Freeway - An individual sport together with your teammates

An individual sport together with your teammates

It's important for everybody to know how to swim, so why not take it a step further? Swim-practise is fun, good for your health plus that it saves lives. Swimming is really something to recommend for everyone. Start swimming and I guarantee that a lot of people will be jealous of your muscles.

Health
Swimming is great exercise for your entire body, it gives you strong and endurable muscles. It also gives you better condition and the risk for injuries is very small. Swimming is also good for people who have an injury from, for example, some other sport or accident. This is because swimming helps to build up the muscles again and at the same time you don't overwork the muscles.

Swim-practise
Most people think that swimming is just going back and forth in a pool, but it's so much more than that. There are four different kinds of swim-styles, freestyle, butterfly, backstroke and breaststroke. With this you can get a very varied form of training. By doing different exercises, and there are many, you don't have to do the same thing all the time.

For example, a person who practises five times a week, hardly ever has to do two even similar training sessions a week. When you swim-practise you often have one of the different swim-styles as your ”special style”, this is the swim-style that you practise the most and the style that you really want to perform in at competitions. If you really want to become a better swimmer then you shouldn't just go to the pool and swim sometimes now and then. Join a club instead, it's so much more fun and then you have a coach who can guide you in what you're doing wrong and help you to become a better swimmer. It is really fun to have people to swim-practise with as well, people who can support you and in that way help you to perform better. The people who you exercise with help making the practise fun and when the different training sessions are fun, then you want to go on with it.
Some equipment you can use during practise

Competitions

Competitions are the ultimate form of exercise. When you're at a competition you feel that you have to perform well, so then you do your very best. In swimming, as in many other sports, the competitions are where you can see the results of your practise. If you notice that you get better that always stimulates you to practise harder. And if you shouldn't perform well at a competition then you know that you have to practise harder. Plus that the competitions bring the people in the group closer to each other. So it's only positive things about it. Of course many people feel nervous when they are going to a competition, but that just helps you to perform better. If you want to become better, then the competitions are a great opportunity, it's fun, it helps you to get better and it's a great opportunity to meet people from other clubs than your own. It is really fun to have the other people from your own club with you at the competitions, these people cheer on you and help you perform better. The people in a group are like a team, and they help each other, even if they actually compete against each other.
At a competition

Swimming in Örnsköldsvik
In Örnsköldsvik we have many different swim-groups, and the people are very mixed. You can find everything from people who are just learning how to swim to people who are in the Swedish championships. Örnsköldsvik isn't a major ”swim-town” but yet we have some really good swimmers and it feels good to know that even if you don't come from a place where most ”good swimmers” come from you can still perform well and become really good.