Body Awareness and Swimming

Body awareness is important for us at all ages.  It helps us improve movement and coordination, which helps us in everyday tasks like walking, reaching for objects, and doing physical activities.   It is also important so we can avoid injury.

Development of body awareness begins in early infancy when babies start to move, turning and rolling over, which helps build their gross motor skills. Providing activities and space for gross motor development offers children space to practice coordinated movements, spatial awareness, and builds body awareness. As children develop more coordinated and complex large muscle movements, they can participate in variety of physical activities including sports.

Body awareness is critical when it comes to learning swim skills.  Increased awareness helps to improve coordination, balance and overall understanding of how our bodies interact within the aquatic environment.   Learning swim skills requires a high level of focus and concentration.  Learning how to move in water with control and purpose, learning buoyancy and breathing skills, stroke and treading skills require channeling your mind to master each skill.  The mind directs the body, until the body has done the activity a sufficient number of times to begin to create muscle memory, freeing up the brain to focus on a new skill.

 As swim lessons progress, we engage in repetitive and more coordinated body movements and breathing becomes synchronized with movement, we master the new skill. This is how swimming supports building strong body and spatial awareness in humans.   The benefits of learning swim skills, also carries over into our daily lives, by improving our concentration skills and the ability to stay focused in different situations.

Here is a link to some activities to do with younger children to help them to develop body awareness:

It is crucial for adults to engage children in activities that can help foster age-appropriate development. Some ideas that support development of gross motor skills in young children,  that are prerequisite for body awareness are: basic stretches –  reaching  hands up above head, reaching downward to touch the floor.  Kneeling and crawling with or without spatial barriers that require body alignment and movements in different directions. Hopping on one foot and alternating to the other, marching and jumping in place, skipping, twirling. As we help young children develop the skill to move in space and be aware of spatial barriers around them, we support their gross motor development and development of body awareness.

For adults, many report positive results by learning yoga which helps align breath and body movement. Others share that using a mirror and imitating movements or gestures is helpful.   Play games such as “Simon Says” with yourself in the mirror and give verbal instructions for the movements you want to make.

At Swim Strong, we use our warm up activities to not only build core muscle strength, but also to help raise body awareness in the aquatic environment. The more quickly a participant is able to master these skills, the more quickly we are able to move forward to teach the actual swim skills of stroke technique, breath control, treading, diving etc.

Jelena Starchevich, MSEd  is a Special Ed Teacher with over 20 years experience working with children from birth to age seven years, in both general and special education settings.  She is the proud parent to two amazing young people who both learned to swim at SSF and volunteers as an instructor with us.

Shawn Slevin is the Founder and E.D. of SSF with more than 50 years of aquatic knowledge and skill and a passion for safely embracing the water for all of the benefit and joy it provides,