Learning lap swim flip-turns as an adult

May 18, 2021 5:02 PM

I am a confident swimmer in all respects but one: I can't do flip-turns. The problem isn't just that I never learned, instructors tried to teach me when I was a kid and gave up because my mind/body basically went NOPE!. I understood the concept but actually moving into the inversion/somersault just felt WRONG. Same thing on dry land—I can't do somersaults, cartwheels, etc. I'd like to learn this skill but explanations like "easy, just do a somersault underwater!" obviously don't work. I have access to a pool and some padded floor space. How can I finally learn?
posted by 4rtemis to Health & Fitness (18 answers total)

Thinking tangentially -- do you have a circus school near you?

I ask because it sounds like your block may be that you just can't picture what it should feel like to rotate your body about that axis. So, maybe learning to do a pullover on a (low!) trapeze or fabric sling would help? That's in the reverse direction that you need, but then you get down by reversing the direction. It's a skill that was covered in the absolute-beginner classes I've taken.

(I'm basing this suggestion on the observation that experience with being backflipped by a dance partner made it stupidly easy for me to learn to do a backflip off a diving board, and that also translated to better spatial awareness in circus and whitewater kayaking.)

More directly, I'll bet you could ask them for a private lesson for doing a somersault. They might have mats/wedges to make it easier to learn -- rolling downhill a bit lets gravity help you.

Once you have the dry-land somersault down (or heck, in parallel), maybe try using nose clips to learn a flip turn. For me, the hardest part is that I waste so much air blowing out my nose to keep the water out
posted by Metasyntactic at 5:26 PM on May 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

I'm pretty novice at lap swimming. i'm marginally accomplished in water other ways - open water swims, rigorous lifeguard training. but i was never on a team as a kid. so i just never 'got' lap swimming. so i got adult lessons at the Y. it was great for me.
posted by j_curiouser at 5:48 PM on May 18, 2021

Flip turns are hard! I understand instructors tried to teach you as a kid, but was that a long time ago? If so, and if you can access and afford it, I would recommend getting 1:1 time with a swim instructor dedicated to this topic. There is a technique to it, and it can be taught and learned.
posted by splitpeasoup at 5:50 PM on May 18, 2021 [6 favorites]

I'll start off by saying that I can do a flip turn but I'm not good at them and mostly don't do them. It's not like doing a somersault because you're underwater and gravity is different and you usually get water up your nose. But it is like a somersault in that you need to tuck your chin and then follow through with your body. Generally, you want to do your turn with a little speed coming into the wall and then when you are about an arms length away, lift your head up to eye the wall, take a good breath and then actively nod your head downwards, tucking your chin and following through by tucking your whole body. Blow out through your nose continuously as you make the turn, let your body orient with your face now up toward the ceiling/sky, plant your feet on the wall, pull your arms above your head with your hands on top of each other in a streamline and push off.

Generally, I find that your first flip turns, you can focus on doing a crawl stroke, flipping and then ending in a backstroke. I'm very much not good at the body pivot back to freestyle/crawl. You should also practice away from the wall to get that curl up body motion down, you'll just flip and....float!

I also think it is very helpful to see someone do this in the water. If you can get some coaching from a swim coach or swim instructor or even a friend who does turns and is willing to help, that can help tremendously because then they can see what you're doing wrong, offer tips and encouragement.

I also super recommend trolling through YouTube and watching lessons! I have used YouTube videos to effectively improve my strokes and there are some really good ones out there. Here's one!
posted by amanda at 5:56 PM on May 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

How do you feel if you lie on your back and extend your feet over your head to touch the ground (plow position)? That's pretty much the second half of a forward somersault (minus the hand position).

If it feels okay, get a 30 dollar mat from IKEA or somewhere and teach yourself a somersault.
posted by oneirodynia at 5:58 PM on May 18, 2021

I never got good at them, but I learned from YouTube tutorials where I could watch enough times to figure out what they were doing with their bodies. This was years and years ago or I’d suggest some links, but for me being able to watch someone do it over and over while I practiced helped. But watching people do something usually helps me.

To that point—is there a way of learning physical skills that’s worked well for you in the past that you might be able to use here?
posted by jameaterblues at 6:03 PM on May 18, 2021

Practice those nose-kegels to where you can scrunch up your nose enough to be water tight. Float out in the water, take a deep breath, pull in your legs into a tuck, stick your arms out the the side and rotate both of your arms. Sorta like doing the butterfly stroke but smaller circles. Try forwards/backwards. Until you can do just somersaults out in the open water.

Then it's not that hard (yeah). You approach the wall and just the right bit before (like arms/legs length because you want to be close enough to push off)... at that point you dive like you're going to swim towards the bottom of the pool to pick up a penny, but you pull your legs in and rotate your arms to do the flip. At this point your sorta wrong side up (if you went in face-down, you're now face-up). So when you extend your curled up legs and touch the wall, you push and twist (left or right, your choice) and move your arms accordingly so that after you've pushed hard and rotated you're back in position to keep swimming the same stroke.

It's a whole bunch of say swimming along and spotting a penny on the bottom and diving down to pick it up and then just pulling in your legs (fetal position) making rather small circles with your outstretched arms.

Try against the deep-end wall first so you don't bonk your head on the bottom when you dive but forget to tuck up.

Oh, maybe just practice getting right up to the deep-end wall and diving down to the bottom. Like "touched wall, dive straight down". I have a feeling the exact method depends on which stroke you're doing and where your arms are when you hit the right distance to flipturn.
posted by zengargoyle at 6:07 PM on May 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

Can you swim under water looking up to the sky? Learn that first if you're just a surface swimmer. Learn to do that, play in the deep-end and instead of rolling over to swim facing-up, just go sorta roller-coaster loop-de-loop. Swim along, dive down, once you're getting to the bottom just dive again to avoid the bottom and presto you're now swimming face-up along the bottom. You do the same thing for a flip-turn, just quicker because you tucked. You just need to fit a half twist in there to be the same face-up/down as you were before the direction change.

Sorry, bit of a in a pool since birth, swim/dive team, swimming instructor, lifeguard, bet I could teach you to flip-turn in a jiffy. It's just not terribly easy to explain. :)
posted by zengargoyle at 6:23 PM on May 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

When I was really fit and in my 20s I managed to do them as a novice swimmer, but I never did them in practice or a meet, and just a couple during a fitness workout.

The only way I could do them was to get up as much speed as possible. I see people doing them at my pool at a measured, or even leisurely pace, and I couldn't do that back in the day.

Remember that the somersault and the twist are two separate, sequential components. That really helped me.

You could also stand on the deck, or ideally above the deck if there's spectator seating, to watch someone do it, or submerge and watch. Videos are good, too.

A nose clip might help while you are working out the motions and when to tuck.
posted by jgirl at 6:25 PM on May 18, 2021

For me, the breakthrough moment was when someone explained that your arms are just going around in a circle, but staying still and it's your body moving. (It's more complicated than that, with the twist afterwards, but that got me around the turn). I don't know why that helped, or whether it will with you, but good luck!
posted by lab.beetle at 6:35 PM on May 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

I’m a good swimmer, was a lifeguard for years, taught swim lessons, etc. But I mostly did open water swimming (though I did some lap swimming as well). What’s your goal with being able to do a flip turn? Because I’ll be honest that as an adult now I guess my inner ear isn’t a good so they kind of make me nauseous and I’m not losing out anything on my lap swimming by just pushing off the wall again.
posted by raccoon409 at 7:25 PM on May 18, 2021 [7 favorites]

I’m a medium ok lap swimmer and learned to do these as an adult. The thing for me was realizing it’s not a “somersault,” it’s a dive, but a dive in which you go all the way around instead of arcing back up.

I agree with everyone who says to book a couple adult 1:1 lessons. This is a skill they teach all the time. It’s way easier to learn by doing than to to try to translate words to physical action.

Also you don’t have to do them. It’s kind of nice to keep you moving but if you’re not racing it doesn’t make much difference.
posted by Miko at 9:15 PM on May 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

Don't worry if you never get it, tapping the wall and not gliding the 5m means you've worked an extra 5m each lap of the pool.

Don't worry about getting your sense of orientation until the turn is finished.
Don't panic about it not going right during the flip, finish up and work out what happened.

I say those two because, over time, you'll calibrate the senses that help you understand what's going on during your flip turn, but at first it is overwhelming and confusing.

P.S. This assumes you swim with goggles and can see (as well as goggles let you see) under water.
posted by k3ninho at 12:12 AM on May 19, 2021

I’ve been a masters swimmer nearly my whole adult life, but I learned flip turns in my 20s. This thread has a lot of bad advice — I’m not going to go through and pick on people but there’s a lot of things that would result in you working too hard and being inefficient and therefore making the turns less pleasant. Get a lesson, then keep doing them even when they make you miserable and eventually they won’t. That’s pretty much it.
posted by dame at 4:06 AM on May 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

keep doing them even when they make you miserable and eventually they won’t

This advice is applicable to learning any new skill.
posted by flabdablet at 4:09 AM on May 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

I don't understand the somersaults/cartwheels analogy. I am not able to do either, but can do flip turns no problem (assuming the breathing timing works, which is a different story). Seconding lessons. Look for experienced adult instructor who will be able to explain the movement multiple different ways. If lessons are impossible, the video amanda liked to above helped me a lot. As did this one - trick is to first be able to do it without the wall (the guy in the video uses the phrase "pretend, like you want to kiss your knees", which seems really apt actually). I also watched a video, which I cannot find now, where the next step is to swim up to the wall with each of your palms on a board, the moment the boards touch the end of the pool, you duck in, letting go of the boards. I don't know why, but trying this once was a complete breakthrough for me. Oh - don't change your mind about doing the flip turn in the middle of it.
posted by Dotty at 5:59 AM on May 19, 2021

+1 for a couple of lessons. Freestyle* flip turns become easy to do, but they aren't at all intuitive or even easily done by watching others do them. I was a competitive swimmer as a kid and recall that we were taught freestyle* flip turns one-on-one and hands on - and that was while we were all a lot faster, shorter, more flexible, and more kinesthetically plastic than you likely are now.

*Backstroke flip-turns were a dark art as far as I was concerned. I never got mine to nearly the level of efficiency that you need (the increased turnaround speed is less important than the power benefit of kicking off from the wall) and I never quite got over worrying about breaking my wrist or head against the wall.
posted by MattD at 6:11 AM on May 19, 2021

I have a hard time with inversions in my yoga practice. For me the feeling that makes it hard is fear, because I'm scared of the aspect of inversion in a headstand or backwards roll where I have to trust my body to do it while my neck and head feel vulnerable. The action happens faster than I can think myself through it step by step, so it involves just throwing the body into it, and it's unfamiliar and feels unsafe. In my case, this had little to do with actual bodily safety - even with a yoga teacher behind me, offering to catch my legs so I wouldn't fall, for example, I would have a terrible mental block about actually kicking up into a headstand. It felt weird and unfamiliar. What helps me with this is repetition, and, strangely, letting the fear of it eventually turn into frustration and anger. If I feel angry enough that I can't seem to take the final step to roll over into a backwards roll, the anger will help me just be able to do it without thinking so much. When you say your mind and body went nope! while trying to learn inversion, it reminded me of my own difficult internal emotional ride. It's okay for it to feel unsafe to do this, even if it's easy for other people to do- wanting to protect your body from injury and harm is a very natural thing to feel.
posted by lizard music at 7:38 AM on May 19, 2021