Brief History of who I am
I previously worked for the police and retired in 2022. Previously, and in another lifetime, I was a National Finalist in Front-crawl and Butterfly. Once I retired from police, I wanted a job that was completely different to my last 30 years and one I felt I could do well in. I chose Swimming Teacher, or it chose me, due to my daughter being taught by PoolSchools.

The Importance of Swimming
Due to me going back to swimming I have now gone back to regularly training in the pool, 3 half hour sessions in the week. These sessions are enough to allow me to stay fit and to keep up my techniques up to date for my teaching. The benefit to this training is that it gives me more confidence when demonstrating skills to my students and just a total feeling of well-being within myself.
Swimming is an important life skill – since you could find yourself in a body of water through no fault of your own and if you cannot swim the incident could become very serious very quickly. Swimming is a low impact activity on your body to allow you to gain fitness, muscle tone and increase your overall confidence in your life in general. Also burns a lot of calories to aid weight loss, if you feel this is necessary!
I have found out over the years that swimming increases your flexibility, anti-aging and makes you smarter!
Flexibility: comes from your ability to stretch your stroke more each time as you swim more.
Anti-Aging: it has been proven, from medical studies, that regular swimming makes you biologically 20 years younger than your actual age.
Smarter – yes! This comes apparently from submerging your body in water, which increases blood flow to the brain which consequently makes the brain more active and giving you the capacity to learn more!

The Makings of a Good Swimming Teacher
Passionate and Patient – Swimming Teachers must be passionate for their subject, to share their zeal of swimming which is shown by their lessons being fun. Patience must be shown by teachers, the ability to be calm and their trust in the process and this allows swimmers to do the same. Being able to demonstrate and explain helps create a great atmosphere for learning.
Friendly and Encouraging – Teachers ability to understand that swimming lessons can be scary at first, presenting a happy friendly face to reassure the pupils will help.
The desire to learn a new skill in swimming can be hard, being able to encourage swimmers on a bad day and challenge them on a good day helps them progress on their swimming journey.
Organised and Knowledgeable – Swimming teachers have to be organised to fit all the best bits into each of the lessons they deliver, structuring their class to make sure all the teaching points are explained and all exercises practised before its time for fun! With swimming there is so much to learn and to perfect. A Swimming Teacher should learn to be skilled and knowledgeable at every stroke helping their swimmers gain a full understanding of how best to perform each stroke and skill.
Creative and Proactive – No Swimming Teacher should aim for a one fits all approach to their teaching and the Teacher should add variety through drills and games to keep learning to swim fun and engaging! Being inventive and creative helps the Teacher to achieve unique lessons! Planning ahead, noticing what needs correcting, analysing risk all needs to happen first – being proactive is vital for swimming teaching.
Multitalented and Adaptable – The best Swimming Teachers should have outside interests of sports, exercises, studies and experiences so that every individual contributes to the group so that all colleagues feel they are surrounded by a well-rounded team of people. All Teachers can learn from others so that our collective knowledge and talents allows us as teachers to evolve and our students to gain a varied and broad experience as we teach them. No two swimmers are the same and it is so important for a Swimming Teacher to understand and adapt how we teach to suit every individual. Different styles of learning require different methods and as a teacher we should reflect this in how we give our lessons.

Why I like being a swimming teacher
I feel very confident about the subject I teach, and I love seeing the results of my teaching by the way my pupils improve and become more confident in the water. I also enjoy given back to others and carrying the baton to the next generation of swimmers; like the teachers who taught me did so selflessly.

*This is an article by Jeremy, in his own words, a PoolSchools Swim Teacher.