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It works!

Customer Rating:

After several years of unpleasant struggle to learn to learn front crawl as an adult, this book has brought me the success that I have been looking for and much more besides. I work as a professional in ski teaching in the mountains in France and so I am very aware of many aspects of learning and teaching physical activity. 20 years in full time teaching has demonstrated to me that about 90% taught in any subject is guaranteed to be wrong information and that if a person is struggling and suffering then the fault is nearly always in the approach taken in either the learning or the coaching. Swimming seems to be the same as in skiing in that instinctive movements cause a great deal of trouble and only learned movements work properly. Shaw bases his approach on this principle by directly relating it to Alexander Technique - which is about awareness of the body. Swimming is also similar to skiing in that much is normally left down to natural selection. Awareness and understanding in both cases can circumvent this issue and bring amazing results with both adults and children - who would otherwise be sidelined. I was personally in the process of being sidelined as a swimmer and no friend or coach could really get me close to where I wanted to be. Shaw's book did the trick 100%. Suddenly I'm really enjoying my swimming. A kilometre of crawl isn't long enough or tiring when before I started the book 100m was my comfort zone limit. It's a whole new universe of excellent experiences being just given to you. I was already a competent swimmer in general and a qualified open water diver - but was always reduced to zero by the crawl. I can also see now how incredibly inefficient most of the other swimmers are around me. How they strain their necks and their shoulders. All this was invisible to me before reading the book. The feelings of gliding and how all the actions coordinate are just great. I never thought I'd discover that water could be so much enjoyment and that it could be related to in this way. I think there are very few swimmers at any level who would not get something out of this book. UPDATE 20 Nov 2008 I've been using this material for almost 6 month's now and I still stand by all that I wrote before. However to go further I bought "Swimming Faster" by Maglischo. Swimming Faster is a massive text book and it is packed full of really useful information. I have found this necessary to add to my understanding. Without the foundation built on Steven Shaw's book I would not be able to make use of the detailed technical information in "Swimming Faster". Swimming Faster gives essential additional information and I'm sure there is no other book on the market that comes close to it - but the difference is that it doesn't teach you how to swim when you are at a fearful or demoralizing stage - and Shaw's book really does. Once you have passed the difficult stage then I strongly recommend Swimming Faster.