Techniques I use for anxiety

Legos! Legos! Legos!

Who knew those little blocks could have so much power. I started using Legos 6 years ago. Pervious to this I would move kick boards, pool toys, or sinkers. I was always on the look out for something to use to impower my swimmer as they worked through the lesson.

I know many of you have seen me with my stacks, Sometimes it is a group effort to move 10. Sometimes each kid has their own stack of 5. Sometimes the kids just want to builds towers. There are reasons for different usages of the Lego distribution, but in the long run I am giving the swimmer the control of the pace of the lesson. Each stack represents the skill at hand. The kids know that once the stack has finished they will move on to the next skill. This is sometimes exciting because they don’t care for what they are doing and sometimes nerve-racking because they want to know what is next. Either way they now where we are.

Where we are is exactly why I continue to emphasis the Legos. It is a concrete way for me to tell the swimmer to not look ahead or discuss what happened previously, but to stay focused on the task at hand.