What if something doesn’t work for me at all

It might happen that you get stuck on an exercise and won’t be able to move forward. It’s important to realize that swimming greatly reflects your body composition, strength, coordination, fitness, the condition of your deep stabilization system, and you’ll likely hit some areas that will be very difficult for you, making training quite frustrating.
In some areas you might be at level 5 right away, in others you might get stuck at the beginning—but those are your weak spots that are limiting your crawl. It’s extremely important to spend the most time on the exercises that don’t go well. This is the big difference from having a coach or not. A coach would push you, but now you have to push yourself.
Of course, in reality, you’ll progress differently in each chapter, so it might look like this. It’s not a problem to be ahead in one chapter, but you simply can’t skip one area completely. We try to gradually raise all levels evenly, otherwise your crawl will never fit together—each link is important.
If an exercise really doesn’t work for you, you basically have two options:
The first option is to keep trying the exercise tirelessly from every angle – you can find an easier variation, usually with the use of a swimming aid, which you gradually stop using until you manage to do the original exercise that was giving you trouble. The goal is to train your way up to it through persistence. Not giving up and repeatedly trying requires a lot of self-discipline, but in my opinion, it’s the preferred option – even though I understand that the feeling of sinking in the pool can kill your motivation completely.
The second option is to skip the exercise after a few failed attempts and move on to the next, more difficult one. There are exercises that feel nearly impossible for some people, while others handle them easily but struggle with something else. However, be careful – if the next exercise or next level doesn’t go well either, it means you haven’t yet mastered the core of that chapter, and you need to go back to the beginning and revisit everything that didn’t go well, even though you pushed through anyway. This is especially important when it comes to breathing or body position in the water.
But since I’m nice, I’m giving you one wildcard per chapter – you can skip one exercise that just doesn’t work for you, frustrates you, and is blocking your progress to the next level.
And here’s the good news: it often happens that the skipped exercise just “clicks” later and fits into your overall crawl naturally, once you stop focusing on it. You might even find that once you’ve reached a much more advanced level – say level 8 – and you go back to try the “cursed” exercise from level 4, it suddenly works and feels easy peasy.