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Is possible to learn to swim, just by reading a lot about it?
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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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I'm going to disagree with everyone here. Loads of people throughout history have learned to swim by literally being thrown in. It's not a good way to learn, but people do it. Even babies can do it.
Given a little bit of reading first, you'd do just fine. Yeah, the motions might be a little off cause it's hard to learn a complex movement from a book, but it would be good enough.
In the immortal words of Mike Tyson, "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face."
No matter how much you study, landing in the water will change everything.
Reading will nevertheless help. It's not going to give you perfect form on your breast stroke, but that's not what OP is going for here. He wants to not die if he suddenly finds himself in deep water. There's plenty of benefit from reading about how to go about not dying under those sorts of circumstances.
Sure it will help. But by no means did you learn how to swim through theory alone.
Which is kind of the whole point of this post
The point of this post is to ask whether reading about techniques is enough to "at least, be able to swim enough to reach the steep end and save themselves from drowning."
And yes, yes it is. It's not going to make you a good swimmer but it will certainly allow you to accomplish that.
They learned how to swim by being thrown in.
Which would by definition be a form of practice.
Which means they learned how to swim by practice.
Which means they did not learn how to swim simply through theory. They first had to practice and then apply the theory they learned, which is still learning by practice.
The spirit of ops question would be reading and learning about it and then being able to jump in the pool and swim without practicing, immediately. Because if you cannot and you first have to practice then by the very statement of this sentence you learned via practice.