What foods to eat: Carbs (bread, pasta, and grains), fruits and veggies, and protein (peanut putter, meat, eggs).
Why? Carbs supply you with long term energy that will keep you going during your workouts; fruits and veggies contain a lot of great vitamins and minerals that will keep you going; protein will help keep your muscles healthy
What foods not to eat: Sugars (candy, ice cream, sweets), junk foods (potato chips, greasy foods, saturated fats), and pop, beer and drugs.
Why? Sugars are simple carbs that you will use and then your body will crash (sluggishness, tiredness, ect.); the bad chemicals and oils in them will not help your internal digestion and they make your body feel slow and unhealthy; and the last three are due mainly with reaction times (how fast you get off the block and how you recover), and your shouldn’t do them anyway if you are trying to get healthy. They will make you feel super slow.
Body hair: Normally swimmers don’t shave their heads, legs, and arms until they get to their final meet (conference, sectionals, state).
Suit: Speedos are the normal competing suits, but jammers (knee length suits) are also really popular.
Strokes: Start off with freestyle, and have a coach or trainer help you with the specifics of backstroke, butterfly, breaststroke. They are really easy to mess up and do wrong without coaching, so make sure you have help getting the technique right. Beginning swimmers normally start in free and work their way up to back, fly and breast.
A good site for stroke help is this one: http://ezinearticles.com/?Swimming—The-Four-Strokes&id=128364. Looking up the strokes on Youtube will also help you a lot too.
Good Luck!
