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How to Flippin' Turn
One day you decide to go for a nice swim at the pool. You hop in, start swimming, and everything is going great until you reach the dreaded end of the pool; what do you do next?! Grab the wall and turn yourself around slowly like all your friends? OR are you going to take your swimming technique to the next level and impress everyone with a fast and flawless flip turn? Before, you would have chickened out. Now, the choice is yours.
Prerequisites: Ability to do basic freestyle, ability to do a somersault in the water, and the motivation to become a faster swimmer!
Alrighty, here we go!
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Signing UpStep 1An important thing to remember...
BEFORE YOU START:
The first thing to remember when doing these turns is that flip turns are “blind”. Don’t try to look ahead to where you’re going when swimming into the wall, and don’t look when you’re pushing off of the wall either. Just keep your head in line with your body and trust the other swimmers in your lane.
A note to the nervous: If you are uncomfortable with doing somersaults or just want some practice before swimming straight into a wall, you can practice the movements given in this tutorial without a wall. Take away the scary part of the turn until you learn how to comfortably somersault.
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To avoid water up the nose you can hum underwater rather than blow bubbles.
Blowing bubbles out of your nose and mouth will blow out all of youroxygen and cause you to need to pop up for a breath sooner (and if youare not used to flip turns, you will want to pop up too soon.)
Instead, take your last breath, then keep your lips closed and starthumming as you glide in for the turn.
Try it just standing in the pool first. Stand there, start humming, duckunderwater while continuing to hum, keep humming as you stand back up.You will notice bubbles coming out of your nose as you hum underwater,but you will not have blown out all of your air.
Then try it doing a somersault and then try it while doing the flip turn.
Yay, you can do a flip turn without water up the nose AND not run out of breath!
-Judy
I have managed to learn to swim - quite poorly, but then I am notgoing to enter any contests for sure :-) - and so am abit more comfortable around (and even UNDER water (where I nowswim my best) BUT, when I get gravitationally disoriented (flipping, or turning oddly) whether in water or out, I tendto gasp in breaths.....not exactly the best thing to do underwater :-)
Your advice though, sounds like it would work.....I will have tosomehow reference this, so that when it warms up again in my area,I can get to a pool and try it. Even if I am not able tolearn a flip turn, it should make be more comfortable withswimming across the top of the water (I have never learned to breath properly with that side to side movement of one's face,either). Thanks.
You are completely right about humming, I teach little kids duringswim lessons to hum & it works great, and if it works for littlekids it should work for us too! Plus, like you said, you only let out afew bubbles so you have plenty to keep you going until its time to swim again.
& Goodhart, that's great that you're continuing to swim even thoughit's left some scars in the past...that takes alot of guts! I woulddefinitly try the humming thing and just play around with flips whileswimming. I know its pretty awkward at first, and it will take somepractice (it took me a few months to be completely comfortable with flipturns) but I'm sure with time it will come! Good luck!
Hows THAT for professional?
all that water goes in my nose
This would help allot!
I'll be forwarding thisto several people who need flipturn help.