When you start learning how to swim, it’s important to learn about what you’ll need for the activity. Regardless of your reasons for swimming, every swimmer needs basic equipment to ensure a successful start. For that, we’ve got you back.
1. The Bare Essentials
One of the reasons swimming is considered by many to be among the cheapest sports is its minimum starting requirements. A suit, cap, and a pair of goggles could be all you need to start your journey off on a good note.
2. Swimming Goggles
Traditionalists argue that you don’t need them, and you may not because you can still learn to swim without them. However, goggles help protect your eyes, and that should be reason enough to firmly include them in our top three basic swimming essentials.
More than anywhere else, the pool is where goggles are truly necessary. It provides a great field of vision for navigating safely around fellow swimmers and judging your distance from the walls. Not only will the naked eye fail to do this most of the time, but they are also prone to the pool’s harmful chemicals and other toxic whatnots.
Going goggle-less when swimming can make your eyes susceptible to redness and irritation. While blotchy redness tends to pass shortly after exiting the pool, it’s why it happens that’s the issue. Chloramines are produced when human sweat and other stuff get mixed together. That’s what’s causing your eyes to go red, and, no, they’re definitely not something you should ignore.
3. Swimming Cap
A swimming cap is another piece of gear that most beginners tend to be skeptical about wearing. That won’t exactly keep my hair dry, so why do I need to wear it?
First of all, a cap does not function to keep hair dry; it’s for keeping hair off your face so that you’ll know where you’re swimming. In a way, it also prevents the pool water’s corrosive chemicals from doing a complete number on your locks.
Then, there’s also the fact that swimming caps keep your hair on your head. While the amount of antisocial behavior that occurs in community pools is countless (for instance, peeing and farting in the water), you can help bring down that number by wearing a swim cap. That way, there won’t be any stray hairballs grossing out or, worse, becoming choking hazards for fellow swimmers.
4. Training Suit
It’s not only the women who have concerns about how they would look in swimsuits; the men do too. Some male swimming amateurs could just cringe at the idea of wearing speedos or swim briefs at their training sessions. However, that’s something the guys should get over, which they could very soon, considering the swimming boost that training suits provide.
Most men prefer wearing board shorts when swimming. While this makes walking around the pool deck more comfortable, it adds extra weight in the water, preventing you from swimming as freely as you may like. In case the traditional Speedo briefs don’t do it for you, there are square-shaped options available that are just as good.
Focus on comfort. If the added weight of the soaked fabric doesn’t bother you, feel free to swim with board shorts. Then again, once you’ve experienced wearing a hydrodynamic piece, the initial awkwardness of wearing it goes down the drain, and you can’t go back.
Nylon is the material of choice for most beginners. It’s affordable, durable, comfortable, and provides an excellent range of motion in the shoulders and hips.
Additional Items
On top of the essentials, here are other items you may need when you start swimming:
1. Ear Plugs
If you’re someone who needs to wear earplugs, then, yes, these accessories should be mandatory. Earaches and infections are the worst, and you should do everything you can to prevent them. Earplugs are the essential first step.
2. Swim Fins
You can make your swimming experience more fun by wearing swim fins. Not only does a pair of flippers add speed, but they also improve maneuverability and comfort. A good pair should help an open-ocean swimmer cut through the waves like a torpedo.
To get the maximum potential of your swim fins, it’s important to develop your legs. You need strength in your lower extremities to manage those flippers with relative ease. Swim fins also do their part in improving leg strength once you start using them.
3. Nose Clip
Some swimmers get a good laugh out of the notion of wearing one of these things, but its benefits brook no argument. Wearing a nose clip can help improve buoyancy, breath-hold duration, and initial kicking power. So, no, it’s not just for synchronized swimming.
Beginner Swimming Essentials: The Takeaway
Swimming is one of the more beginner-friendly sports in terms of cost. While you technically don’t need anything but a well-functioning body to learn how to swim (our ancestors are proof enough of this), the bare minimum essentials for swimming safely and efficiently should be within your financial capacity should you decide to acquire them.
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