Should I continue with my swimming lessons?

• Should I continue my swimming lessons? I'm an exchange student, and I'm thinking of spending part of my grant on finally getting a good grasp of swimming, but not sure if it's worth it. Moar details to follow. So, I guess it won't hurt to give specifics, but I'm spending a year abroad in Berlin as part of an exchange scheme. Part of the scheme is a very generous grant, which with my student loans, gives me a weekly budget far above what I could have at my home university. I still need to be a little careful with how I spend it, but by and large it's pretty comfortable. I say this because I feel like I owe it to myself to use this money to generally make this year as rich as possible with having great food and going to nice bars with great company, day trips to nearby lovely places etc etc. So, my friends who are here with me poke fun at me a little for choosing to spend it on swimming lessons instead. Where I grew up, swimming lessons weren't a thing. The only reason I have experience of swimming when I was young is because my best friend's family had a membership to the local Hilton, and I would sneak in under pretence of being his brother. He taught me how to manage a very sloppy front crawl that gets me from point A to point B, but that's it. There's a lot of wasted energy and thrashing about involved. So, I decided to get a grip on swimming and had my first lesson tonight. My instructor was great, and she had a great feel for when we could laugh at my getting tired easily or prodigious gift at avoiding synchronicity at all costs. The lessons are 30 euros an hour, and I get the feeling this is quite standard, and she seems to know her stuff. Basically, are swimming lessons worth it? Or can I, with enough repeated visits to a swimming pool, considering I'm not a total beginner and not scared of the water or anything, kind of eventually get better? Because I won't be able to afford more than 10 lessons, in the space for my budget, I don't think. Just to give you an idea of what my ability today was like, I found it really difficult to focus as suggested on my kicking. My instructor tells me my arm movements are not ideal, but they get the job done, whereas it's my general core and legs that let me down. I also just find focusing on my arms, fluid leg movements AND breathing from side to side impossibly hard. Anyway, AskMeFi seem to have a good couple of recent questions about swimming, so I'll look into those, but from what I've said, would you suggest I keep at the lessons? If I keep it at every two weeks, it wouldn't cut away at my weekly budget too bad, and I'd still go swimming 3 times a week otherwise anyway. Also, I'm pretty terribly unfit and this is a good way to keep fit in the cold weather. I guess the answer's pretty obvious, I thought I'd hold out just in case people have experienced it fairly easy to build up a good technique without extensive teaching and DVDs etc instead. On a side note, if I were to do them, would it be better to do the 10 lessons in a short 10 week stretch, or stretch them out between weeks? Maybe it doesn't make a considerable difference either way but I thought I'd ask.

• Answer:

  Why not take another lesson or two and then spend some time just practicing by yourself? Then you'll be in a better position to assess whether there's something in particular you need/want help with, and you get your exercise. From personal experience with casual swimming and other activities, I'm not convinced that lessons necessarily scale well over a short time-frame. (However, I am biased -- when I was living near Berlin I was poor and constantly busy, so discretionary money for daytrips sounds way too appealing to pass up for lessons you might not find useful.) It's a bit hard to tell, but I don't think the OP is going home to somewhere with easy/cheap access to swimming lessons.