It all starts off with the learning; the basic knowledge of how to swim. This starts at a very small age of 4 and onwards. Parents send their children to commercial centres, swimming clubs, golf clubs or life clubs and parents can also arrange private classes with teachers. An example of a swimming centre in Selangor is the Atlantis Swimming Centre. The swimming centre brings in teachers that teach swimming and only teach swimming for children.
Another way of learning how to swim in Selangor could be through clubs such as the Stingray Swimming Club where high level coaches teach the basic swimming lessons for children. Golf clubs or life clubs are also a place where children can learn how to swim as many clubs have good facilities and good teachers. Parents bring their children here to learn the basics and maybe even keep them there to learn the advanced courses that the club brings. The skills they learn here are very basic and mainly consist of breathing techniques, entering the pool, learning the front crawl, breast stroke and rarely the butterfly and the back crawl.
After the basics in swimming many children move onto the advanced courses which take place normally in swimming clubs, golf clubs and international schools. An example of both the swimming clubs and the golf clubs are the same as above and an example of an international school is the Kuala Lumpur Alice Smith School (KLASS). In these places children learn how to improve their strokes and also learn the back crawl and the butterfly. They also now learn how to tumble turn and dive properly. The children now at this age may learn how to improve their stamina by doing long lengths in a pool.
All the strokes are now improved and children are able to do long lengths and are now sent to intensive training where stamina is further increased and children and teenagers learn to swim faster and develop larger muscles for stronger swimming so that they can swim faster and longer. A good swimming club in Malaysia would be the Aquakudas which is situated in the national swimming stadium. Swimmers swim eight times a week. This is an intensive training and only a few people take this up and are normally teenagers.
There are a lot of competitions in Selangor for the ages of ten to under eighteen. Such as the in-house club swimming competition. There is also inter-clubs swimming competition such as the PRANS (in Malay) which means: amateur swimming association of Selangor. Clubs such as the Stingrays and Aquakudas would compete in this event. There is also National Inter-Club competition level such as the Tan Sri Ong Kee Hui Trophy. There is also school meets such as the MSSS (Majlis Sukan Sekolah Sekolah dari Selangor) which basically means national meet of schools in Selangor. There is also MSSM ( Majlis Sukan Sekolah Sekolah Malaysia) which means national meet of schools in Malaysia.
In Selangor, Malaysia there is also training at a National level. The national stadium, Bukit Jalil has its own sports school which is run by the Malaysian Sports Council where teenagers and even twenty year olds attend. It is like a normal sport school with both lessons and intensive training. That is mainly the only national level training that Selangor runs and either than that senior swimmers are sent overseas to pursuit better excellence in an academy of sports.
The national level of competition that the national swimmers attend is SUKMA which is basically a national championship of swimming in Malaysia which occurs every two years. There is also the Sea Games which is an international championship in South East Asia which happens every two years. The Asian games which take place every four years. The Commonwealth Games which happens every 4 years. The Olympic Games take place happens every four years as well. Although there are national levels in Selangor, Malaysia there are no professional swimmers in the whole of Malaysia as many swimmers leave overseas to pursuit better training and competition.