Why blowing bubbles is wrong

Blowing bubbles and learning how to swim are sort of like apples and pie, It's like one-in-the same.  Today, I'm going to teach you why learning how to blow bubbles, as part of your learn to swim experience, is actually detrimental and why it has no place in the learn to swim experience. 

Why does the swim industry, generally speaking, teach kids and adults to blow bubbles?

The answer is really simple. It's to create an air barrier between the surface of the water and your nose when you are putting your face in the water. This ensures that when you put your face in the water, you don't get water up your nose.  And believe me, this saves a lot of discomfort!

The logic behind this makes a lot of sense - as you are blowing air out of your nose, water can't go in.  BUT what are we sacrificing to achieve this result & is there another way?

Lets back it up so we can understand the mechanics of swimming first: Our goal, when swimming or floating, is to float on top of the water. [duh, its swimming, not sinking]

The problem is that when we start blowing out our air, deflating our lungs, we start to compromise our buoyancy in the water.  

This is a major problem because our lungs act as a natural flotation aid when they are filled with air > they help us achieve our naturally buoyancy in the water.

When we take a big deep breath in, our natural flotation aid is all the way blown up.  Our goal is to utilize this buoyancy especially as we are first learning how to swim!

Compromising this buoyancy is a MAJOR mistake for brand new swimmers! So how do we achieve the same result [creating a seal between the air and water] if we cannot blow bubbles?

The answer is incredibly simple: We combat fear and anxiety BEFORE ever stepping foot in the water. 

By combating our fear FIRST, we are going to drastically reduce the likelihood of our body going into fight or flight mode and inhaling water when we put our face in the water.  That air tight seal we mentioned earlier in the article is already naturally created by our body when we are relaxed in the water!

And so just to wrap this all up, as we're going through the learn to swim process and we get to facial submersion, it is really really important that we have already sorted out our fear and anxiety of the water FIRST before ever putting our face in!

And if we do that, then we will naturally create the air/water barrier and not have to worry about needing to blow bubbles to prevent water from getting in our nose!

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