swimshawmethod talks to: Steven Shaw

Who better to launch swimshawmethod.com than the man who made it all possible. It is 20 years since a newly qualified Alexander Technique teacher, Steven Shaw, first started teaching swimming. In that time he has radically changed the way he swims, and the way he teaches. Literally thousands of people have had their swimming transformed by Steven, and many of those would say that Shaw Method has changed their life.

Let’s go back to the beginning, how did you get into swimming?
I was a competitive swimmer from the age of 13 to 17. I swam breaststroke, which was a very popular stroke in the 70s and 80s thanks to GB Olympic gold medallists David Wilkie and Duncan Goodhew.  Inspired by those Olympians I was training four hours a day, seven days a week. I was totally committed, but in my A level year at school I realised I was never going to be good enough to win a sports scholarship to a top flight American university. So I gave it all up to concentrate on my A levels.

Did you carry on swimming?
No, not at all. All through university I didn’t even go near the water. When you swim competitively you judge your performance simply by your time. When you stop training you start to slide and it feels like a waste of time to go into the pool.  I took lifeguarding jobs in the summer holidays, but that was about it.

So how did you find out about Alexander Technique?
A friend of mine at university, who was a competitive swimmer, took up lessons in Alexander Technique (AT). By the end of my third year I was getting postural issues and I didn’t exercise very much. My friend was so evangelical about AT – saying it would change my life – that he almost put me off. However, I had a few lessons and, although it didn’t make a lot of sense to me at first, I found Alexander’s books very interesting.

Where did you do your training?
I went travelling after university. Whilst in Israel I met an AT teacher who was very inspiring and I decided to train under him.

When did you make the link between AT and swimming?
My teacher told me that the postural habits I had on dry land were influenced by swimming, and so it made sense for me to do a bit of work in the water. Then I started experimenting and re-thinking the way I swam. It was incredibly challenging. Like a lot of our pupils I suddenly went from thinking I knew what I was doing to feeling like everything I did was wrong.

When did you complete your training?
In 1990. I stayed in Israel for another year, working as a lifeguard and an AT teacher. I worked on my own swimming for at least a year before starting to teach, but as a lifeguard I did a lot of observation. I then started to teach swimming, not really for money, but as an experiment. I was working at a 5 star hotel and was able to observe people in the water as well as teach. I taught children and adults, and found a lot of adults were fearful. They told me about their experiences and the lessons they were having with other swimming teachers. Often those teachers were telling them to “try harder” and “do more”. I found that all this increased effort didn’t tend to produce a helpful result, but just letting go didn’t really work either. It started to emerge that there needed to be a balance. As I realised the difference between propulsive and non-propulsive movements I began to grasp where that balance should be.

How did your teaching style develop?
One of the key things I developed at that time, which came directly from my Alexander training, was using hands-on guidance. It seemed to make a huge difference to people. You could analyse people’s swimming, you could give them a description of what you wanted to do, you could even demonstrate, but what speeded the process along was manually guiding them into position.

What did you do when you returned to the UK?
I started working as an Alexander teacher, and then did my ASA swimming teaching training. At that point I just saw the swimming teaching as a way of making some extra money whilst I established myself as an Alexander teacher. I rented gym space in The Lingfield Health Club in Hampstead for my AT lessons and also offered lessons in the pool.

Did you market the two disciplines together?
Not really! It took an early pupil who saw my two adverts at the club – one for AT and one for swimming – to put them together. He had had Alexander lessons previously and thought if I taught AT, then I would probably use it to teach him to swim. His name was Armand D’Angour and he was very afraid of the water.

You taught him to swim?
Yes. He overcame his fear and decided that he wanted to write about it because it was a life changing experience for him. We decided that it made sense to write something together and so we wrote The Art of Swimming.

That’s when things began to change for you?
The book came out in 1996 and on the day of publication I had two full-page interviews printed: one in the Daily Mail and the other in the Evening Standard. My telephone number was published with the articles, and the response was overwhelming. It was far too much for one person to cope with. Luckily I had just signed a deal with The Laboratory Spa (where I still teach) so I had a pool to bring pupils to, but the demand for lessons was incredible.

So you decided to train other teachers?
Yes. I now employ about 50 teachers and have trained about 150 to date. I’m based in London, but I’ve taught all over the UK, in the US, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Holland, Estonia and, of course, Israel.

What is the difference between your method and other methods such as Total Immersion?
Well there are points of contact with Total Immersion – for example, they talk about body rotation and using your front quadrant in front crawl – and Richard Quick’s method talks a lot about postural awareness. But I think the main difference with Shaw Method is the way that we teach it, for example using the hands-on direction I talked about earlier.  Shaw Method aims to promote a way of swimming that also improves alignment on land reinforced by a range of dry-land swimming practices. I would add that everything I teach has genuinely been worked out directly from my own experience.

You are always working on your own swimming?
Yes. I try to swim every day and am constantly working on myself in the water. I am always increasing my understanding of the strokes and the way I (and my pupils) move in the water. So my teaching is constantly being updated. For example, if you came to a lesson in front crawl with me tomorrow it wouldn’t be the same lesson you received two years ago.

How has mainstream swimming teaching changed in the past 20 years?
Not a great deal. What teachers continue to tell me is that they are taught a progression for teaching children that kind of works, but when they are faced with an adult to teach they have no tools and don’t even know where to begin, particularly if that adult is fearful. Because of fears over child protection there is no hands-on guidance, and very little teaching in the water. Shaw Method teachers can draw on 20 years’ experience of the most effective way of working with adults and using touch, whilst mainstream teachers have no equivalent knowledge base. It’s a shame because hands on guidance really works. It’s essentially what Alexander Technique is: you can show someone how to get out of a chair, but until you put your hands on them and guide them they haven’t experienced it.

What’s the solution?
I’m working with the government at the moment on a scheme to teach the over 60s in London. If our pilot is successful we will roll it out across the country and offer swimming teachers training in our method. In the future I would like to see teacher training include a module on teaching adults that would start to influence the teaching of children too. I feel strongly that people should be offered a “wellbeing” model of learning swimming, not just the “competitive” model that exists at the moment.

What keeps you going after 20 years of Shaw Method?
More and more I’m getting into working with people with mental and/or physical disabilities. It’s really interesting because you have to think outside of the box and find new ways of communicating. It’s more challenging, of course, but when you help people discover an ability they didn’t know they had it’s a great feeling.

And potentially life changing?
Yes – I do hear that a lot. A pupil said to me the other day that Shaw Method had saved her life. After suffering a stroke, she used her time in the pool to get the use of her body back and now swims about 50 lengths a day. She’s in her 70s and really feels that without swimming she wouldn’t be here.

What about you?
Well if you had told me in 1990 that I would make a career out of swimming I’d have been surprised. I would probably not have believed that I would still be enjoying making discoveries through my own swimming 20 years later. That’s what keeps it fresh for me: there’s always a new challenge, something new to learn.

Contact Steven Shaw at Art of Swimming

Photo of Steven Shaw by Jane-Ann Purdy

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