Swim To Live 2: Sport, mindfulness and much more

Swim to Live is a small collaborative partnership formed as an Erasmus+ sport project in 2017.  Our goals are oriented towards making a habit of regular swimming activities, gaining knowledge for swimming instructors, learning how to promote good practices, influencing local environment for club leaders and a Swim to Live license for instructors.

We want to spread the knowledge of teaching swimming and love towards swimming to previously non-active people by simply engaging them.

In 2018 we are focusing more on youngsters, 12 to 17 year olds, who are physically not very active and the focus is on underprivileged kids. We as a society are becoming more and more aware that what we learn as children stays with us for our whole lives. And the same goes for what we don’t learn. Today’s children are growing up in a world of tablets and video games. They are less and less active and more and more clumsy. And the numbers don’t lie, children are getting fatter. So what can we do about it? Children need to be more active and they need a basic physical knowledge, to make it easier in the future to learn new physical things. And swimming is a very important part of the basic physical skills.

The plan is to have 6 months of swimming classes twice a week for up to 5 underprivileged youngsters per partner country and before one swimming practice we will have up to 20 minutes of mindfulness practice at the swimming pool, and once a week a full hour of mindfulness in a calm and quiet environment. Which means 3 trainings a week for a healthy young mind and body. Before we begin with the classes, the instructors and social workers with have one month mindfulness webinar workshops from a renowned expert in this field.

Our innovation is adding mindfulness training through which our youngsters will become more aware of the mind-body connection.

Our plan is to implement mindfulness in regular exercise. According to new studies, physical exercise is a good way for improving mental health. With mindfulness, we teach youngsters that it is right to notice that the feelings are there, but it is not right to take those emotions with you, to react upon them.

There will be four transnational meetings in all three partner countries.

The first trans-national meeting is an advance planning visit, that will take place in Ljubljana, Slovenia, between January 27-29, 2018.

The other three meetings, in form of youth exchanges, will take place in:

• Ankaran, Slovenia – May 10-13, 2018;
• Cluj-Napoca, Romania – June 16-19, 2018;
• Naples, Italy – October 12-14, 2018.

Project coordinator:

• Riba Sport Club – Slovenia;

Project partners:

• Asociatia Babilon Travel – Romania;
• Sfera – Italy.

Related articles:

• Swim to Live 2: Continued (Part 3 – Romania)
• Swim to Live 2: Continued (Part 2 – Slovenia)
• Swim to Live: Adaptive Sport as tool for Inclusion