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

① the Foundation

② 'Natural Swimming'

③ Stroke Efficiency

The problem with adult swimming education…

A majority of ‘beginner’ swimming lessons focus almost exclusively on freestyle / front crawl, a competitive stroke that can be incredibly unhelpful for beginning adults, who usually just want to know how to feel comfortable, safe, and relaxed in water—before trying to win the Olympics!

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! It’s simply inappropriate for our stage of development.

Too many fundamental skills and abilities are either skipped, overridden, or brushed over too quickly.

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

① the FOUNDATION

We’ll start by developing the essential physical and psychological foundations for swimming success:

• breath awareness and control
• understanding buoyancy
• posture
• body-type awareness
• developing core stability
• returning to a standing position safely
• relaxation under water, and
• developing the hand-water connection—the most important thing to learn in order to become safe in water

② Natural Swimming

If you want to feel completely relaxed, in control, and free whenever and wherever you are in water, ‘Natural Swimming’ is the answer.

Natural Swimming, as I call it in my system, is a completely different way of connecting with the water than of learning the strokes alone, which can be extremely limiting and restrictive for beginners. It is a way of swimming, or of ‘being’ in water, that is often missing from conventional swimming lessons; yet it allows you to move freely, fluidly, and intuitively through the water.

When learning Natural Swimming, you’ll develop the freedom to move with complete versatility and adaptability in water. It is a synergy of a range of abilities combined:

• swimming with head-up
• swimming comfortably with head under water
• transitioning effortlessly between the two
• rotating between front ⇔ back in a variety of ways
• sculling on the back,
• rescue backstroke
• floating
• 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…
(well, until dinner time that is!)

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 out in the sea or in holiday swimming pools with your friends and family…
but learning ‘Natural Swimming’ will.

③ Stroke Efficiency

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.