Welcome to Confident Swimming—Oxford’s Adult Swimming Lesson Specialist
Whatever your goals, dreams, and ambitions, my passion is in helping you achieve your fullest potential in the water
Are you looking for Adult Swimming Lessons in Oxford?
With over 15 years of dedicated, full-time experience in teaching adult swimming lessons in Oxford, Tim at Confident Swimming offers a unique, gentle, and empowering pathway toward helping adults of all ages learn to swim, and improve their swimming ability.
Meet Tim
Whether you've just decided to pursue adult swimming lessons as a complete beginner, or if you’re looking to improve your speed and efficiency for exercise or triathlon; develop water skills and confidence so you can enjoy swimming with friends and family; or if you’d like to master a completely new stroke, I am committed to helping you get to exactly where you want to be with your swimming ability.
My unique adult swimming lesson programme, developed over a period of more than 15 years, has enabled a large number of adults to finally experience the joy of swimming — even after many years of unsuccessful attempts at learning to swim elsewhere.
Our Oxford Venue:
the voco Oxford Thames Hotel
Our one-to-one adult swimming lessons take place at the beautiful voco Oxford Thames Hotel pool. The venue offers:
• free parking and changing room facilities
• easy access by bus (via 3A from the City Centre)
• heated pool (of 1.2m in depth throughout)
• an ideal calm and relaxing environment for learners
• our own private swimming lane and learning area
The perfect venue for your new swimming journey…
The most important thing when learning to swim as an adult is that you feel comfortable and relaxed with your instructor. You can schedule a call with Tim at any time if you’d like to chat anything over with him directly—he’d love to hear about your swimming experiences and future goals.
Learning to swim should never feel like hard work.
Most beginning adults just want to learn how to feel safe, relaxed, and in control in the water.
Many other teaching approaches often offer a ‘top down’ and a typically ‘mechanical’ approach to learning to swim — usually telling you how elite swimmers swim, and expecting you to replicate that (and then passing the blame on to you when you don’t get it right!). More often than not, this leads to frustration, tension, discomfort, exhaustion, and ultimately, losing hope and giving up! “I’ve tried to learn, but it’s too hard: swimming is for everyone else, but just not for me!”
But that’s not true!
An alternative way to learn
My 3-Stage Adult Swimming Lesson Programme will guide you instead through an exciting and empowering process of learning to understand, trust, relax within, and connect with the water, allowing you to feel safe, comfortable, in control — and to really enjoy the experience of swimming and of being in the water.
Whether your goals are to swim for health and exercise, relaxation, recreation, to enjoy swimming with family and friends, for your safety and of those around you, for new adventures and water-based activities, to perform at your best in sports or competition, or for your own personal growth toward becoming a more capable and complete human being, the reasons for learning to swim are endless.
Stage 1: Foundation Pathway
(Beginners)
Our Foundation pathway will help those completely new to the water, or those who may need to start afresh to fill some missing gaps in their development. You’ll learn how to acclimatise and adapt to the water environment, developing a fundamental sense of stability (a hidden yet essential process) and understanding the importance of our breath, our posture, and of developing our hand-water connection throughout the process of learning to swim.
We’ll cover and master essential, foundational skills such as being able to float and glide — and return to a standing position safely — as well as bringing in some basic swimming movements, in a completely relaxed, independent, and controlled manner.
After completion of the Foundation pathway, you’ll be set up to proceed with two further pathways, completely unique in their own way: Versatility / Safety and Stroke Mastery / Efficiency.
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Our Foundation pathway will help those completely new to the water, or those who may need to start afresh to fill some missing gaps in their development. You’ll learn how to acclimatise and adapt to the water environment, developing a fundamental sense of stability (a hidden yet essential process) and understanding the importance of our breath, our posture, and of developing our hand-water connection throughout the process of learning to swim.
We’ll cover and master essential, foundational skills such as being able to float and glide — and return to a standing position safely — as well as bringing in some basic swimming movements, in a completely relaxed, independent, and controlled manner.
After completion of the Foundation pathway, you’ll be set up to proceed with two further pathways, completely unique in their own way:
Versatility / Safety
and
Stroke Mastery / Efficiency
Stage 2: Versatility Pathway
(Beginners / Improvers)
Our Versatility pathway will enable and empower you to feel safe, relaxed, and in control in the water. You’ll learn to master the hand-water connection, and control of the body in the water, so that you will feel in total control and ‘at one’ with the water at all times, and at any depth.
This will involve learning to swim the ‘head up Breaststroke’ (an often neglected swimming skill, because it can be inconvenient — and often challenging — for teachers to teach). You will learn how to float and swim on the back in a relaxed and effortless way, including sculling on the back, treading water, and being able to rotate in the water from front to back, and back to front, and turn in all directions. You’ll also learn to transition between ‘underwater’ swimming and ‘head above water swimming’ with ease, giving you total versatility and control in the water, and helping to equip you with water safety skills — and the ability to simply enjoy being in the water — for the rest of your life.
For many adults wanting to learn to swim, the skills we learn in the Foundation and Versatility pathways are often the missing piece of the puzzle in their search for basic comfort, ease of swimming, and enjoyment of the water.
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Our Versatility pathway will enable and empower you to feel safe, relaxed, and in control in the water. You’ll learn to master the hand-water connection, and control of the body in the water, so that you will feel in total control and ‘at one’ with the water at all times, and at any depth.
This will involve learning to swim the ‘head up Breaststroke’ (an often neglected swimming skill, because it can be inconvenient — and often challenging — for teachers to teach). You will learn how to float and swim on the back in a relaxed and effortless way, including sculling on the back, treading water, and being able to rotate in the water from front to back, and back to front, and turn in all directions. You’ll also learn to transition between ‘underwater’ swimming and ‘head above water swimming’ with ease, giving you total versatility and control in the water, and helping to equip you with water safety skills — and the ability to simply enjoy being in the water — for the rest of your life.
For many adults wanting to learn to swim, the skills we learn in the Foundation and Versatility pathways are often the missing piece of the puzzle in their search for basic comfort, ease of swimming, and enjoyment of the water.
Stage 3: Mastery Pathway
(Improvers / Advanced)
Our Mastery pathway will focus on refining and improving the efficiency of your swimming strokes, which may be for exercise / health purposes, or for competition such as triathlon. Our focus will usually be on the Front Crawl, and / or Breaststroke — although Backstroke and Butterfly can be included if desired.
Most people struggle with their strokes because they are fundamentally tense and out of control when swimming, and this is often due to lacking basic coordination and balance in the water, or through simply having the wrong perception that we need to try hard or put in a lot of effort to swim well.
When mastering your strokes, you’ll learn my concept of ‘focussed effort’, so that you’ll be able to apply your effort in the most efficient and effective of ways, using the correct muscle groups, at exactly the right moments in the stroke. This results in less ‘wasted’ effort, enabling you to incorporate much more relaxation into your strokes, helping them to become more sustainable, enjoyable, smoother, faster, and more efficient.
The perfect swimming strokes are a fine balance between effort, but also relaxation — and this is why you’ll see extremely efficient and fast swimmers, look so smooth and relaxed!
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Our Mastery pathway will focus on refining and improving the efficiency of your swimming strokes, which may be for exercise / health purposes, or for competition such as triathlon. Our focus will usually be on the Front Crawl, and / or Breaststroke — although Backstroke and Butterfly can be included if desired.
Most people struggle with their strokes because they are fundamentally tense and not fully in control when swimming, and this is often due to lacking basic coordination and balance in the water, or through simply having the wrong perception that we need to try hard or put in a lot of effort to swim well.
When mastering your strokes, you’ll learn my concept of ‘focussed effort’, so that you’ll be able to apply your effort in the most efficient and effective of ways, using the correct muscle groups, at exactly the right moments in the stroke. This results in less ‘wasted’ effort, enabling you to incorporate much more relaxation into your strokes, helping them to become more sustainable, enjoyable, smoother, faster, and more efficient.
The perfect swimming strokes are a fine balance between effort, but also relaxation — and this is why you’ll see extremely efficient and fast swimmers, look so smooth and relaxed!
I can’t wait to be of help!
An exciting and empowering journey awaits…
What’s different about our swimming lessons for adults?
If you have attempted to learn to swim in the past, but didn’t get to where you dream of being, I can promise you—there is hope! Tim at Confident Swimming offers an alternative approach to learning to swim as an adult.
1: In-Water Teaching and Support
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I will always be present in the water with you throughout your development as a swimmer. I am able to provide the necessary—and often essential—support and assistance in your early stages of learning that will enable you to become truly independent, in control, and empowered in the water.
Group lessons will often bypass this essential supportive step by giving you a float/kickboard to consistently hold on to, creating a dependency, instead of enabling you to develop the most important connection of all when learning to swim: the intuitive connection between your hands and the water.
Being present in the water also allows me to visually demonstrate movements, practices, and perform the strokes for you to see as we progress—making them easier for you to understand.
2: Video Analysis and Accelerated Teaching Methods
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I can offer instant video analysis of your technique from within the water, allowing us to pinpoint areas for improvement on-the-spot, helping to accelerate your stroke development.
After our session, I can send you copies of any footage taken, enabling you to review your technique and track your own progress over time.
3: Mastery of the Fundamentals
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Many people struggle to swim easily and efficiently, not because they are being taught the wrong technique, but because they are missing the underlying fundamentals to correctly apply that technique. Other teaching approaches will often have you try to do too much, all at once, and far too soon, offering a purely ‘mechanical’ approach to learning, without necessarily developing you appropriately as a swimmer, exactly where you’re at—it's no wonder you always feel tense, uncomfortable, and always get out of breath when swimming!
Whether you are learning to float and move through the water for the very first time, or if you are refining your front crawl stroke to further improve your swimming speed and efficiency, we will build things up at every stage from the core foundations, of developing:
• Coordination
• Balance / Core Stability, and
• a State of Relaxation in the waterThese are the hidden, and so often neglected fundamentals, that are absolutely essential to developing smooth, easy, relaxing, safe and efficient swimming.