Like other sports in India, Swimming is also a neglated. As it is only states where it is strongly followed are Karnataka and Maharashtra. One of the reasons is that most people as soon as they know enough swimming to not drawn and be able to cross to the other side of the swimming pool think they have learnt swimming. This much can be learnt in 10 -15 days.

The real thing starts now. Learning proper strokes. There are 4 styles of swimming. Most common being what is known as Freestyle or front crawl. trhen come b reast stroke, back stroke and most difficult Butterfly. Learning reasonable levels of these would take about 6 months.
 
Then start training for competative swimming. There are also sub groups like WaterPole, Diving and almost unknown in India is Syncronised swimming. For competative swimming a child in 6 -12 years age groups would need about 2 hours of training daily through out the year. 12 years and above may have 3 hours of training daily usually in two sessions per day. Whily evening sessions are 6 days a week, morning sessions may be 4 -5 times a week.
 
Come summer and major competitions approaching the training may increase by 1 hour per day. The major problems in india are low availaility of swimming pools. Clubs pools are often not of standard sizes. [25 or 50 meters long.]. In north where less people swimm pools do not have enough swimmers in cold seasons and close down for 4 -6 months a year trainings going for a toss. But in Bangalore training goes on through winter. But even south states do not produce good swimmers. Karnataka dominates the scene followed by Maharashtra.

These two states take up about 75% of all medals in India. States like TN, AP, Delhi, WB and Kerala take up the rest. This is very lop sided. Due to lack of competition the standards are not improving. Even Karnataka which take more than 50% of national medals have only 2 swimming pools who share most of these.

Maharashtra has a little better distribution of swimmers across more pools. But people do not realise that it may be easy to get collage admissions, or jobs through reserved sports quata through this sport which does not have too much competition compared to sports like foot ball or hocky.

Please help spread this sport to bring about standard of this sport. [I have a child in the sport winning national medals. But lack of competition reduces efforts to improve]

Who is your favorite sports player in this field?

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