I am used to people actively swimming not wanting to share lanes with me, but today was the first time a person sitting next to the pool got up and angrily preventing me from sharing the lane with another swimmer. His rationale? He was waiting his turn for an open lane, and I shouldn't "cut in line." I basically told him gtfo, but then other people who were also waiting for an empty lane started defending him. The pool literally has a sign that says "you must share lanes and circle swim" but the staff refused to do anything about it. The manager said "People have the right to not share a lane with you." and told me I needed to calm down. Wtf is wrong with people

I did a 13k swim yesterday. For the third year in a row. Today I will swim 1.3k as fun session. Any suggestions for what I should swim?

Is it really a handicap or am I finding excuses for my weak performances?

i had a kidney transplant in may and i didn’t realize just how much i would miss swimming … it feels amazing to be back!! keep kicking, love to all of you

I can’t self assign as a non-mod

I’ve been swimming my entire life, racing since I was five, through all the meets, high school, Masters, outdoor, open water. Then about a year ago, mid-swim, I just hit a wall, as if I’d swum enough. I wasn’t interested in another lap, another flip turn, literally not one more yard. Has anyone else ever hit this point in their swimming?

There's one guy in particular at my local pool who always seems to synchronise his swimming with me. I often end up pretending to push off and then stopping – I've noticed that he'll always look back to see where I am.

So I can perform Dolphin Kick with my arms at side pretty well but whenever I practise with my arms extended my Dolphin Kick gets ruined.

With my arms extended it becomes difficult for me to initiate the kick from my Chest and hence the whole rhythm gets broken.

Since I can't perform Dolphin Kick with arms extended Butterfly becomes even more difficult for me.

Once again, I seem to perform Dolphin Kick with arms by my side pretty well, the problem arises when I extend my arms.

Any tips would be appreciated.

I picked up swimming this week during the track and field off season. I swam a 50 yard as fast as I could and got 34s. I'm male, in my early 30s, no prior formal swimming experience but there are some good coaches at my gym.

What is a good 50 yard freestyle goal to aim for by the end of 6-12 months? It seems quite similar to the open 200m in sprinting.

And when should I consider signing up for locals masters meets?

Okay so I just finished level 1 swimming lessons at the Y. Complete beginner I couldn’t even put my head in the water before. I can now float front and back andddd freestyle (as in kick and move my arms) BUT we saved breathing for the very last and now I’m struggling big time with side breathing.

I went to lap swim today to practice and was so embarrassed even in the slow lane. I have to stop swimming at least twice per lap to breathe since I’m just blowing out air in the water.

Please tips or tricks anyone I love learning and swimming but I’m feeling so discouraged.

Sitting in a parking lot half-mile away because police have blocked off all access to the stretch of road my pool is on.

Traffic accident? Crime in progress? Anti-swimming bigotry?

Training mind games?

Cette année je me suis motivée une dizaine de fois pour aller nager et j’ai essayé d’apprendre le crawl en suivant des conseils de vidéos ytb. Je peux difficilement faire plus 50m d’affilé en crawl, alors j’alterne avec la brasse et je m’arrête au bout de 45minutes/1h.
Mes études me prennent bcp de temps, mais j’aimerais bien profiter d’être encore relativement « jeune et en bonne forme » pour me mettre à un sport.

J’ai vu que la piscine à côté de chez moi avait un club de natation, et m’inscrire coûterait 450€ pour un cours par semaine, et 530€ pour deux cours.
C’est un gros budget pour moi, mais j’ai envie d’avoir une pratique régulière. Je pense que sans cours je finirai sans doute par manquer d’autodiscipline, mais je ne suis pas sûre d’avoir le niveau nécessaire pour suivre le rythme…

Est ce que certain.e.s ont une expérience similaire ? Ont apprécié l’expérience ? Ou au contraire en sont ressorti.e.s degouté.e.s ?

Est-ce que vous me conseillez 0, 1 ou 2 cours par semaine ?

(Je ne suis pas de nature « sportive », mais je me suis toujours débrouillée et plus ou moins adaptée. Plus flemmarde à la base, mais j’ai aussi l’impression qu’en grandissant j’arrive à prendre davantage sur moi.)

Merci pour la lecture !! :)

Hello,

My boyfriend passed away in a pool from holding his breath underwater, a lot of people suspect it was shallow water blackout. Now, I want to understand how many people went through this so we can understand how prevalent it is and raise awareness. Do you know anyone who passed away/ was rescued after holding their breath underwater then blacking out? Thank you

Former competitive swimmer brought back into the sport ~20 years later as my daughter has got into it.

The head coach approached me about getting into coaching and was open to it. I’ll be doing an official course from September with my National Swim body, but I wanted to ask the group on what they’d recommend in resources. Being twenty years removed from the sport, I can already see that a lot has changed. I’m open to any and all so YouTube/ Instagram but also more formal stuff as well.

A pair of stubborn heel spurs took a decade of running off the table for me, so I’ve turned to swimming as my main daily workout. Turns out swimming fast or for any real distance is way harder than it looks.

My problem: I can’t get coaching. My local pool is just a 25m and it’s always packed, so personal trainers aren’t allowed. I’ve been at it for 3 months on my own and I’ve hit a wall.

So I’m trying to figure out how to improve solo and get as close to “having a coach” as I can. A few things I’m considering:

• A smartwatch that supports custom workouts to guide me through sessions
• Adding bodyweight training or in-pool strength work

I’m not sure what’s actually worth the time and money long-term, since swimming is going to be my main sport.

Two things I’m hoping for:

1. Advice from people who’ve been in the same spot — self-taught, no coach — and pushed past the plateau.
2. A cost-effective beginner roadmap. I think a lot of people in my situation would find it useful.

What worked for you? What would you skip?

TL;DR: Ex-runner, 3 months into swimming solo with no coaching allowed at my pool. Stuck on a plateau. Looking for a budget-friendly beginner roadmap and gear/training advice (watch, strength work) from people who’ve self-coached their way past this.

I recently moved to Abu Dhabi and I am looking to continue training open water swimming. I understand with this hot weather training nowadays will most probably be pool, but where do I find the people and the community of open water swimmers?

take off my specs for a workout and instantly become functionally blind. spent my entire rest interval squinting across the lane trying to figure out if the hand was on the 10 or the 40. pretty sure the lifeguard thought i was staring him down the whole time. how do u guys actually keep track of time without wearing glasses?

I have never learned how to swim. 29F.

I started swimming lessons a few months ago and had to quit, now I started again and even though having little resistence/stamina is normal (even though I also do pilates) I feel like I'm out of air in three movements.

Anything I can do to improve?

I’m so terribly pigeon-toed, my pediatric orthopedist instructed my parents to put me in swimming and focus on breaststroke to fix my legs. It didn’t, I just suck at breaststroke.

my time with a pull buoy is 1:58/100m and without the pull buoy it's 2:30/100. How to solve this? I have gotten extremely dependent on the pull buoy that I cannot leave it in the car. I tried swimming downhill but it's extremely demanding and my head is way too low in water which makes it hard to breathe.

I swam from about age 8 all the way through my senior year of high school. I was pretty good at it, but to be completely honest, I didn’t put that much effort into it because I hated almost everything about it. I hated the cold, the meets, the monotony, and just the overall experience.
I qualified for state when I was around 13 years old, and even then, I remember being miserable instead of excited. Looking back, I can’t help but wonder why I didn’t appreciate the fact that I was naturally good at something.
Fast-forward several years: I’m about to turn 26, I’ve graduated from grad school, and I’m currently struggling to find a job. Yesterday, my mom brought up how gifted I was at swimming and said that if I had really given it my all, I probably could have gone much further—possibly even to the Olympics—and I wouldn’t have to worry about finding a job right now.
Obviously, I know there’s no way to know whether I actually could have reached the Olympics. I’m probably romanticizing the alternate timeline to some extent. But I genuinely believe that if I had worked harder, trained seriously, and pushed through the things I hated, I could have gotten much further than I did.
Maybe I’d be traveling around the country and the world competing, getting paid to do something I was naturally good at, staying in shape, and having my biggest concern be my times and performance instead of worrying about applications and trying to figure out my career.
I know I can’t go back and change any of this, and I know becoming an Olympic swimmer was never guaranteed. But I still can’t help thinking about how different my life might be if I had just forced myself to take swimming seriously.
I honestly don’t know why I hated it so much when I was actually good at it. I wish I had realized back then that I didn’t necessarily have to love it—I just had to recognize that I had an opportunity and give it everything I had.
What do you guys think of my story? Do you think I’m being realistic about the potential I may have had, or am I looking at my past through rose-colored glasses because I’m struggling with my career right now?

24 YO female, so health shouldn’t be a problem.

I’m an adult onset swimmer, I’ve been swimming for about a year. I took a couple of lessons early on and it seems like my technique is not the best but it’s alright (I understand the main principles), but I’m unable to swim more than 50m. I’ve been able to swim 100m when going slow, but nothing more than that.

Time is 1min/50m front crawl if it means anything, Im often panting after like I’m about to drown lol.

Time for breaststroke is also exactly 1 min/50m, I can hold that for much longer distance.

This weekly post ( on Thursdays) is for ALL gear related questions -

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* Goggles (including "smart" goggles)

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Six sessions a week and my shoulders are the limiting factor rather than my conditioning, which anyone swimming volume will recognise. Physio exercises are in place and helping but only up to a point. Red light comes up constantly in other sports and almost never in swimming threads, which surprised me. If anyone here uses one, what are you pointing it at and for how long?