Customer Reviews

It works! - By: Fiddler, 30 Jun 2008
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 & much more besides.

I work as a professionalin ski teachingin the mountainsin France & so I am very aware of many aspects of learning & teaching physical activity. 20 yearsin full time teaching has demonstrated to me that about 90% taughtin any subject is guaranteed to be wrong information & that if a person is struggling & suffering then the fault is nearly alwaysin the approach takenin either the learning or the coaching.

Swimming seems to be the same asin skiingin that instinctive movements cause a great deal of trouble & 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 skiingin that much is normally left down to natural selection. Awareness & understandingin both cases can circumvent this issue & bring amazing results with both adults & children - who would otherwise be sidelined. I was personallyin the process of being sidelined as a swimmer & 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 swimmerin general & 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 & their shoulders. All this was invisible to me before reading the book. The feelings of gliding & how all the actions coordinate are just great. I never thought I'd discover that water could be so much enjoyment & that it could be related toin 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 & 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 & 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 informationin "Swimming Faster". Swimming Faster gives essential additional information & 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 - & Shaw's book really does. Once you have passed the difficult stage then I strongly recommend Swimming Faster.