SWIM STRONGER: TURNS AND FINISHES
Milestone 2 of 4 in the Swim Stronger Program Focuses on More Advanced Skills
Students who reach the Turns and Finishes milestone will:
- Know how to perform an open turn and a flip turn at the wall
- Understand how to transition from one stroke to the other
- Have all the basic skills needed to pursue competitive swimming
- Standard for mastery: Successfully execute all the turns and finishes taught
Swimming stronger is more than just knowing the strokes and executing them well. It includes all the pieces that go along with swimming in a pool or other body of water. That’s why the second milestone in the Foss Swim School Swim Stronger program is what we call Turns and Finishes – important skills for a strong swimmer.
It might seem like only competitive swimmers need to learn these skills, but if you watch skilled swimmers even when they are doing casual laps, you’ll see that their ability to turn efficiently helps them move gracefully in the water and keep their momentum, allowing them to swim with less wasted energy.
Learning to finish a swim strongly, like learning the stroke patterns, lets swimmers master every part of a swim and sets them up for competitive swimming if they so desire.
Milestone 2: What to Know About Swim Turns and Finishes
There are different ways to execute turns and finishes that will apply in different situations.
Open Turns
These are turns made at the surface – the swimmer touches the wall, tucks their body, turns, and pushes off with their feet.
Flip Turns
This is what you think of when you imagine competitive swimming – the swimmer flips their feet to the wall and pushes off, rotating underwater (and often adding some dolphin kicks) before resurfacing and continuing their stroke.
Transitions
When making a turn and switching from one stroke to another, a swimmer must also account for differences in body position, such as moving from front to back or vice versa.
Finishes
The key here is learning how to time when the student will touch the wall. They learn how to use markers along the pool to know when to reach, using the right amount of their momentum safely.
The Swim Stronger Levels
We teach the Turns and Finishes skills in the Big 5 level. Ask a teacher about moving on to Swim Stronger when you graduate from Learn to Swim, or if you are new to FOSS, consider a Preview Lesson to determine if Swim Stronger is right for your student.
The Swim Stronger Levels
We teach the Turns and Finishes skills in the Big 5 level. Ask a teacher about moving on to Swim Stronger when you graduate from Learn to Swim, or if you are new to FOSS, consider a Preview Lesson to determine if Swim Stronger is right for your student.
Why We Teach Turns and Finishes
Being a strong swimmer means going a step beyond just learning to swim – it’s understanding all the components that go into efficient, confident swimming and being able to put them together.
We make turns and finishes a separate milestone within our program because they mark the last distinct swimming techniques a student needs to learn. That doesn’t mean the process of learning is complete, of course – there are two more milestones in the Swim Stronger program that a swimmer will need to complete before graduating, and both require turns and finishes.
These might seem like ambitious goals, but we know from experience that students who have learned to swim at FOSS have the necessary foundation to graduate, with the help of our teachers and some hard work and practice.
