Welcome to Confident Swimming—Oxford’s Adult Swimming Lesson Specialist

With over 17 years of dedicated, full-time experience in teaching adult swimming lessons in Oxford, Tim at Confident Swimming offers a unique and empowering pathway toward helping adults of all ages learn to swim, and improve their swimming ability.

Adult Swimming Lessons in Oxford… and Beyond…

Check out my FREE 6-lesson Foundations video course, designed to help you begin your swimming journey, wherever you are in the world

Free FOUNDATIONS Course

A Swim School Specialising in Helping Beginning and Nervous Adults Learn to Swim

A majority of swimming lessons focus almost exclusively on freestyle / front crawl, a competitive stroke that can be incredibly unhelpful for beginning adults, who primarily want to know how to feel comfortable, safe, and relaxed in water—before anything else! I often say it’s similar to having our very first driving lesson, yet we’re being told to drive on the motorway because it’s the ‘fastest and most efficient way to drive’ - yet we don’t even know how to work the brakes yet, or know where the gears are!

The Confident Swimming Way of learning to swim will guide you through a journey of complete and holistic development within the water, starting with:

Stage 1: the FOUNDATIONS

We’ll start by developing the essential physical and psychological foundations for swimming success: breath awareness and control, buoyancy, posture, body-type awareness, developing core stability/balance and other fundamental skills, relaxation under water, and developing the hand-water connection—which is the most important thing to learn to feel safe in water.

Stage 2: ‘Natural Swimming’

In my system, Natural Swimming’ is a completely different way of connecting with the water than of learning the strokes, which can be extremely limiting and restrictive for beginners. It is a way of swimming that is often missing from conventional swimming lessons, yet it helps you to develop free, fluid, and intuitive movement through the water.

When learning ‘Natural Swimming’, you’ll develop the freedom to move with complete versatility and adaptability in water: swimming with head-up, floating, swimming comfortably with head-under, rotating from front to back, sculling on the back, rescue backstroke, treading water with ease, swimming under water, and moving with complete control and freedom in any direction, in any depth of water, for any length of time.

Learning the strokes alone will not make you safe or comfortable in deep water, nor will they help you just to feel relaxed and comfortable swimming with your friends and family on holiday—but learning ‘Natural Swimming’ will.

Stage 3: Stroke Mastery

Parallel to learning ‘Natural Swimming’, we can refine your growing connection with the water into efficient and sustainable strokes for recreation, fitness, and lifelong enjoyment.

Mastery of the strokes can only grow upon a foundation of feeling relaxed and in control in the water, otherwise we will forever be stuck saying ‘I just can’t get the breathing’.

We can develop and refine the Front Crawl stroke, Breaststroke, Butterfly, or Backstroke (as well as learn advanced skills like flip turns) using my unique ‘layered’ system of learning the strokes.