught him how to glide, kick, pull, roll, and float, and this swimmer wasn’t afraid. Had he been given another moment to struggle, he would have had time to feel the water. He would have started to swim.
Adam calls this the “point of buoyancy:” the moment where, after sinking a little bit, we can feel the resistance of the water as it pushes us back up. After all, getting to and staying at the bottom of a currentless pool is pretty hard. It’s floating that’s easy – as long as we’re calm. In a still pool, it’s not the water that sinks us; it’s our own imaginations, our fear and anxiety and hesitation, our panicked bodies’ instincts to thrash and flail or tense and freeze that send us to the bottom.
“Movers” like the swimmer in this story are fearless, even if a little uncoordinated. The kids that jump into the deep end without trepidation are the ones who are most likely to find a way to stay afloat. Sometimes, the process of discovery just happens to look like active drowning.
By no means are we encouraging lifeguards to shrug at kids who are flapping about in the water. Context and environment is key. We need to learn who someone is before we teach them how to swim. How do they feel when water gets on their face? Are they trembling and hesitant or wildly uninhibited? Can we distract them with a toy, or is there a hidden anxiety they need to talk their way through? There’s a reason that some people report being traumatized by their father flinging them into the lake one summer while others talk about it fondly. In the water as in life, we are all different people, and we all have different needs.
What we all have in common is that in order to learn and grow, we first need to struggle. We need to fall so we can get up, we need to sink so that we can float. As coaches, we learn how to pinpoint just the right moment to help your swimmer up. If we step in too late, their fear could grow – but if we step in too soon, their confidence never will.