Charke Swim

05/31/2026

Kick Kick Swim - The Cover
With all these stroke patterns I use, I decided to combine them to create the cover for the book on Swim Lessons I've been writing for years. This is an extremely primitive version of the cover.

I've got the s-pull in there, spiral swimming, the figure 8 from skulling and the 'draw the circle, cut the circle in half' for breaststroke and I'd like to figure out how to include bent-arm-recovery. The colors will need to be muted and everything will have to be better drawn but the idea is there.

05/30/2026

Sculling Hoola Hoop
There are two ways to scull. You can go back and forth, pushing your hands out, stopping, turning them over and bringing them back together. But drawing a figure 8, sideways, is more effecient. You don't stop.

I've been teaching this for a long time, but with a relatively low success rate. It's a really complicated arm motion. Well, I figured out a simple way to teach it with a hoola hoop.

Starting with 1 hoola hoop, you get the student to brush the inside edges downwards on one side, then brush the other side. There is a natural tendency to 'fill in the gaps' and perform the rest of the arm motions. By squeezing the hoola hoop from the top or sides, you can adjust how wide the motion is. Finally you can hold up two hoola hoops to get both arms going at the same time.

Linked is a good video. It teaches you WHAT to teach, but it doesn't teach HOW.

I've tried the hoola hoop with two students now, both under 10 years old and generally in an age I don't normally see learn this. They could do it perfectly with the hoop and then badly without the hoop, on their first try.

If you really want to get the hoola hoop right, you could add tape or some kind of marking to let the student know WHERE they brush against it. You might even include tape on the outside so they know that isn't where they brush.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKnIIaQJOzU&t=4s

05/28/2026

Patience, the 50/50 class.
I deal with a lot of kids and that type of human being isn't known for their patience. I continue to use a system for some students where I spend about 50% of the time playing games. I play a game, I teach a topic, game/topic/game/topic. I've had a lot of success with this when dealing with students who have difficulty concentrating. Kids have good and bad days and sometimes I'll shift the percentages a bit if I see that they are more, or less, focused. Now, almost all my games are designed to improve swimming. I think the suction cup toys aren't quite as productive a game but the kids love it so there is value in that. I could do that game in the deep end... Hmmm.

05/27/2026

I fuss over skills. It's been a long list now where I work on how to better teach a skill for several months until I come with something new. I'm working on the figure 8 pattern for sculling. This video nicely shows the technique but doesn't offer a good way to teach it.

I've tried many methods. Using a pair arms like a martial arts training dummy. Throwing a ball into the air and making your arm go around it and catching it before it lands. Wax on clockwise, wax off counterclockwise and then merge. I haven't found a technique that works yet. So I'll continue the hunt.

For breast stroke it was the kick. So many students have trouble with the kick. My solution was teaching the arms to "Cut the circle in half and draw the circle" and then teaching the feet to do the same thing. Other things I've obsessed over have been the S-pull, different ways to tread, kicking properly by flicking the toes, splashing, goggles, the butterfly arms, eggbeater, blowing bubbles, going underwater and now sculling (figure 8).

05/26/2026

The Nanaimo Location Opens
in 4 days!

05/19/2026

Using only the Muscles you Need
This was a topic I was trying to teach a student, and I got to thinking about it. I've thought about two ways to acheive this goal.

First, what is it? Swimming, being in deep water, can be panic inducing, especially for someone with a phobia or who isn't a strong swimmer yet. There is a tendency to tense up muscles you don't need to be using. Swimming uses different muscles than walking and running, another reason you may be tensing the wrong muscles - and even not-tensing the correct ones.

The idea is to only use the muscles you need. This reduces wasted energy. Further, you don't need to be kicking and paddling all the time without a break - another common habbit. Pausing between strokes and kicks, when done properly, can give you a bit of a break and use your momentum more efficiently than constantly propulsion. The ideal Front Crawl, for example, pauses after each arm stroke for about 1/4 to 1/2 of a second, to glide. The kick is continuous. One arm is straight forward and the other arm is straight back during this time. Breaststroke has the most pronounced glide phase and it is also uses to give you enough time to blow all your bubbles before you cycle another pull-breath-kick (glide).

Relaxation Method
With this method you relax before you swim. This can take years of training with Yoga, martial arts, meditation or mesage to learn how to make your muscles relax. I practice lying down, starting from one end of the body and working to the other making my muscles relax. Having done that for decades, I can quickly relax a lot of muscles you don't realize have tensed up. You relax when you aren't swimming so that when you start to swim, you only tense up the muscles you are using. When you get better at it, you relax while you are swimming. This isn't ideal for racing but if you are swimming long distance, it's practically a requirement.

Exhaustion Method
My Sensi Richard Clemas always said, "You do your best Judo when you are tired." He was right. When you are tired, really tired, at the point of collapse, you stop fighting yourself. You stop protecting yourself by tensing up muscles. You stop trying to swim constantly. You can reach this sureal place where your body is just doing something on autopilot and you're thoughts are kind of separate. You can do this with a lot of sports. It's when you do just what you need to do because you haven't got the energy to do anything else. Also, I think, this is when you switch to burning fat instead of sugar. It's an ugly feeling like you have no energy at all but somehow you still find more.

This isn't entirely safe, so don't do this alone and certainly not out on the ocean. You want a lifeguard watching you. It's a good idea you tell people what you are doing so they know the treatment in case you pass out. If you've done a lot of exercise you've probably hit this point before and have an idea of how far you can really push yourself. I accidently hit this point a few days ago swimming while dieting and it's why I'm writing about it now. If you are diabetic or otherwise have trouble with blood sugar, this is something to really avoid. Also, it doesn't need to be exhaustion. You can just swim until you are tired, and you will stop wasting as much energy.

Slow Down - Later Speed Up
When I tell a student to 'slow down' this is my goal. They are wasting energy and slowing down can get them back to their most efficient stroke. Once they get better at that, then we can speed back up. The trick is to go fast when you are moving, move the correct way and still take the breaks inbetween the movement. It takes years to learn because each step must be memorized and made into muscle memory because you can't learn 40-50 motions all at once. At best I might be able to teach 6 and wait for my student to drill them into long term memory, then I can do more.

05/08/2026

Learning can be Embarrassing

Sometimes the world reminds me that I've got lots to learn.
My signups dropped to almost zero.

I went mad trying things. I quatrupled my advertising, cleaned up the website, did SEO optimization and ran sales. I finally called tech support. Apparently I had to agree to some update from Wix, literally click a button that said "yes" or my website didn't work properly.

Hopefully that actually fixes it.

Контактная информация, товары и услуги компании "ООО "Дейтон""

05/08/2026

Finger Strokes

This was a happy accident where I had a student in a foam back support and she was reaching out and grabbing my fingers for more help. I alternated my fingers, something I do with a lot of my support to get the student used to not having support all the time. I saw that she was alternating hands as well and while it wasn't a perfect arm stroke, she was doing the arm stroke pattern, reaching for my fingers. Sometimes she reached for both fingers with her dominant hand, her right, but if I reached towards each hand a little bit I could better control which arm she was reaching with an encourage a front crawl style arm pattern.

This is the odd sort of drill that won't work for every student but everynow and then, you're going to run into a student that can benefit from it, especially kids who keep their arms in tight and are unwilling to reach forward as they move through the water.

(Thanks Raven!)

05/02/2026

The Arm

I can't stress how little a thing this is but a lot of little things add up to good instruction. I'm sure I've seen other instructors do this.

Basically I leave my arm, within reach, for students to grab, rather then grabbing them myself. It lets them decide when they've had enough and need help and I'm often surprised at students choosing to hold their breath longer and swim farther, rather than taking the help. I still have to watch, carefully, for the student who has forgotten, can't see the arm or otherwise doesn't know it's there and starts to get in trouble. But it lets the student decide how hard to push themselves.

On a practical level, the student knows far better than anyone else, how they are doing. They know their panic level, oxygen level and everything else that affects their decision to seek assistance or not. However... ...kids are also prone to poor decision making that does NOT improve duing their teen years and we can discuss the decision making abilities of adults (ug, I am one) - so always watch your students.

It's like goggles. I ask students to put their goggles on themselves because they will have to do it, possibly, dozens of times in a single lesson. Same with getting help to breathe. For some students that's many times in a single lesson.

My only concern is that I'm training the students to expect help to always be available immediately. Almost every activity you do has flaws, so it's just a matter of recognizing this ones. You can make up for it by pushing students harder in shallow water - asking them to swim on their own and offering no help. I tell them I won't be offering help - because they can stand if they need to but I tell/ask/beg them not to stand.

I got lucky and someone took a picture of me holding my arm out!

04/14/2026

Refillable Water Balloons - Revisited, Easier
Another face-get-wet tool, I don’t throw refillable water balloons but squeeze them. One problem I’ve been having, over and over, is that the younger students, the ones who benefit the most from the toy, don’t know how to fill it with water. I’ve been teaching a technique where you open the balloon, put it underwater, push it down, lift it up and close it underwater. These directions are too complicated for the youngest age groups. They are just too impatient, because their kids, and frequently lift the balloon up to close it, resulting in, at best, a half filled balloon.

A home school student accidentally showed me another way. Open the refillable water balloon and place it on top of the water. That’s all the student needs to do. No one is ever going to just leave it like that and all it takes is a tiny push and the toy snaps shut, and every single time it’s full. Further it’s never completely full of water, but has some air in it. This means it floats. So now it floats and the splashing game doesn’t have to stop because the student dropped the refillable water balloon and is hunting for it at the bottom of the pool or can’t get it. Instead, things just keep going, splashing, splashing, splashing.