Denise Prado: Teaching Swimming from Childhood to Adulthood
With 46 years at Clube Paulistano, the coach details playful teaching methods, conquering fear, and her life in the sport.
With over four decades dedicated to the pool deck, Denise Prado shares the pedagogical secrets to teaching swimming across generations. The coach explains how to make learning fun for kids while guiding adults to break through mental blocks in the water.
Swimming is a sport that demands discipline, consistency, and patience, whether for a child taking their first strokes or an adult trying to overcome a fear of water. With a 46-year career as a youth coach at Clube Paulistano, Denise Prado has accumulated an extensive wealth of experience that transforms the learning process into something natural, lighthearted, and effective. In an interview with Samir Barel and Wanderley Santos on Natação Stemma, the coach reflected on her journey from her childhood in Andradina to the establishment of her proven methodology.
Holding a degree in Physical Education with a specialization in swimming and early childhood education completed in Midland, Texas, Denise emphasizes that sports have always opened crucial doors throughout her life. Her experience as a competitive swimmer—competing in Brazilian national championships, South American championships, and the Universiade—shaped the practical understanding she applies daily on the pool deck, maintaining an early-morning training routine so she never loses touch with the effort demanded of her students.
Teaching Children: Playfulness, Discipline, and Safety
When working with children ages 5 to 12, the primary modern challenge is maintaining engagement amid competition from countless other activities and distractions. Denise explains that swimming should first be introduced as an essential life safety skill rather than merely an athletic obligation. To keep classes engaging without sacrificing technical discipline, she incorporates playful activities: pajama-themed swim days, breath-holding games, and simple point-and-reward systems.
Technical progression at the club follows clearly structured stages. In Level 3, where she coaches, the goal is to consolidate all four strokes (freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke, and butterfly), along with starts and flip turns, before swimmers move on to the pre-team or competitive training. The coach advocates that simple, concise instructions—such as focusing on only two corrections at a time—work far better with children than complex biomechanical breakdowns, allowing core activation and proper body alignment to develop intuitively.
Teaching Adults: Overcoming Mental Blocks and Vanity
Instructing adults involves a completely different dynamic than teaching children. According to Denise, the biggest hurdle for adults is rarely physical ability, but rather self-criticism, fear of judgment, and the urge to rush across the pool before mastering buoyancy. For this audience, the approach must be patient, respecting personal boundaries such as a fear of putting one's face in the water or apprehension when attempting a flip turn.
Conditioning and technique work for adults becomes significantly more effective through targeted video analysis for stroke correction and gradual adjustments to bilateral breathing. Denise highlights the importance of pairing pool sessions with strength training to prevent overuse injuries, reinforcing that mastering all four strokes is entirely achievable at any stage of life with consistency.
Open Water and Olympic Behind-the-Scenes
Beyond the pool, Denise keeps her passion for the sport alive by competing in open-water events. Among her recent challenges, she completed the 16 km relay at BISA alongside Fernando Mutarelli, tackling the course at a demanding pace even after returning from vacation and demonstrating her enduring competitive spirit.
Her involvement in the sporting world also includes a decade as an accredited Doping Control Officer (DCO) with ABCD and the ITA. This role took her directly behind the scenes at the Rio 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games, closely overseeing testing procedures for world-class champions across swimming, track and field, and team sports.