Alarm bells start to ring in the heads of adult swimmers as the time approaches for their lesson to begin: just like all good students they have the very best of intentions as they prepare for their toughest class: swimming.
The conventional way of splitting a class into beginners, intermediates and advanced, which definitely helps the instructor come up with just the right programme, actually covers a whole range of sub-groups. In the case of a beginners group for example, a different teaching approach will be adopted for an adult who is terrified of entering the water and another who feels quite at home and is secretly wondering “Why didn’t I do this earlier?”. The initial contact with the water is vitally important; the instructor, under the guise of Cupid, must make sure it is love at first “splash” for the novice swimmer. Attending class regularly really is the key ingredient for beginners!
The intermediate group is, without a shadow of a doubt, the trickiest in swim class; more often than not it will include both adults who are desperate to move up to the next level and those who, by their very nature, are “always intermediates”. The excitement at striving to reach the advanced level (and hence the risk of getting carried away and…
