SG Sink Or Swim 

By Coach Tan Meng Chew (MC), SG Sink or Swim If your family is planning a posting, a study stint or a permanent move abroad, you have probably asked whether your child's SwimSafer certificate will count for anything there. I get this question from parents at SG Sink or Swim several times a year, often just before a long-planned relocation to Australia, the UK, Canada or elsewhere in Asia. Their children may have just finished Stage 3 or Bronze, and the parents want to know wh

Front crawl — freestyle — is the stroke every swim club lives and dies by. It's the fastest stroke, the one used in the majority of club training volume, and the one most swimmers will default to for fitness, triathlon, or open water long after formal lessons end. It's also, paradoxically, one of the hardest strokes to coach well. Because it looks simple from the pool deck — just arms and legs moving in a rhythm — clubs often under-invest in structured front crawl coaching re

Warm-ups and cool-downs are often treated as afterthoughts in swim lesson planning—a few easy laps tacked onto the beginning and end of a session without much intention behind them. But well-designed warm-up and cool-down routines serve real physiological and psychological purposes, and when built thoughtfully, they can improve safety, technique retention, and overall student engagement throughout a lesson. Whether teaching young beginners, competitive swimmers, or adult fitn

By Coach Tan Meng Chew (MC), SG Sink or Swim Every time the haze rolls in, my phone fills with the same message from parents and adult students: "PSI is high today. Can we still swim?" It's a fair question, and the honest answer is: it depends. It depends on how high the number is, which number you're looking at, whether the pool is indoors or outdoors, how hard you plan to swim, and who is getting in the water. That answer is not very satisfying, so this guide breaks it down

If you try to teach a complex freestyle catch to a three-year-old, you will both end up frustrated. If you try to teach a sixteen-year-old using the same "motorboat bubbles" games you use for toddlers, they will quickly lose interest. Swimming is a lifelong skill, but the way we teach it must evolve as the child grows. A child’s physical coordination, cognitive ability, attention span, and emotional maturity change drastically from infancy through their teenage years. To buil

By Coach Tan Meng Chew (MC), SG Sink or Swim Most swimmers in Singapore check the weather before a pool session. They look at the rain radar, glance at the sky, and maybe wonder about thunder. Far fewer check the air. Singapore usually enjoys good air quality. But every so often, usually during the dry Southwest Monsoon months, smoke from regional fires drifts across the region and the haze returns. On those days, a swim lesson or training session that looked routine on the c

Singapore parents know the drill. The sky turns a flat, milky grey, the smell of smoke drifts in from somewhere upwind, and a message pops up in the class chat group: "Is swimming still on today?" With the 24-hour PSI sitting in the Unhealthy band across several regions as this article is written on 30 September 2026, that question is not hypothetical. It's the one many parents are asking right now. The honest answer is: it depends on the number, the band it falls in, your ch

By Coach Tan Meng Chew (MC), Founder and Head Coach, SG Sink Or Swim Every few years, usually during the drier months between June and September, a smoky haze settles over Singapore and parents start messaging me the same question: should my child still go to swim lesson today? It's a genuinely good question, and the honest answer is "it depends," but not in a vague way. It depends on specific, checkable things: the current air quality reading, your child's own health, and ho

By Coach Tan Meng Chew (MC), SG Sink Or Swim Almost every month, someone messages us with the same two questions. Some are university students looking for a meaningful part-time job. Some are parents who fell in love with teaching after coaching their own children. Some are mid-career professionals who want to work in something that keeps them healthy and outdoors. They ask how long it takes to become a SwimSafer 2.0 Instructor and how much it costs. I have taught swimming in

Pathway to Becoming a SwimSafer 2.0 Instructor By Coach Tan Meng Chew (MC), SG Sink Or Swim If you have ever watched a child take their first brave kick across a Singapore pool and thought, "I want to be the person who makes that moment happen," then you have probably wondered how one actually becomes a swimming instructor here. The answer is more structured than many people expect. In Singapore, teaching the national SwimSafer programme is not simply a matter of being a stro

In swimming, there is a saying: "The race is won in the water, but the time is saved at the walls." When you are swimming between the flags, you are fighting a constant, exhausting battle against drag. But the wall itself? The wall is your best friend. A perfectly executed flip turn provides "free speed." It allows you to maintain the momentum you’ve built over the last 25 meters and carry it into the next lap without breaking your rhythm. Conversely, a sloppy flip turn acts

Watching your baby take their first steps or say their first word are universally celebrated milestones. But for many parents in Singapore, introducing their infant to the water is a milestone wrapped in equal parts excitement and anxiety. Is my baby too young? What if they swallow water? Will they cry the whole time? If you are looking to teach your infant to swim, the first thing to understand is that "infant swimming" doesn’t mean your six-month-old will be doing laps of f

By Coach Tan Meng Chew (MC), Founder and Head Coach, SG Sink Or Swim If you're a parent of a child with autism, ADHD, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, or any other additional need, you may already know that finding swim lessons isn't as simple as picking the nearest class. Many parents tell me they've tried a standard group lesson, watched their child become overwhelmed by the noise or the crowd, and quietly stopped going. That doesn't mean swimming isn't for your child. It usu

By Coach Tan Meng Chew (MC), Founder and Head Coach, SG Sink Or Swim Singapore is a country surrounded by water, and almost every family here will end up near a pool, a beach or a boat at some point. Yet the question I hear most often is a surprisingly basic one: where do I actually go to learn? Parents ask it about a six-month-old, a seven-year-old who's frozen at the edge of the pool, a teenager who never picked it up, and a grandparent who has quietly avoided the water for

By Coach Tan Meng Chew (MC), Founder and Head Coach, SG Sink Or Swim People often assume an adult swim lesson is just a child's lesson with taller students. It isn't. The stroke techniques are the same, and a freestyle catch is a freestyle catch at age six or age sixty. What differs is almost everything around the technique: how fear shows up, how the body behaves in the water, how a coach explains things, what the swimmer is trying to achieve, and even what a good first less

By Coach Tan Meng Chew (MC), Founder and Head Coach, SG Sink Or Swim It's a question I hear most often from parents of children who already swim reasonably well. Maybe your child picked up strokes at a holiday resort, learned from a relative, or spent years splashing around in a condo pool, and now you're wondering why they'd have to start at Stage 1 alongside a child who's never floated before. It's a completely reasonable thing to ask. The short answer is that, as far as I

By Coach Tan Meng Chew (MC), Founder and Head Coach, SG Sink Or Swim Lightning gets most of the attention when people ask about weather-related cancellations at Singapore's outdoor pools, and understandably so, it's the far more frequent disruptor. But during the drier months, typically the Southwest Monsoon season from June to September, when regional haze can blanket Singapore within 24 to 48 hours, a different set of thresholds comes into play, and I think it's worth expla

By Coach Tan Meng Chew (MC), Founder and Head Coach, SG Sink Or Swim Singapore gets thunderstorms often enough that, if you're taking swimming lessons at an outdoor pool here for any length of time, a rained-out session is basically inevitable at some point. The question isn't really whether it'll happen, it's what happens next. I've had enough conversations with new parents confused or frustrated by a sudden pool closure that I think it's worth explaining, plainly and in ful

When athletes hear "open water sprint," they usually picture the 750-meter swim leg of a sprint triathlon or a short 1-kilometer ocean/lake race. It sounds deceptively simple. It’s short, it’s fast, and it’s over in less than 15 minutes. But experienced open water swimmers know the truth: the sprint is arguably the most physically and mentally grueling distance in the sport. Unlike a 50-meter pool sprint, which is purely anaerobic and over in 30 seconds, an open water sprint

By Coach Tan Meng Chew (MC), Founder and Head Coach, SG Sink Or Swim A four-year-old who's never been to a formal class before doesn't process instructions the way an adult does. When they're nervous, overstimulated, or simply too young to have built up much English vocabulary yet, the language a coach uses in that moment can be the difference between a child who follows along and one who freezes up entirely. In a country as multilingual as Singapore, this is a genuinely prac