Your level
From your first face-in-the-water breath to your fastest lap, in the order a coach would teach it, with the chapter that matters most kept for last. Pick your level and the whole site changes what it shows you.
Your level, and the site follows
Everything on this page happens somewhere in this pool. Scroll and you go under with it.
Face in, hum it out. The first thing water teaches is to stop holding your breath.
The swimmer above you is doing the stroke you pick in Technique, at your pace.
Follow the line. Sets, pace and the clock live down here.
Move over the water to make ripples
keep going
Every good swimmer started exactly here. Learn to breathe out, float, kick and glide, in this order, and the water starts doing half the work for you. Strokes become the easy part.
Breathing out steadily is what makes the water feel calm. Exhale slowly through your nose and mouth the whole time your face is in, so that when you turn to the side there is only a quick sip to take, not a gasp. Practise standing in the shallow end: face in, hum out, turn, sip, repeat, until it is boring.
You float when your lungs are full and your body is long. Lie back, put both ears in the water, look straight up and push your belly to the surface. If your feet sink, your chin is too far down or you are breathing out and holding empty: breathe in a little deeper than usual and let the water hold you.
A good flutter kick is small and fast and starts at the hip with a nearly straight leg and a floppy ankle. Bent knees and a big splash feel like effort but move you nowhere. Hold the wall or a kickboard, keep your face in (bubbles!), and count sixty small kicks before you need to stop.
Streamline is the fastest shape you will ever make: one hand over the other, arms squeezing your ears, chin tucked, toes pointed. Push off the wall and do nothing. A clean glide carries you five metres before a single kick. Every stroke, every turn, every race starts from this shape.
For you, beginner
Standing depth, always with someone, ideally a coach. Do not move to the next session until the current one feels easy.
For you, intermediate
For you, advanced
Pick a stroke. The diagram shows the shape, and the panel below gives you the one thing to work on at your level, with a drill that makes it click.
Beginner focus
A low head keeps the hips up, so the legs float behind you. Drill: kick on your side, bottom arm extended, ear on the shoulder, and breathe without turning the whole body. Then catch-up: one arm waits in front until the other touches it, which forces the roll to the side.
Intermediate focus
A bent, high elbow grips more water, and rolling the hips adds free power. Drill: fingertip drag (trail fingers along the surface on recovery) to teach a high elbow, and 6-kick switch (six kicks on one side, one stroke, six on the other) to make rotation a habit. Breathe every three.
Advanced focus
Count strokes per 25m at easy pace, then at race pace. If the count climbs by more than two, that is your cue to finish each push past the hip. Drill: single-arm freestyle with the other arm at the side, focusing on finishing past the hip, and sculling at the front to rebuild the catch. Then hold your easy count at threshold.
Freestyle is swum on a rolling long axis. The hips and shoulders turn together; the head stays still and looks at the bottom. Rotation is what lets the breath come to you and what puts your back muscles, not just your shoulders, into the pull.
Breathing to one side only builds a lopsided stroke you cannot feel. Bilateral breathing (every third stroke) evens it out and lets you see both ways in open water. Race on whatever pattern gives you air; train the other side every session.
Beginner
Backstroke is often the first stroke beginners swim a full length in, because the face is out of the water. To reach the wall with confidence, count your strokes from the flags, five metres out.
Intermediate focus
Drill: kick on your back with a cup on your forehead (a real one, or the idea of one): keep the head still and the hips stay up. Then single-arm backstroke with the other arm at your side to feel the roll.
Advanced
The fastest part of a backstroke race is under the water. Work the flip turn (roll to the front one stroke out, tumble, push on the back) and hold a tight streamline dolphin kick to the 15 m mark that the rules allow.
Beginner
The trick is doing one thing at a time. Do the sequence with a board first: kick, glide, count. Then arms only with a pull buoy. Then together, saying the four words.
Intermediate focus
When both feet turn out together, the kick drives you dead straight. Drill: kick on your back, hands on your hips, watching your knees stay inside your hands, then two kicks, one pull to exaggerate the glide.
Advanced
Look after your knees: keep the kick narrow, build the pull-out (one pull, one dolphin kick, one kick, surface) and train the stroke in short fast sets, not long slow ones.
Beginner
Butterfly asks for the freestyle pull, the breaststroke timing and a dolphin kick. Learn dolphin kick on your back first (arms at your side, hips driving) and come back to this panel when 200 m of freestyle is easy.
Intermediate focus
Drill: single-arm butterfly with the other arm in front, breathing to the side, two kicks per cycle counted out loud. Then three kicks one pull to feel the rhythm without exhausting the arms.
Advanced
Butterfly stays smooth past 35 m when the hips keep driving. Train it in 25s and 50s with full recovery, breathe every two strokes, and keep the recovery low, the sign your kick is still doing its job.
Open turn (beginner, and every breaststroke and butterfly turn): touch, knees to chest, feet to the wall, push off in streamline. Flip turn (intermediate onward, freestyle and backstroke): last stroke, tuck, somersault, feet plant, push off on your side, rotate to your front as you glide. Learn it with a coach and a shallow, uncrowded lane.
Your job now: never breathe on the stroke into the wall, and push off in a streamline every single time.
Your job now: start the tumble one stroke earlier than feels right. Most learners flip too close and jam their knees.
Your job now: measure it. Time from 5 m in to 5 m out. A tight turn is worth more than a month of aerobic work.
below the black line
Sets and the pace clock, the few things worth buying, and the habits that bring everyone home.
Up and down for forty minutes at one pace makes you good at forty minutes at one pace. A session has a shape: a warm-up that wakes the shoulders, drills that keep the stroke honest, a main set with a purpose, and a cool-down. Here is the shape, a way to find your pace, and a session for your level.
Warm-up is easy swimming with some kick and some backstroke to open the shoulders. Drills are short, technical, and slow. The main set is the reason you came: intervals with rest, at a pace you can repeat. The cool-down is easy and honest.
Swim a timed 400 m and, after full rest, a timed 200 m, both as fast as you can hold evenly. The difference in distance over the difference in time is your critical swim speed, the pace you can sustain for a long swim. Everything else in training is a step above or below it.
Every pool has one on the wall. This one is a stopwatch: start it as you push off, tap Lap at every wall, and read your splits. Rest on the number you agreed with yourself, and never argue with it.
The best news in swimming: you need almost nothing. Goggles that seal, a cap, a suit that moves with you. Everything else is a tool for a specific skill, and a badge marks what is worth buying at your level.
Water is at its best when you know it well. A swimmer who needs help is usually quiet and upright, mouth at the surface, arms pressing down, for twenty to sixty seconds, so knowing the signs lets you help early. These habits keep every swim a good one, at every level, every year.
Swim with a buddy, every time
It makes every swim safer and more fun, whatever your level.
Look for a darker, calmer channel between breaking waves, foam or debris moving out to sea, and a gap in the wave line. That calm-looking water can run at over two metres a second, faster than an Olympic swimmer, so there is no need to race it. Float, wave an arm, then swim sideways out of it.
Float first. It is the single most useful thing to know about cold water, and it is why the back float from the shallow end is a survival skill, not a beginner exercise.
Look for someone upright in the water, head low or tilted back, mouth at the surface, arms pressing down as if climbing a ladder, not kicking and not moving forward. They are usually quiet rather than waving. Children at play are noisy, so if a child goes quiet, go and check. Spotting it early is how lifeguards help, and you can too.
Learn the number for wherever you are swimming before you get in. Learn CPR; a basic two to three hour course is the most useful afternoon a swimmer can spend.
Saved on this device only. It resets to unticked every day, on purpose.
For you, beginner
The shallow end is where confidence grows. Stay where you can stand, stay with someone, and learn the back float early: it keeps your mouth clear of the water and lets you rest anywhere.
For you, intermediate
Open water is a whole new adventure: colder, darker and longer than it looks from the shore, and beautiful. Build up gently. First swims: short, close to shore, with someone, in a bright cap, in water you have measured with a thermometer, not a guess.
For you, advanced
The habits that keep strong swimmers swimming: train with a tow float and a buddy, keep breath-hold work supervised and short, respect cold water even in a wetsuit, and remember that a race with safety cover is a different sport from the same distance alone.
open water · before, during, after
Temperature, waves, wind and current, the best window to go, your swim as it happens and the session afterwards. Try it: drag the timeline, switch the charts, start the swim.
Sample day at a made-up bay. It shows how it works; it does not read real conditions.
sat / 19 sep
open water conditions
21.2°
water temperature
best swim window
17:10 - 18:40
sat / 19 sep
Silver Bay
live swim
01.42km
pause
session / 019
Sep 19, 2026 · Silver Bay
Sources · who says so
Safety guidance follows the RNLI's Float to Live campaign, the Royal Life Saving Society UK Water Safety Code, Surf Life Saving Australia's rip current advice, the American Red Cross water safety guidance and Dr Francesco Pia's description of the Instinctive Drowning Response, published in the US Coast Guard's On Scene magazine (Fall 2006). The cold water timings follow Professor Mike Tipton's work at the University of Portsmouth. Drowning facts, including the link between alcohol and adult drownings, follow the World Health Organization drowning fact sheet.
Learn-to-swim content draws on Swim England's Learn to Swim Framework and USA Swimming's learn-to-swim guidance; the beginner, intermediate and advanced levels here are this site's own grouping, not their stages. Technique cues are the standard coaching vocabulary used by Swim Smooth and USA Swimming; the critical swim speed test is from Wakayoshi and colleagues (1992) as popularised by Swim Smooth. Gear guidance is manufacturer-neutral.
Nothing here replaces lessons with a qualified coach or the instructions of a lifeguard. If a rule on this site and a lifeguard disagree, the lifeguard is right.
surf · the ocean end
The pool taught you to breathe, float and kick. The sea adds swell, wind, tide and a board. Here is how the pieces fit, one element at a time.
A good surf is never luck. It is swell from far away, meeting the right wind, the right tide and the right bottom. Tap a card to open it.
Waves are born when storms blow across open ocean, sometimes thousands of kilometres away. That energy travels as swell and arrives as lines on the horizon. The number that matters most is the period, the seconds between waves: short periods (under about 9 s) feel choppy and weak, long periods (12 s and up) arrive as even lines with more power under them.
Wind blowing from the land out to sea (offshore) grooms waves: it holds the face up, delays the break and gives clean, glassy lines. Wind from the sea onto the beach (onshore) crumbles them into messy whitewater. Light or no wind is best of all, which is why early mornings are often the cleanest session of the day.
Twice a day, roughly, the sea rises and falls. That changes how deep the water is over the sandbar or reef, so the same beach can be perfect at mid tide and closed out or too shallow at low. Most spots have a tide they like: check a tide chart before you go, and ask the locals which one.
Beach breaks break over sandbars: forgiving, and the peaks move as the sand shifts, so they are where most people learn. Reef breaks break over rock or coral: consistent and powerful, but shallow and sharp, not for beginners. Point breaks wrap along a headland and peel for a long ride.
Water pushed onto the beach by waves has to get back out, and it does it in channels called rips. Look for a darker, calmer gap where fewer waves break, often with a rippled surface. Surfers use them as an escalator to the lineup. If one takes you: stay calm, float, do not fight it straight on, swim parallel to the beach until you are out of it, then come in, and raise an arm to signal for help.
Tap the markers. Every surf lesson uses these words, and the lineup will too.
peak
The highest point, where the wave first starts to break. The surfer closest to it has the right of way.
Drag the board to turn it. Length, width and thickness decide how easily it paddles and catches waves, and how sharply it turns once you are up.
drag to turn
7'6"
The friendly step down from a foam board. Enough length to paddle into waves early, short enough to start turning. Good on small to medium days.
Your first board
A soft-top, 8 feet or longer. It floats you, it forgives you, and it does not hurt when it hits you. Rent one before you buy.
Practise it on the sand twenty times before you try it on a wave. It plays through on its own; tap a move to hold it.
Surf etiquette keeps people safe and keeps the water friendly. It is the same everywhere in the world.
Before every session
Check the forecast, the tide and the flags. Watch the water for ten minutes before you paddle out, and find the rip. Wear a leash, and when you fall, fall flat and cover your head as you come up. If the lifeguard says no, it is no.
