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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

I have been interested in swimming for a few years but never found the place to develop the skill to the point of not drowning.

I could try to swim in my apartment's tiny shallow pool which is really better for children.

I could spend $200/mo at a nearby health club.

I could drive to the ocean and jump in.

The first just isn't big enough or deep enough to get anything done.

The second is ... well I want to go swimming but not that bad.

If I just jumped in the ocean, especially the Pacific around the bay area, I would just expect to drown. I can swim a bit but not enough to have confidence with the ocean.

What else can I do?

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I'm going to preface this by mentioning that I swam competitively starting at around age 6 through high school, was both a life guard and swim instructor at UCSF's rec center during high school, tend to be an overly cautious person, have had to pull a lifeless body from the ocean before, and have witnessed too many near drownings to count.

With that out of the way, does anyone else think its a really bad idea to advise someone who in their own words is trying to develop their swimming skill to the "point of not drowning", to simply find some seemingly calm piece of open water and have at it? I think this is terrible advice. If you aren't comfortable in the water you shouldn't be going into any natural body of water unsupervised, no matter how calm it may appear.

I no longer live in the BA but you should be able to find a YMCA, community swimming pool, or your local community college, that will have adult swim classes for beginners at a very reasonable cost. A couple weeks of classes and you should be comfortable enough to where you most likely won't drown, keep in mind even excellent swimmers drown on occasion.

Once you have the basics down you can join a local Masters club if you want to get more serious. Please don't go practice at Ocean beach.

Here's a learning process you can do on your own at your local pool, lake or ocean. The problem with learning to swim is that there are perhaps a half a dozen independent motor skills needed and it's hard to learn them all at once. This breaks it down to one skill at a time. Do all of this is shallow water, say, four feet in depth.

1) buy a mask, fins and snorkel set.

2) throw way the snorkel (not really, store it away for much later)

3) start with a kick board and fins. Do an hour of just kicking with the fins on. Now you've learned the kicking motor skill.

4) Next put on your mask (defog it with your spit, youtube will show you how, yuckky I know but necessary) and now, with fins on, start kicking, as usual, but also start stroking with your arms. Don't bother trying to breath yet, just stand up when you need to breath. Do this for an hour.

5) Repeat 4 above but now try to breath on your dominate side (right side if you're right handed, other side if you're not). It's tricky to learn how to breathe without coughing, definitely practice this for an hour.

6) Take off your fins and repeat step 5. It will feel really weird without the extra power of the fins but your arm strokes should pull you thru.

7) Perhaps the ugliest part. Take of your mask and repeat step 6. Learning to manage the discomfort of having your face in the water does take some effort, but at least you've saved the hardest for the last. Keeping water out of your nose requires a continuous but very low pressure exhaling thru your nose when it's underwater. Your eyes will sting when you open them underwater so only do that for short glances to get your bearings.

8) Repeat step 7 for 32 lengths and bingo! You're a swimmer.

Not sure about learning to swim with fins. Haven't used them for ages, but from what I remember, you just cannot move your hands fast enough to match the speed you can get with fins. What I used to as a teen just be on my back and go full-speed.

There are natural (and man-made) bodies of water that are inexpensive to access and don't have the problems of the ocean, like natural and artificial lakes.

There are, for that matter, public pools that are cheaper than health club pools.

If you can find one-on-one swimming lessons where the instructor has access to a pool already, I think that would suit your aims quite well.

Most reasonably fit adults can get to the point of "not drowning" in still water in a single half hour lesson. Two tops. Learn to float, tread, then swim, then jump in and transition to swimming.

I did this once with a 60 year old woman who was initially quite scared, and I hadn't taught in years before this so I was certainly not as good as any paid teacher.

I used to live in NYC and there is an amazing network of public pools that were very inexpensive ($25/6 months I think). I’d bet most major cities have something similar. Definitely worth a search.

What about other bodies of water than the ocean? Like lakes or somerhing. Mostly still water.

Or where I live, they have put swimming lanes in the ocean. Like a dock that extends out on two places, and with lane separators in between. Free and safe.

But what I did was to just pay for a swimming course over X weeks. That included entrance to the swimming facilities on the course days. Find one for your level, and the progress will be swift.

Have you considered taking swimming lessons? You'd probably still have to pay for them, but it wouldn't be a monthly subscription and swim classes are (usually) designed to teach you how to swim without drowning.

In general, if you want to learn how to do something, there are probably people willing to teach you. You don't have to figure everything out from first principles.

After you've gotten some swimming lessons (check out the books and technique made by Terry Laughlin - swimming made easy might be a good start), then find an open water swimming club that takes on beginners (try meetup or facebook). Might not be for you, but you also might not know until you've tried it.

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