The Benefits of Swimming
One Simple Exercise That Allows You to Torch Fat, Spare Your Joints & Build Muscle at the Same Time
Some fitness writing involves helping a general audience keep up to date with the latest research and cutting edge reports from the field of sports science, but most of the time we’re just emphasizing the basics and helping to quantify or explain why what generations of fitness enthusiasts have understood to work actually works. Case in point: swimming.
Do you really need an exercise scientist or fitness influencer to tell you that swimming is a good exercise? Probably not. But what exactly makes swimming a good exercise — now that’s an interesting question.
RELATED: The Benefits of Walking
Swimming is a unique exercise, with a host of expected and unexpected benefits that make doing it regularly extremely worthwhile, so whether you’re already getting your laps in regularly or looking for an excuse to dip your toes in the water for the first time, read on to learn how you can benefit from making swimming a habit.
The Benefits of Incorporating Regular Swimming Into Your Fitness Routine
You don’t need to be a budding Olympic swimmer to benefit from swimming as an exercise. In fact, you can do it somewhat infrequently and still garner massive benefits. Here are some of the best reasons to take up swimming:
Swimming Is Easy on Your Joints
Running, sprinting, jumping, skipping rope and playing sports are all great forms of cardiovascular exercise, of course, but they do take a toll on your body, which is one of the reasons you rarely see elderly people sprinting or playing sports. Because swimming keeps your body suspended in water, though, you can get all the lung- and heart-taxing benefits of cardiovascular exercise without the constant impact on your ankle, knee and hip joints.
If you’re young, it’s easy to dismiss this as a minor benefit, but trust your elders, here: it’s actually a really, really big deal. Your success on your fitness journey is largely a product of how consistent you are over the weeks, months and years, and nothing can stall or reserve your progress quite like an injury or chronic pain.
And because swimming is so easy on the joints, it’s also an excellent exercise choice for people who are overweight or obese. If you, a friend, or a client are severely overweight, going for a run might sound like a great way to burn calories but it’s also a major liability, as all that added fat tissue can severely damage joints not designed to support that level of mass. Even if this doesn’t result in an injury, it won’t be very enjoyable, whereas swimming will provide all of the calorie burning of running without the discomfort or next-day pain.
Swimming (as Exercise) Is Surprisingly Beginner-Friendly
You don’t need to be able to execute a perfect front crawl to get serious benefits from swimming. In fact, if you’re starting out with a doggie paddle, you’re actually making swimming more challenging, and therefore even better cardio, due to the sheer inefficiency of your technique.
Too many people skip the pool workout for fear that they don’t have the right technique or experience, but the truth is, as long as you can actually swim, it’s very easy to get a great workout in without mastering any particular stroke. If you’re really new to swimming, stick to the shallow end and do whatever stroke you can from one end to the other, stopping as often as you need. Trust us: you will burn a whole lot of calories. Or don’t trust us and wear a fitness tracker.
Swimming Scales Easily
One major criteria of effective cardiovascular exercise is the ability to easily scale it. Take running, for example: you can manipulate the variables of pace and distance to make your runs easier or harder. Well, swimming works the same way. You can progress in terms of speed, completing laps in less time, or in terms of endurance, by being able to do more laps without resting.
Swimming Is Excellent for Rehab
Recovering from an injury or living with arthritis? Maybe you just have generalized muscle soreness, or aching joints? Good news: swimming is a great way to get your muscles going again while mitigating the risk of re-injury.
There’s even an entire range of pool workouts that don’t involve actual swimming, instead harnessing the density of the water to create added resistance to everyday movements like walking or lunging.
And if you have balance issues, or are working with an elderly person, the pool is a great place to do balance training, since the penalty of falling is heavily mitigated by the water.
Swimming Burns a Ton of Calories
Because it’s a total body workout, equally involving your arms and legs, and because the water provides a natural resistance that your body has to overcome at every turn, swimming is an extremely efficient exercise from a calorie burn perspective.
For example, a 200-pound man doing a butterfly stroke should expect to burn close to 1,200 calories in an hour-long workout, or 600 calories in a half-hour workout. Sure, you can get close to those numbers with a treadmill as well, but that level of exertion in running will have next-day consequences, from aching joints to sore muscles, that make it hard to repeat that level of exertion again.
So whether you’re trying to lose weight or just want to regularly engage in a great calorie-burning workout to give yourself more dietary flexibility, swimming is a great exercise to incorporate into your routine.
You Might Also Dig:
-
Workout Routine