Kids Swim Lessons

Learning to swim hasn’t changed that much in the last 2,000 years. The key is managing natural human emotions and developing a rapport with the water. The Jim Gorman process focuses on this rapport from Day One. You just can’t become a natural swimmer until the water feels like a natural environment for you. So that children don’t feel rushed to feel natural, we offer a simple progression:

1. Happy in the Water

Our experienced instructors start by acclimating students in the wading pool, or even the shallow end – it all starts where students feel comfortable. Once kids feel comfortable in the water, it’s not long until they’re smiling and whooping, and that joy is our first goal. We help students get over that first fear. This can be even more daunting for beginning adult swimmers, because adults are taught not to show any fear, so we help adults open up about their fears and then overcome them.

2. Putting Your Face in the Water

If you want to learn to swim, you’re going to have to learn how to keep water out of your mouth and nose when your head is under water. This isn’t a natural skill for most of us, so there’s nothing wrong with struggling with this at first. This is a crucial step, and our instructors will work patiently to make sure that all students learn it before moving on.

3. Floating and Buoyancy

Once you’re fine with your face in the water, you’re ready to learn about how your body interacts with the water. The physics of body and water can be complicated, but Jim Gorman instructors use our own exercises to help students discover natural buoyancy, one step at a time. Once you pass through this phase, you’ll know that, if your lungs are full of air, you can float on the water.

For many of our students (and teachers) this is one of the most fun and rewarding stages. Students get a real euphoria from realizing that, in the water, they can be weightless and do things that aren’t possible on land.

4. Propulsion

Once you can float, you’re ready to position yourself in the water and start to move around. Many strong swimmers who come to our program have to rebuild their foundation, because they are vertical swimmers and use way too much energy fighting the water. Most of them hold their heads too high, keeping their body from being streamlined. At the Jim Gorman Swim School, we teach proper alignment from the very beginning. If your body is in the correct position, you’ll swim much more efficiently.

5. Learning to Breathe

While we can’t install gills in our students, we do teach them the best way to pick up their head to get air. In the beginning, we call this backfloating. Once they calm down and realize that they’re not going to suffocate, we teach them how to breathe to the side.

Once our students have learned to breathe, then (and only then) do we start teaching stroke techniques, so that our students learn to use the water to propel themselves with optimal levels of effort.