Using a kitchen sink, dressing mirror, mattress, and a bath tub at home you can get familiar with all the basic swimming skills you’ll need to swim in a pool or lake. Always start in the shallow end where you can stand up for your safety until you can swim some distance and float well to rest if you become tired.
I reveal six new teaching methods and this one “transfer of identical elements” applies taking skills learned at home to the pool or lake.
Two other critical and new teaching methods I introduce are “sequential learning” and “mastery learning.” Your brain learns best in sequences of patterns. But don’t fall into the trap where you think you know how to do a simple skill because key parts can be lost in translation between what your body parts feel and brain processes to do correctly.
Better to do each small easy-to-master step in the sequence to be sure and build your confidence to master more steps to follow. In the long run this process makes it easier for your brain to learn an entire skill by mastery of small parts you will chain together.
There are 29 small steps to master at home. Then you can think about transferring those now familiar steps to the shallow end of the pool or lake where you can stand up.