So whenever you teach your kid how to swim, you might encounter the conundrum of the stiff swimmer! What is a stiff swimmer you might ask? Well, if you've got a kid that swims like a plank of wood..........he's a stiff swimmer!
The scientific jargon behind this is "degrees of freedom". When anyone is learning a new skill, they begin the task of unlocking their degrees of freedom! It's a fancy term referring to the stiffness. As the learner becomes better at the skill, they start unlocking certain joints to make the movement smoother. In the beginning, they'll use fewer joints because they're piecing the skill together.
Ways to counteract the joint locking is to emphasize relaxation in the water. You can focus more on floating and looking down to show the water's ability to carry the swimmer! Sometimes they get into the habit of fighting or thrashing the water because it seems like the obvious solution to swimming fast. Usually I flip the focus to swimming slow by telling them to do "floaty feet" with "tiny kicks".
Generally, if they try to fight the water, you'll see the bicycle kicks. My basic solution to this is by putting a board under their knees so they feel how to kick without letting their knees drop. You can progress it from there with the whole "floaty feet" thing and build up the speed.
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