Is traditional swimming teaching harmful? - a conversation with Andrea Andrews

Andrea Andrews is a swimming instructor with a specialist research interest in drowning prevention.

Andrea describes herself like this...

"My aim is to improve the lived human experience in water by helping all ages make sense of the water through natural learner-led approaches that trigger the amazing hidden skills we are all born with.I am in effect focused upon panic prevention by helping everyone overcome emotional dysregulation in water....I am a scaffolder for an elite form of human aquatic prowes..."

Andrea joined me to discuss her unique approach to helping people learn to swim which is informed by the ecological approach. 

Andrea explains how her childhood experiences of play in water shaped her approach to teaching and instructing and how she has been passionate about offering similar experiences to others. In this episode we cover: 

- How people have an 'embodied trauma' that fuels a phobia of water. 
- How babies are actually very adapted to water. 
- How people sense differently in water and how verbal instructions lead to people using the wrong sensory apparatus.
- How traditional teaching could actually be dangerous and lead to increased risk of drowning.

and so much more...
This is an absolutely fascinating conversation - I hope you enjoy

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-talent-equation-podcast--2186775/support.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi everyone, Stewart here before we get into today's podcast,
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Sometimes that impact goes as far as family members and

(00:23):
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(00:43):
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Speaker 2 (01:56):
Welcome to the Townent Equation Podcast. If you are passionate
about helping young people to leash their potential and want
to find ways to do that better, then you've come
to the right place. The Talent Equation podcast seeks to
answer the important questions facing parents, coaches, and talent developers

(02:17):
as they try to help young people become the best
they can be. This is a series of unscripted, unpolished
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community who are prepared to share their knowledge, experiences and
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(02:38):
and don't forget to join the discussion at the Talent
Equation dot co dot uk. Enjoy the show.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
Likely to Welcome Andrea Andrews to the podcast. I'm going
to be going to be taking a deep dive if
you'll excuse the punt. Andrea, Welcome to the show. Thanks Stuart,
So we were just talking before I press record and
as usual. The danger is we'd have all the good
stuff done before the recording button is pressed. Wouldn't have

(03:22):
been the first time I've had a really great conversation
with somebody and not press record and thought, oh my god,
that would have made an amazing podcast. But I wonder
if you wouldn't mind just maybe starting off with your
backstory and tell me a little bit about yourself and
tell the listeners a bit about kind of the work
that you do and what you're up to.

Speaker 3 (03:42):
Okay, yes, Basically I started off as a swimming teacher,
and I got a bit interested in doing things a
bit differently because when I was a child. When I
was a child, I had an amazing experience. I think

(04:07):
I was about the age of twelve and my brother
was nine years old, and my parents always said to me,
you know, you've got to look after your brother when
you go swimming wherever you go. And I really took
that to heart massively, and we did a lot of
swimming in water bodies across Europe, mostly it was France.

(04:30):
My parents used to we used to get on the
ferry at the beginning of the summer holidays and then
come back basically dry out for the rest of the year.
But also I was brought up in Dorset as well,
and that is a stunning place for anything aquatic, you know,

(04:52):
it's got so much variety. And yeah, So going back
to this institut that I had. When I was twelve
years old, I was in a beautiful pool south of
France and my brother said to me, Andy, I really
I want to walk to the deep end, you know,

(05:14):
on the bottom, And I went, I can see that's
not going to work, but okay, we'll give it a go.
So he started. We started to have a go at it,
and it was really hard, obviously, because you float right up.
You can't stay on the bottom very easily and you
have to come up for air. But basically we got
to the deep end and we'd been having a good

(05:38):
laugh and then all of a sudden he came up
to me. He swam up to me, and he held
my hands and he pulled on my hands a little
bit and just got a little bit of air. We
were just hanging in the middle of the deep end.

(05:58):
And until that point i'd been because I've been looking
after him. I'd always had a little bit of a
knot in my stomach about being in deep water, and
it's really interesting. We were doing this what I call
sea sawing, so it's where he was pulling down on
my hands a little bit. I was getting a little

(06:18):
bit of air when I was doing the same, so
we were just and we were just smiling at each other.
It was the most amazing feeling, absolutely mind blowing because
you know, even now I can go back there just
to know what it feels like, and I could feel
like the sun on my head because it was really

(06:40):
hot on my head. And yeah, and that experience, I
now realized years later is what I've been chasing for
other people. And it's the sort of thing where you
can't just take someone from not being a a confident

(07:01):
swimmer to go and do that in the middle of
the deep end. That's not going to work. So it's
been a long trail of trying to work out how
to reach people to explain this sensation. And its important
because it's turned out that I was very shy as
a child. I was very mousey, very quiet person. And

(07:25):
then you know, as I went through my teenager I
found some leadership skills in there, which is you know,
it's from someone also who had had quite a lot
of fear of water when learning to swim, absolutely loved it.
Learned a little bit late round about. I think I
took my feet off the floor and I was about eight,

(07:48):
whereas everyone else was way off, you know, way off
the floor already. So there's a lot of factors in
there which are really interesting. I did a bit of
club swimming as well, but not for long because I
just didn't like the sensation of water being swept over

(08:10):
my face all the time, because I was quite asthmatic
as a kid as well. So then did lifeguarding. Loved
that that was brilliant. Did a little bit of swimming teaching,
and then what did I do? Ended up working not

(08:33):
in swimming, ended up doing a geology degree, so I've
got a sort of a heavy scientific background in geology
and hydro geology, grand water chemistry, that type of thing.
And as I was working as a soil engineer until

(08:53):
I have my kids and realized that actually that wasn't
going to be a very good Indie street to go
back to having two kids, so looked around, I thought
what shall I do? And then my daughter swam towards me,
you know, sort of spontaneously said mommy, I know what
I can do, and I thought, I want some of that.

(09:16):
That's that's where I'm going. So then qualified in two
thousand and three, two thousand and four for my main
swimming teaching qualifications and thought to myself, I'm not sure
about the way everyone's being asked to teach people to swim.

(09:40):
I'm not I did not feel good with it. I
see you smiling away there, Stuart, and I thought to myself,
you know what, I'm going to give this a go
on my own, you know. So I set up a
little swim school in Helly on Thames in a place
called and the Trinity Trainer Pool, which was really sweet.

(10:03):
It's like a little old building with a pool you
have to walk up into, you know. And that was
with mums and babies, toddlers, free schoolers and we had
an absolute ball. It was fantastic. I learned masses in there.

(10:24):
They taught me loads about how to reach them, you know,
how to help them become more aquatic as I call it.
And then I had to sell my business unfortunately, because
my husband wanted to go to America. Well, if I
couldn't sell it, I had to hand it over, which

(10:45):
is pretty devastating. And yeah, so when I was in America,
I didn't have a working visa, so I couldn't work
over there, but I met lots of people who were
into swimming, and I met a couple of teachers. One
was British, another was Texan, and we went. We decided

(11:08):
we'd go and do some training to help afraid adults
with a specialist course. It was all about fears and
how to overcome them, and that was with a woman
called Melon Dash based in Sarasota in Florida, and it
was fantastic. It was like a real justification for the

(11:34):
approaches I've been taking already in the pool. You know,
there was so much I've been doing instinctively and it
was a real sort of boost confidence boosts. Yeah, I
can do this. You know, it's justified because when you
hear afraid adults and how small things really impact them

(12:02):
and the sort of sorts of horrendous things that have
happened to them over the years that put them off,
and yeah, it's a real eye opener. In some ways,
I wish that every swimming teacher could go through what
I've been through, because they would really understand what not

(12:23):
to do, and you know, also how to support these people,
how to help them have just become more what's the word,
sort of yeah, confident in themselves that they're actually born
to swim, which I believe most people are. I can't

(12:46):
think of anyone who shouldn't be able to enjoy themselves
in the water really, especially after watching the Paralympics seeing
you know, my husband and I we watched somebody swim
super fast length and he had one arm and you know,

(13:09):
and that was just about it and my husband said,
oh my god, you can swim it faster than me.
It's just, you know, it's fantastic. So the definition of
swimming is a it's an interesting thing as well.

Speaker 1 (13:26):
So you did catch me. You did catch me smiling
because I knew this conversation was going to be really endourable.
And obviously you've touched on areas that I've definitely spoken about,
probably a bit ad nauseent on the podcast. But this

(13:46):
is the first time I think I've probably had a
conversation with someone from the aquatics world. That's not quite true,
actually there's been others, but that quite resonates and maps
onto my own experiences around aquatics. So along similar lines.
I was very fortunate that I in my younger day,

(14:09):
when I was younger, my father had a couple of
contracts abroad, one one in Africa and one in Polynesia.
Where you know, I'm at five years old and you know,
you're in the pool every day, You're at the beach
every day, You're in water every day, saying when I

(14:29):
was like eight, nine, ten, and nobody to us, nobody
you never had like you didn't know no such thing.
You know, you just got in a pool and went
for it. And again little brother Will we got into
subscripts and all that sort of stuff. But you know,

(14:50):
a kind of similar experience, the joy of exploring, you know,
the kind of the aquatic world. Some of it you
know obviously in a pool, but other times, you know,
with wildlife around you. You know, So very fortunate. But
as a result of that, my level of water confidence,

(15:12):
it's just was just sky high, like so much more
so than many of my peers who'd had formal swimming
lessons as part of the statutory requirement in this country.
You know, and you know, I'd be like doing all
sorts like for example, like you know, kids have kids
who like you know, still holding nose to jump in
and and can't roll over underwater without you know, getting

(15:36):
water in the nose and their eyes and this, that
and the other, and I'm like, that's so much fun.
You're missing out on so much of it anyway. So
without me waxing lyrical, that's your those experiences really mapped
one and so I'd love to know more about. Firstly,
the other thing that made me laugh as well was
you did, like so many people who have come on
this podcast, they do some formal education that you have

(15:59):
to do in order to be in inverted Commas qualified.
But then the reality is you find that what you've
learned in that educational thing really doesn't map on to
the kind of real world experiences that people looking for
and doesn't really serve them that well. So what you've

(16:24):
had to do is get your formal qualification, I kind
of disregard to a certain extent most of what you've learned,
apart from all the safety elements and all that sort
of stuff, and then essentially provide an alternative paradigm for
people who've got very very different needs. And that's partly
why I wax lyrical about the need for coach education

(16:44):
to modernize, but likewise, i'd just be interested to know
really about what you're How that felt really, because you know,
what you've basically said is I've got a qualification. And
then I really started learning. Like so many people say, yeah.

Speaker 3 (17:03):
Well what it was like. Well, when I was doing
the qualification, which I did with a wonderful lady, she
basically she started off by asking everyone to write down,
you know, when we smat down, she said, well, write
down why you're here. And that was a powerful exercise

(17:24):
because I looked around and I thought, oh god, there's
people from sports centers, you know, and I thought, oh,
there's some people who are clearly competitive swimming people. And
I was thinking, oh, you know, why am I here?
And I thought my stuff was about I just want
people to enjoy the water basically, and I want some

(17:48):
more of what I got with my daughters, which was
to help little kids get a joy from a really
young age. So when I then went off to do
my main you know, my main work, the place is
where I could work, it was all about there was
a gap there was the children were starting a lot later,

(18:14):
and they just a lot of them were really rigid
that the whole set up for the you know, for
the lessons, was really noisy. It was very jarring. It
was jarring for me. I couldn't hear very much, you know,
and if I had to stand on the side when

(18:34):
there's a lot of children in the water, I used
to absolutely hate that sensation of just being so separated
from them. But over the years I managed to I
decided to myself that really the environment didn't matter. It

(18:57):
became about how to meet them where they were. It
didn't matter what state they were in. Really my job
was to just sort of make sure that they felt
that they deserved to be there, they were going to
get something out of it, and I wasn't going to
push them. And that last bit is the key. That

(19:20):
I wasn't going to push them, and I sort of
ended up being a sort of I don't know what
you'd call it, like a shield to protect their learning
journey against everyone else. So it would be about if

(19:40):
the center that I was working at said, right, well,
you have to have eight people in there instead of six,
I'd say, no, hang on a minute, that's not going
to work. You know. It was stick up for them
and also stick up for them against their parents as well,
who would often if they were really nervous, and there
would often be a very either a very nervous quiet

(20:06):
adult watching or someone who's really on their case. And
that's hard. That's really hard because you know, they've hardly
got any clothes on, they're shoved out there with people
they don't know, and it's just you know, it's like, oh,
it just doesn't feel right. So yeah, to be able

(20:30):
to then go to one side and try my own
thing was amazing. That was really freeing. I thought it was.
It was an absolute joy to be able to help
people directly and do what I wanted to do and
experiment as well.

Speaker 2 (20:51):
You know.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
Then so then you The other thing I was struck
by was you then have he went on a training
course later on where you essentially felt validated for your
own ideas by the virtue of the fact that there
was somebody else out there articulating similar notions of how

(21:13):
people learn and all that sort of stuff.

Speaker 3 (21:16):
Yeah, absolutely, yeah, there was. It was fascinating because a
lot of the people were very who were learning as
adults afraid adults were a lot of them were very
high flying people, and it was fascinating to see how

(21:36):
that seemed to correlate with a lot of a lot
of aquatic trauma as well. And yeah, it was an
absolute joy to watch them change. There's nothing like it.
It was completely addictive. You know. It's because obviously you
can change people's lives with this thing, because it's about

(21:59):
amal regulation. Really, the whole swimming process is about being
able to build internal self control in an immersive environment
not always warm enough. You know, a lot of challenging
things happen, and a lot of surprising things if you've

(22:21):
never been in water for any length of time. It
is a major challenge for people and it changes them.
Once they've learned to swim, then they'll ring you or
send you a message and say, oh my god, I've
learnt to drive. I never thought I could do that,
Or I've learned the piano, or you wouldn't believe what

(22:43):
I've done. You know, I've been I've been to the
mal Deeves and I've done a bit of scuba diving.
It's yeah, transforms them. It's it's a brilliant thing.

Speaker 1 (22:56):
That notion of aquatic trauma, like you know, are these
people had traumatic experiences and that's what's fueled their fear.

Speaker 3 (23:04):
Yeah, yeah, most of them, although there are some people
who haven't had any traumatic experience themselves, but they've had
family members drown or you know, basically it's by proxy.
It's a secondary fear, and sometimes that can be even

(23:25):
worse than someone who has had a bad experience until
they actually get to the water and then you introduce
them to it at their pace, and then they are
fast learners because they realize that, you know, they haven't

(23:45):
they haven't built up any negative experiences which are retained
in the body. There's nothing's been embodied, so you know,
they really learn quite quickly, which is great as well,
obviously for them, because some of them will have been
doing things like not driving over a bridge, you know,

(24:10):
fifteen miles round, so that they don't have to go
over a bridge.

Speaker 1 (24:13):
They don't like that level of fear. Even going over
water was too traumatic.

Speaker 3 (24:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:20):
Wow, yeah, it's amazing. So you just said something that
really piqued my interests, this notion of embodied trauma. So
can you expand on that for me because I think
I know a bit about what you're talking about, but
I would love to know more.

Speaker 3 (24:40):
Yeah. Well, it's when we make connections in the brain
from an experience when you've not been able to make
meaning out of something because it's incomplete or not, you've
not been able to sense it properly. You've shut yourself

(25:02):
off and your conscious awareness has disappeared off somewhere. You've
got a gap. And that's what I mean by embodied trauma.
It's almost like a trapped energy in the cells of
the body and the muscles, and yeah, it's it takes

(25:22):
sometimes people a lot of time to actually untangle and
you know, it's it's almost like a there is a
physiological element to it, is what I'm trying to say,
not making a very good.

Speaker 1 (25:34):
Job of it.

Speaker 3 (25:37):
Yeah, so there's a lot of neural connections which need
to be a sort of softened, allowed to still be there,
but feel more neutral than they did in the past.
Because when you've had it aquatic trauma, a lot of
the time it never goes away. You remember it, but

(25:57):
it can become flat, can become neutral and no longer
affect you. You can just go, oh, yeah that happened.
I remember how affecting it was, but now it doesn't
affect me anymore.

Speaker 1 (26:14):
So that's really interesting because you know, as you know,
you know, one of the main I guess thrusts of
this podcast is exploring kind of you know, human advancement,
human performance, skill acquisition, but through the lens of you know,

(26:37):
kind of ecological psychology, which talks quite a bit about
the idea of embodiment in particular, you know, kind of
what they call embodied cognition. In this notion of how
you know, a lot of skill acquisition research assumes that

(26:57):
the kind of you know, the brain is a computer
and motor program theory, and you you know it basically
put instructions into the brain and that magically transforms into
you know, movement competence, and likewise, I imagine this sort
of you know, you hear this a lot with people
who've got you know, various forms of form not trauma, sorry,

(27:19):
various forms of like phobia, et cetera, or you know,
kind of fear that the the predominant method of trying
to help them deal with the you know, the fear
is through language, i e. Information into the brain. But
but from what you're telling me, this is something there's

(27:40):
a there's a kind of brain body disconnect, you know.
So on a rational level, this is someone who probably
you know, in a perfectly rational way would say, you know,
I kind of know, I know all that, but physically
something happens that's making me just like one of fall
to pieces. And anyway, I'm probably speaking far too much

(28:00):
and massively oversimplifying what we're talking about, But like so
I'm really fascinated by these notions of how you know,
the brain isn't the central governor, you know, always in
everything that we're doing. You know, there is what they
call an embodied brain if you like, you can call
it a brain or really a brain, but there is
a lot happening in the body sort of not necessarily

(28:25):
run by rational thought, but driven by emotion and other sensations.
And you clearly have firsthand experience of this.

Speaker 3 (28:36):
Yeah, absolutely, it's Yeah, when you talk about embodiment and
ecological learning, I think it's the most powerful thing that
we have. It's the biggest tool that we've got. Yeah,
it's the embodiment process in water. Is it starts from

(28:59):
you know, when you're in the womb basically, Yeah, so
you know, when the baby's born, a lot of them
can actually move in water, they can hold their breath,
there's all sorts of things going on there. They obviously
can't do anything on their own, to be left on
their own for any length of time. But there is

(29:23):
you know, it's so recent that they've been in water,
but really it's the closest thing. And also the way
that we sense in water is different because obviously sound
travels faster in water than it does in air. A
lot of the learning that children do is silent and

(29:48):
completely unconscious. It's just not so. You know, children that
learn faster tend to be death. A lot of deaf
children learn really quickly. Autistic children have an affinity with
water as well. So that tells you something straight away

(30:08):
that the verbal side of the brain is actually not
that helpful in more in learning to swim. And it's
the other side because I don't know whether you've heard
of doctor and McGilchrist's work where he talks about two
hemispheres of the brain in mammals. Well, almost any creature

(30:32):
with a brain has two hemispheres, and he says, well
why is that? And it is really about having two
forms of attention available to you. So if you imagine
he talks about a pigeon picking seed out of a

(30:53):
pile of grit, what it's doing there, It's using its
left hemisphere to identify what it wants to eat, and
it's picking it and eating it. So it's focused on something,
getting something, and then the other hemisphere is about rest
and digest It's also about look around you for wider dangers,

(31:19):
changes signals, mates young. So you can understand that when
we focus on using just your arms and legs, or
you're focusing on doing what someone else is instructing you
to do, you are you are only using your left hemisphere.

(31:43):
You're not using your right hemisphere, which is is drastic
when somebody is learning naturally and water that they are
using the right hemisphere more than the left. And it's
because it's about it's receiving generalized signals from the environment.

(32:05):
It's receiving waves of information that go through the body.
They don't just touch the outside, they resonate through the body.
And yeah, so being distracted with a lot of left
hemisphere stuff is no good. It's going to stop you

(32:27):
addressing what you need to know in the water, which
is how does this environment work? What will happen to
me if I do X, Y and Z, Where will
I get air from? There's all of these I mean,
you know yourself because because we learned so young to
sort of be so aquatic, it's easy for us to

(32:48):
accept to sort of almost a minute, how much we've
taken in.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
Yeah. Yeah, And it's interesting because I think you just
said something there that really hits the nail on my head.
I mean, I'm as an ecological dynamicist. If that's even
a word, I've decided to coin that word. Now I
might express that slightly differently, which is to say, when

(33:15):
you're receiving verbal instruction and you're carrying out that verbal instruction,
which is obviously you know, kind of like governed by
the brain, what that does is that you're using the
wrong sensory apparatus or you're desensitizing yourself from from the
sensory apparatus that you need to properly experience. So your

(33:41):
points are really good on So like my chilhood, your childhood,
because we didn't have anyone going you need to do
this and you need to do that. The only thing
we had was our you know, kind of touch, feel, hearing,
you know, and so you know, kynesthesia all these sorts

(34:02):
of notions right as you know, you can go through
a list of different senses that we have I'm making
I did make a list, wonder, but some slides and
I can't remember them all. There's twenty one apparently anyway.
But like you know, the sense of the sense of
touch on the skin is, it's got its own title.
Your point about temperature and what that does as well,

(34:25):
and all those sorts of things, All of those things
are you know I was. I can still think of
them now, I can feel those sensations. Now I can
like evoke them because they were like tremendously powerful and
that's where I was. That's exactly how our So for example,
you talk about depth, I remember exploring depth, you know,

(34:49):
so seeing how deep I could go, not just in
a pool, but like in the sea when it's getting
really quite deep. Can I get to the bottom to
get that shell? And what does it feel like if
I go to the bottom, because obviously there's pressure and
you can feel the sensation of pressure, and you're exploring
like where where's my tolerance levels and these sorts of things,

(35:12):
and what's it like to then get to the surface,
and how far can I go down? And how long
can I go down before I have to come back up?
You know, And that minor sense of panic when you
think that's a long way up and I haven't got
enough breath left. But so those exploratory actions that just
were like normal to me, and then you see kids

(35:36):
nowadays and that it took us a lot. We went
through about eight different from schools for my children now sorry,
about four actually before we found one that we felt
I felt anyway, was kind of where I wanted to be,
which was much more play based, right, so the kids
were playing in water and learning as they went, because

(35:57):
all I had up to that point was just doing lengths,
and it was just like what why? So yeah, I
was I think I was searching unconsciously. Maybe it wasn't
unconsciously or subconsciously. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was deliberate,
but something that equated to the kind of experiences that
I had.

Speaker 3 (36:18):
Yeah, yeah, I can resonate with that. And but also
when my children were I mean they were they were
pretty democratic before they even went to lessons anyway, but
when they were there, they were they were there to
learn strokes, but they weren't interested. And a lot of

(36:41):
the time I used to feel really sorry for my colleagues,
you know, because my especially my younger one, she was
always under the water. They'd turn around and go okay, everyone,
and then she she would emerge, and then she'd have
to explain it to her again, you know, to go
off and do something. And yeah, it's you try and

(37:06):
seek out what you know, don't you, and what's in
it sort of retained in your body, which is worrying
really when you consider that there's a lot of people
who a lot of adults who are very nervous of water,
so what they're actually seeking out is not going to

(37:27):
be helpful for their kids a lot of the time,
especially you know, if the if the dad has had
a lot of issues in water. I've seen it time
and time again. I think there's an epigenetic component to
this that you know, what the dad does experienced can

(37:50):
travel down to the kids. That's the way it feels.
And there's lots of you know, dispute about epigenetics and
whether it is a real thing, et cetera. But I
really feel that there is a component there. So yeah,
I mean, this is why I've spent you know, the
last sort of fifteen years trying to work out how

(38:12):
to explain to people what I've learned. You know, what
I know about how to sort of change things in
swimming lessons to try and make them more all about play,
all about problem solving, for fun exploring, and you know,

(38:35):
there's nothing wrong with a bit of stamina building by
you know, doing these things. Water is a challenging thing
for the body anyway, because it takes away heat. Even
if it's warm water, it still takes heat out and
the body instantly is concerned about where you're going to

(38:58):
get air from. When you're learning, it's about survival. And
that's why I find it odd in some ways that
the side, you know, the educative side of swimming instruction
seems to disregard the technical insights that people who have

(39:22):
deep water information to share tends to sort of get
filtered out all the time. It's not people aren't so
interested in it, perhaps because it's maybe that they feel
it will take too long for those things develop or
to be shared, or to be shared effectively and clearly.

(39:44):
And one of the reasons for that is because, I think,
is because that a lot of the learning that goes
on is silent and it's unconscious. So this is why
it's taking so long for people to actually even academics,
you know, who are working in drowning prevention sometimes can't

(40:05):
grasp some of the key concepts about it. And that
comes down to what is in their body, What have
they what have they experienced? If they're there because they've
experienced some negative experiences in deep water, and they're there

(40:26):
to make sure people have embodied skills in front of them,
or they think they have so they can tick it
off it makes them feel better, But actually what they
need to start to to explore is can they actually
embody some of those skills now, even in you know,
the age that they are. Doesn't matter how old you are,

(40:48):
you can still improve your own skills in water. And
you know the consequences of people assuming that they can swim,
They're being told that they can swim, you know, hundreds
of meters in a nice warm pool with nice clear,
crystal clear water. They end up outside somewhere and in

(41:10):
an aquatic environment and they realize that they need someone
to hold onto. They can't float very well, or they've
not spent enough time learning what happens when you float,
learning what your signature is, How much effort do I
need to put in? Where will I go if I can't?

(41:30):
You know, if I can't hold on for hours, what
will I do? It's just simple stuff, it's basic stuff,
but it gets missed all the time. So yeah, you.

Speaker 1 (41:45):
So I I have a hypothesis about some of this.
So you know, one of the things that I've challenged
decision makers, policy makers system build within the aquatics landscapes.

(42:06):
I'll challenged them on why swimming teaching largely and I'm
going to generalize obviously, but largely follows this model whereby
young people are taught the formal strokes as and that
is what swimming teaching looks like. Now A probably needless

(42:27):
to say, this is probably multifaceted, So it's probably a
societal expectation, probably follows something around government policy because it's
a statutory requirement, and therefore, what might the government ask for.
Maybe it's that, Maybe it's like you said, parental expectation,
because if they're paying for it, that's what they're paying for.

(42:48):
You know. Maybe it's also to do with the fact
that there's this misguided assumption that you know, ten thousand
hours and you know, you've got to start learning the
strokes if you're then going to be you know, a
kind of Olympic champion and this, that, and the other.
I'm pretty convinced by the way that the Olympic performance

(43:10):
world has influenced some of the thinking here about early
introductions to swimming being based around the formal strokes as
a mechanism to sort of start young people on a
talent journey. But by the way, if that was your motivation,
why would given how many different aquatic disciplines there are,

(43:32):
so diving, syncro, polo, and I'm probably forgetting a load
of others, why would you not, like, you know, introduce
all aspects of the aquatic disciplines in your learn to
swim programs. So, okay, learn some strokes, but learn to dive,

(43:56):
you know, learn to be comfortable underwater for and inverted
for you know, periods of time, a massive synchrome thing,
you know, from a polo perspective play, but also learn
to be able to swim and throw and everything else,
you know, So why not why wouldn't you introduce all

(44:18):
the aquatic disciplines? Why just the formal So I feel
as if you know that in all sports there's dominance,
isn't there? So you know, in athletics there's sprint, says,
get the dominant space, don't they You know, it's there's
a hierarchy, isn't there. You know, there's kind of track rows,

(44:41):
jumps might be the way around. I don't know, but
you know what I mean, Like, there's always a hierarchy,
isn't there. And I'm pretty certain that in the aquatics
world obviously, you know, kind of lane swimming is the
priority and then everything else is kind of a bit
of an added extra. But it's just it's a bit frustrating, though,
isn't it. Because when you were telling me about your
daughter once to be deep, I thought to myself, well,

(45:02):
if it was me, and I was thinking about it
from a talent lens synchrome brilliant in you come.

Speaker 3 (45:10):
Yeah, I mean the like you say that, the it
would be amazing if they did do that. And what
I do see, I mean I went to a recent
Swimming Teacher's Association conference up near Derby and then a
day later they announced there's a new curriculum going to

(45:32):
be introduced, a new syllabus which people can choose, you know,
swim schools can choose to use if they want to.
And inside that syllabus there's there's basically water rescue stuff,
So can you throw a rope, you know, can you
can you climb out at the deep end? It just
the basics of the RLSS rookies. Really, that qualification is

(45:59):
being sort of mailed it in, which I thought was
quite a good, good thing. The only worry that I
have about that is that we're still ignoring my end
of the stuff again, which is we need to engage
the right hemisphere. We need to stop trying to force

(46:20):
everyone to be doing the same thing at the same time,
when because they're not, they might not be ready. And
you know, that's what I'm about, is making sure that
people understand their own potential and get given a voice
as well, which obviously you know, for swimming instruction, historically

(46:45):
that's it's been where the swimming instructor knows everything, they're
the expert, and you do what you're told and you
do it when you're told, whereas really my stuff is
about saying, hang on a minute. Not everyone that is
in front of you is going to be capable or

(47:06):
ready to do it, and you're not going to know
either until they tell you sometime later. Unless you learn
to read the signs of how you know, there's signals
that people give off or they tell you or they

(47:26):
hop to the back of a queue. You know, it's
there's so many there's a whole world of information. When
you look at the world of aquatics, there's that. Really
there's two natural human forms of attention in watery circumstances.

(47:51):
One of them is left hemisphere shallow water engagement, moving
from one point to another for survival reasons, to get
out as fast as possible, to not be in the
environment really to not really engage with it deeply. And
then the other is about you know, you see little
kids wanting to get underneath and pick stuff up and

(48:14):
play and learn to engage with the environment to see
how it works, because it's part of their world and
they want to know how it works and what's under there,
what lives under there. It's the massive misstep, I think
to just shut that out, because one thing I have

(48:37):
noticed is that if people have not had a close
positive relationship of some kind with nature, you know, the
outside world, the natural outside world, then they can be
a major disadvantage for learning to swim, because they're basing

(48:58):
their sense of safety from what they're taught rather than
what they feel and what.

Speaker 1 (49:08):
It's all right.

Speaker 3 (49:10):
Yeah, yeah, So it's something that you know, people almost
have become sort of too domesticated in a way to
be able to engage sometimes with a piece of water safely.
And that obviously in my work as a drowning prevention

(49:31):
researcher and for the life same foundation, that is a
great concern to me. And I think that there's one
tool which we've been using which is great. It actually
it does in a way it comes from a natural

(49:51):
interest in competition and sort of what's the word, set
up up yourself a challenge, see if you can do it.
All of that side of us, it's a natural thing.
Children also when they're learning, they like to move a lot,
and they like to jump in, climb out, jump in,

(50:13):
climb out, and they learn dog paddle. It's their first
steps of how does it work? And then the other
engagement side is people all over the world, indigenous populations
learn to live by foraging in water, and they are

(50:35):
amazing what they do. It's just, you know, it's the
understanding and the sort of traditional technology that they have
embodied is it's quite staggering. So a lot of that
is just it's cut off from us, isn't it. We

(50:58):
don't get any access to it. So that's the idea
with this tool that I've developed, is to try and
show people that actually every human being really has access
to another tool, and that is about taking responsibility for
yourself in the water. And when you do that, what

(51:21):
tools have you got. You've got the right to say no,
I can't do that, I'm not doing that yet, I'll
do something a few steps down or a few steps back.
It's about giving people that agency and trust in their
own body as well, that the insights will come to

(51:44):
them if they play, if they calm down enough, if
they play enough, if they relax enough, then so much
intuitive stuff starts to flow up. And it's a that's
a very natural side as well. So and my aim

(52:05):
really is in the life staying foundation is this communication
between the people that don't get the you know, they
don't understand the deeper water stuff because they've never experienced it.
And you can understand why you wouldn't be interested in
it if you've never experienced it, and you know, and

(52:30):
then because the people who'd love to teach the deep
water slow slow, a way engaging with the water at
a pupil's own pace, so many times they don't get
any room, any access, you know, in the swimming pools
to teach the way they want to teach, So you

(52:51):
end up with a very skewed I call it a
terrestrial attitude to swimming swimming instructure.

Speaker 1 (53:00):
Soon, Yeah, yeah, I do, I do. I've got to
write that down.

Speaker 3 (53:13):
See.

Speaker 1 (53:14):
Now that's interesting though, isn't it, Because obviously I've noticed
quite a lot of swimming teachers do so from the side. Now,
I guess some of that's to do with heat, but
I noticed a lot of swimming teachers where wetsuit's assuming
I'm assuming that's for that purpose.

Speaker 3 (53:34):
But.

Speaker 1 (53:36):
The sense of like I, I'm not a swimming teacher,
but if I was, I would find it extremely difficult
to teach swimming from the side. I would feel as
if I trapped to be in the environment in proximity

(53:57):
in order to be able to attune to the information
I'm getting from the learners. And that's link to my methodology,
I suppose. But before I get onto that, you're really
pushing a lot of my buttons here, which is good.

(54:19):
So you talked about the learning tool, and I noticed
this as well when you sent it through to me.
You know, you call it, I am, I think are
you a friend? As a question? Am I am? I? Yeah.
So now what you're doing with that tool is and
you'll be aware of the campaign that I launched when

(54:41):
I was Sport England is now running, you know, which
is actually driven by this notion of young people having
much more of a voice, choice and to a certain extent,
a means by which to a kind of define their

(55:02):
own journey, their developmental journey. So everything you've spoken to
speaks to that notion of and it is called play
their way, you know. And you just said that the
right to use the word rights because it's based on rights,
you know, so the right to say no, you just said,
insights will come to them if they play enough, you know.

(55:27):
And I'm really really in your point. From a safety perspective,
I'm really concerned that and I've not fully grasped this,
but in the in the aquatics space, this framing of voice,
choice and journey and rights is actually critical from a

(55:50):
water safety perspective, from a drowning prevention perspective, because you
could argue, and maybe this is my bias, I'd be
interested in your view, but you could argue that the
approach we currently take to learning to swim is so
impoverished that it's dangerous or potentially dangerous. That might be

(56:14):
a big statement, but I'm interested in your view.

Speaker 3 (56:17):
Well, yeah, I have strong views on it obviously, Otherwise
I wouldn't have been doing this for fifteen years. And
I've you know, I've witnessed sad things going on next
to me with you know, colleagues that don't fully understand.

(56:39):
And you know, what is happening is that there's definitely
a new understanding about the science underneath all of this
that trauma informed practices is what it's called, basically, is
now is really starting to emerge in in aquatics, which

(57:04):
is wonderful. I'm absolutely delighted. What I will say though,
is that I see lots and lots of people who
are desperate to help, you know, with swimming, and they
come along with their point of view about what will help,

(57:24):
and they're misguided. But that's because of what they've embodied.
So that's what this tool is about as well. It's
about educating those people to help them understand that there's
now a lot of massive world of science behind all
of this and that if they're trying to do something

(57:48):
which is not appropriate for someone at their learning stage,
then it's something that they really do need to address.
They can't they can't just keep sweeping it a side
and saying, oh, it's too difficult for me to actually
address this. My expertise is just about, you know, teaching
people how to swim efficiently and swim faster, you know,

(58:14):
because and I feel I do feel sorry for some
people who've actually they've learned to swim with perhaps quite
a lot of fear in their body, so they've had
quite a lot of tension when they were I'm young,
and they've gone to lessons and someone has managed to
get them to learn to swim lengths, you know, to

(58:36):
perform strokes beautifully, and they get lyft in the water.
You know, that sensation of traveling through the water so
fast and so efficiently that you can feel yourself get
lyft in the water, that is that you get a
real high from that. And people have an people who

(58:57):
watch as well, you know, everyone loves you. I love
all of the aquatics races. I mean I love watching them.
They're amazing and you get a buzz from it from
you know, secondary buzz from them doing what they're doing
and this is why it dominates in my opinion, it's
why it dominates aquatics.

Speaker 1 (59:18):
Okay, I get it.

Speaker 3 (59:19):
Yeah, so if you've only ever had that sensation of
overcoming your fear, but some people can do it, it's
not many people who can do it, can overcome their
fear and just carry on swimming and get lift. Those
people are actually relying upon Also, they're relying upon external

(59:46):
forms of safety because a lot of the time they're
not very good. They're not very good at stopping and
resting in the water in deep water, so some of
them are really actually quite vulnerable in that regard. Okay,
So being able to move through the water and being
able to rest and stop in it are two different

(01:00:07):
skills and they require different approaches if you think about it.
Unless unless it's just an all mixed in like you
and I had, you know, we just generally blended in.
There was a bit of racing, bit of tag, but
of this bit of that. Sometimes feeling lift, sometimes just

(01:00:32):
laying they think, oh, I warm myself out, I'm enough
to rest now and feeling fine about it, not needing
to get out or touch the side or hang on
to anything, just relying on yourself. So Yeah, it's interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:00:50):
It's interesting. I've not really thought about that before, this
notion that learning to move efficiently and quickly in water
my actually be detrimental because you're then failing to understand
what it takes to just be in water. Because you're right. Actually,
I think about that myself a little bit. You know.
You it's it can actually be relatively easy to make

(01:01:17):
very very little movement in water and yet still be
in water safely. You know. I sometimes do that just
for fun, you know, like just just hang in water
but still breathe and but without having to tread or
anything like that has to use a lot of energy.
Just I do wonder how many people have actually tried that.

(01:01:40):
But equally, yeah, yeah, but equally you know that sense,
the sense you talk about of lift, and how kind
of exhilarating that is. You're right, I do get that well. Interestingly,
one of the reasons I've always loved being underwater is
it feels like flight. It's weightless business.

Speaker 3 (01:02:01):
Yeah it is. Yeah. I read a book about they
tried to measure awe and wonder in astronauts, and they
tried to you know, they try to give ordinary people
the same sensation just by being in a chair and
in a capsule looking out over say, you know where

(01:02:28):
the shuttles and things have gone into space, have had
all these amazing images and footage, and it was sort
of on a curved screen, so you felt it was
like an immersive experience. And yeah, I mean there's so
much overlap with that sort of research with astronauts, and

(01:02:48):
of course they do a lot of their work underwater,
you know, they train underwater in suits and everything. There
is so much overlap with the research base for all
of that stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:03:02):
So we've talked a bit about the tool that you've developed.
Now one of the things I really like about it.
I mean, firstly, you mentioned earlier on about this notion that,
you know, enabling individuals to define their learning experience based
on their comfort level and all that sort of stuff,

(01:03:25):
you know, which is an appeal I think to a
nonlinear approach. So the stuff you talked about with the
Swimming Teachers Association, I know them well, and the fact
that they're embedding things like water rescue again to be applauded,
but still using a linear model where everybody is assumed
to start at the same place and end at the
same place. So that is, you know, as does have

(01:03:47):
some flaws as a method of curriculum design or syllabus design.
And then, but what I like about what you've created
is so traditionally, curricular athlete curricula or syllabus usually is
a list of things that the athlete should be able

(01:04:08):
to do, and then the teacher or coach's role is
to ensure that they can, and then success is defined
about whether they can or they can't, which then creates
this world where the athlete has no agency because the
coach is on a mission based on how they're measured

(01:04:29):
on can you do X, Y and Z Yours is
entirely different because what it's doing is it's placing the
athlete and their experiences central too, how we would diagnose
whether an individual is having a learning experience. You are

(01:04:52):
drawing on the things that those individuals would say if
they were learning. And there's lots in there because you
talk about flow a bit as well, So can you
unpack it a bit more? I've probably not done that
quite justice.

Speaker 3 (01:05:12):
No, it's great, Honestly, I love hearing your stuff as well.
There's so much overlap and there's there's been lots of
good things happen over the years where someone has come
along and talked about the zones of proximal development, and

(01:05:33):
that type of model has been used, I think by
I think it was by Swim England that was introduced
some time ago. But I was thrilled at first and
I thought, oh, fantastic, this is going to really shake
things up. And then I heard him say, you need
to make them feel excited and you know, get it

(01:05:55):
doesn't matter if there's a little bit of anxiety, and
I thought, no, this is wrong. This is still leading
from the front. This is still not letting the person decide.
You know, my body is telling me that I'd like
to have a go at this and or have a

(01:06:17):
go at trying to lay on the bottom while the
teacher's talking. Can I get Can I sneak underneath? You
know all of this stuff, it's all about who is
in charge. It's all about how much do you trust
the individual to know when they're ready to do something,
or to know how much of it they can do.

(01:06:40):
There's there's so much that could change for the for
the you know, the positive side. Where it can look
it can look quite messy, It can look unstructured and
it's about having small enough groups so that you know
that sort of the appearance of unstructured activities being completely

(01:07:07):
safe because the person is at the center of them,
and that trust in that person is critical. If they're
never going to be trusted in a pool, in a
warm pool with clear water, how on earth are you
going to expect them to navigate being outside, you know,

(01:07:29):
at a beach where there's rip ties, where there's all
sorts of stuff going on, or in a lake or
a river. Each of those water bodies as well, are
completely different the way they move. There's so many different
rules differences, you know, to learn. That's one of the

(01:07:50):
things that occupies this the life saving foundation A lot
is about how to inform people about how different types
of water move. And if you've never even sort of
had a comfortable, a really comfortable relationship with the deep
end of a pool, then you know where are you

(01:08:11):
going to go? It's worrying. So in a way, it
would be better if around the age of I would
say ten to thirteen children were shown the deep end

(01:08:32):
of a pool and the shallow end and learn and
perfecting their flotation skills, perfecting their understanding of what happens
with their body in the water and how much difference
they need to make up. So some people, especially if
there's someone who's not very buoyant, usually male, you know,

(01:08:57):
there's no lungs in your legs, they drop down people.
That's another good thing that's been happening from the Life
Saving Foundation work. There was a big influence on the RNLI.
All of the organizations, the rls S, the RNI you know,

(01:09:20):
all turn up at the Life Saving Foundation conferences and
talk about how to improve their provision. And yeah, the
Float First campaign of the r nl I has been
really really positive and it's it's doing great things because

(01:09:41):
it's showing people how they're showing like a cutaway image
of so you see somebody floating in the water. They're
not floating flat at the surface like a starfish. They're
floating with their legs hanging down, and you know they
made need to move their hands and their feet a
little bit to themselves near the surface if they're rais thin.

(01:10:05):
All of this is powerful stuff because normally, you know,
you look at a swimming pool and people get this
impression of what a float is. It's like this rigid,
fixed starfish thing. And they've got no idea what's going
on under the water most of the time, and that's
where all the information is for me, I must say.

(01:10:27):
I with adults, I spend sort of probably seventy percent
of the time underwater looking at what's happening. With adults,
because the all of the tails, all of the signs
about how confident they are, how comfortable they are are
in the extremities in the hands and feet and you know,

(01:10:51):
the face, how they hold their abdomen, and you can't
see any of that from the side. It's just impossible.
It's almost like we need cutaway pools, you know, like
with a glass side, Yeah, so that you can see
you can see that someone's comfortable, you can read them properly.

Speaker 1 (01:11:15):
So do you teach with like a snorkel of masks
so that you can observe the movement under the water.

Speaker 3 (01:11:21):
No, I've got some beautiful they're almost like a mask.
It's a big frame goggle, you know. So, yeah, it's
got curved glass as well.

Speaker 1 (01:11:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:11:33):
So yeah, it's yeah, really decent goggles. Yeah. I mean,
obviously with children that becomes more difficult. But children are
different as well in that they they have a real
desire to move to learn in water, and that's absolutely fine.

(01:11:57):
My role then becomes snow eekally introducing things that slow
them right down so that they understart to feel and
understand how the water works when they're at rest, because
they need to know.

Speaker 1 (01:12:14):
What kind of things might you do there? Because I'm
interested sort of from a practical standpoint, what you might
do to sort of slow them down, the strengths you
might use.

Speaker 3 (01:12:24):
Oh, it's things like, okay, can you swim in slow motion?
I don't care what straight you're using? Going as slow?
Can you go slower than that? You know, we can
have another go at that. See what happens, What happens
if you do this? What happens if you do that.

(01:12:44):
One of the other things as well is using the
pool environment as a massive learning tool, like running around
the sides of the corners underwater. You know, obviously you
have to be on your side. Or Another one is
things like if you were about to do a push

(01:13:08):
and glide. You know you've built yourself up, You're like
a coiled spring. You're about to push off, and then
you notice out the corner of your eye that someone
is about to swim in your path. So what you're
going to do. Are you just going to carry on
and whack into them or are you going to stop?
So then they have to experiment and I say to them, oh,

(01:13:29):
can you keep your feet on the wall? How do
you keep your feet on the wall? What do you
have to do? And there's a myriad different ways of
keeping your feet on the wall in that scenario. You know,
another thing as well, which is really powerful, is how
to manipulate things with your feet in the deep end

(01:13:53):
in a stationary vertical position, vertical floating. So I'd say
put some bricks on the floor and say, all right,
can you build stonehenge with your feet? So that involves
going up and down in the water column. You're you're
changing where your balances, you're you know, you're picking up

(01:14:17):
an object that you would think would take it to
the bottom, but it doesn't because it's you're in water.
It doesn't work like that. Just because it's heavy on
land doesn't mean that it's not gonna you know that
it's going to take you to the bottom. It's there's
so much it's just a whole different world of exploration

(01:14:37):
that can go on.

Speaker 1 (01:14:40):
I love that, love that. Wow, my mind is blown
and I could talk all night. I've got to go
out coaching soon, so I can't, and I'm really gad
we go have this conversation. I'm loving what you're doing.
I do sense that there's a little bit of a

(01:15:02):
movement building in the aquatics world of more people who
are kind of mapping on to this way of thinking.
You know, I've had what four or five on the
show over the years, you know, kind of different alternative
practitioners who are kind of operating in the aquatics landscape
in a different way, with a different articulation, and you know,

(01:15:24):
and sometimes in the main it's largely been about the
you know, kind of like the performance end or the
talent development end. But this has very much been in
the kind of early stages of fundamental Yeah, yeah, exactly,
the experiential side. I can well imagine people are going
to want to get in touch. So what's the best

(01:15:46):
way for somebody to reach out to you?

Speaker 3 (01:15:49):
On my eight of z swim, there's a Facebook page.
It's a and then a number two Z.

Speaker 1 (01:15:57):
Swim A two S ed swim. Okay, so if they
look up a two S ed swim on Facebook, they
will find you and be able to get in touch. Ye, lovely,
it's been an absolute joy and a pleasure to chat
to you. I'm I'm loving it and hoping that the

(01:16:19):
more of the more, the stuff that you do is
starting to reach far and wide, and I will definitely
do my level best to ensure that your stuff is
sort of circulated. Have any of the people from the
Play their Way campaign been in touch? By the way, no,
I may well be making some introductions to Sweet Brilliant.

Speaker 3 (01:16:43):
Oh, thanks so much. It's been a joy.

Speaker 1 (01:16:47):
Thank you. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. It's not time to
go just yet. After the podcast recording finished, Andre remembered
that there was a few things that she'd forgotten to mention,
so she sent me through a separate audio file, which
I'll play for you now before closing out the show.

Speaker 3 (01:17:07):
So when I was first learning how to teach adults
instead of groups of children, a question kept rising up
around me, which was why do some people struggle to
learn to swim when we all have the same basic
body plan? And it was in a different form that
the same question David Attenborough asked me in twenty thirteen.

(01:17:29):
That was a conference on human evolution and it was
something like, why do some people struggle to rationally consider
that we may have had even a slightly more aquatic
phase in our evolutionary past. At the time, I couldn't
answer that question so that others could easily understand it,

(01:17:49):
But now I can. That's because I did lots of
multidisciplinary reading, scouring open sources for solid reasons, and exploring
ways to share what I'd learned effectively. I felt like
I was getting somewhere by doing presentations at research conferences
with a lifesaving foundation, but also writing articles in The

(01:18:13):
Swimming Times until twenty eighteen, when it sadly ceased publication.
So then go forward to twenty nineteen. I did Mike
Berman's course on water phobia and was so delighted to
see that scientific answers were finally being shared by him
for swimming teachers. Those answers come from outside of aquatics,

(01:18:37):
mostly in neuroscience, neuropsychiatry, bio robotics, all sorts of fields,
and I worked with Mike and the Institute of Aquaphobia
as it's now called, continuing to bring awareness of this
crucial science and to keep adding more information to it

(01:19:00):
as we learn things, and also to sort of accentuate
the even deeper water perspective that I value so much
because I feel that it really makes people far safer.
So Mike's aquaphobia course and his apps have opened up
more minds internationally, I think than almost any other endeavor

(01:19:22):
so far, and it's really wonderful to go into the
safe spaces it creates online to hear dedicated swimming teachers
talk about their deep, sort of seated wish to help
people who've been struggling and the problems they encounter when
trying to do so. Really so having a clear shared

(01:19:43):
understanding that humans usually can't have, that don't have access
to moving freely, and they're not able to help themselves
when they're afraid of being in water, and that information
is critical because really every swimming teacher should be aware
of it. That's why I've developed, you know, my visual

(01:20:05):
communication tool that's designed to be used by learners and teachers,
and it's why I work with as many people as
possible across the aquatics sphere to try and improve things
for everybody.

Speaker 2 (01:20:27):
Thanks for listening to the Talent Equation podcast. If you
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