The words we use are important. They carry a lot of baggage though. Your awareness of your words must be thorough because some words mean a different thing than what you think they do.
Try the word ‘kick’. If I told a toddler to kick a pillow, I imagine every one would wind up and kick the pillow just like they would kick a ball. So if you tell any age of person, to kick, they would wind up and boot it. Many new swimmers struggle to use their legs correctly.
In swimming we call the leg movement of frontcrawl a kick. This is wrong. We don’t kick, what we do is very different to kicking.
If you’ve been in a hot country and used a fan to swish air at yourself to cool down you’ll know that it can only be done one way to get the swish. The fan can’t be pushed towards you like a fork and can’t be pushed through the air all at once. What you do is fan in a curved sweep.
Fanning is a slightly odd thing to describe but not hard to do by watching…and then trying. Using a fan is easily learnt. Once you feel the air swishing against your skin you know how to do it.
In swimming what you do with your legs is swish the water away from you to push you in the opposite direction. You fan your legs. you don’t kick them. You swish the water just like you swish a fan. With that as an image teaching the leg movement becomes much quicker to learn.
Your arm action is referred to as a pull. If you have a tug-of-war with someone using a rope; then you are pulling. With your hands gripping the rope, you pull back leading with your elbows.
If you pulled in the water you would go no where. To correctly use your arms you need to use your hands and forearms as a paddle and press the water. After you reach the half point under your shoulders you then push. Pulling is not the same as pressing and pushing.
If you are a person introducing something new, be aware of using words that can have other interpretations. A kick is not what you want in water and a pull isn’t either. Oddly that is the words that are commonly used because we are predominantly land-based.
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