Swimfulness helps you to enhance the health benefits from the time you spend in the water. Allowing you to fully enjoy and benefit from the weightlessness and experience a freedom of movement not found on dry land
Swimfulness helps you to enhance the health benefits from the time you spend in the water. Allowing you to fully enjoy and benefit from the weightlessness and experience a freedom of movement not found on dry land
The principles from the Alexander Technique are woven into the Shaw Method and the four traditional strokes are redesigned in a way so they become more biomechanically friendly, reducing strain on joints, and facilitating breathing. Elements such as good body alignment and thoughtful usage of energy, working with the water and an effortless breathing pattern are highlighted.
The strokes are taught in accessible progressive steps: explained, demonstrated and hands-on guided. The teacher is with you in the water and teaching also takes place on land.
There is a focus on every present moment and movement, on enjoying the process and reducing focus on external goals such as speed. Most swimmers, however, as a byproduct of the process come to increase their speed and endurance.
The Shaw Method was developed by Steven Shaw, a former competitive swimmer that had had enough of swimming by the age of 17 – for the time being.
During his studies becoming a teacher in the Alexander Technique he worked as a lifeguard. A job which gave him plenty of time to observe people’s swimming as well as reflect on his own past in the swimming environment. A seed for an alternative approach to the swimming practice was planted.
“Whatever challenges you face in life, swimming always helps:
when you are stressed it relaxes you,
when you are exhausted it revitalizes you,
and when your muscles are stiff it releases them.
Forget Prozac – the remedy is in H20!”
Steven Shaw