Taking a dip into a heated pool or the pounding surf can be quite refreshing; it can also be good exercise. Swimming is an activity that can help you shed weight, build and tone muscles, improve your lung capacity, and even boost your cardiovascular health. Swim like Aquaman and you’ll step out of the water feeling like Wonder Woman or Superman. For this week’s Wellness Wednesday, we’re looking at the health benefits of swimming.
Whole Body
While so many exercises will focus on developing a single part of your body, swimming is a whole body workout. What that means is each of the different strokes you can do (like breaststroke, backstroke, sidestroke, butterfly, and freestyle) works out a different muscle group. Even a brief bit of doggy-paddling in the water can help tone and firm up your muscles.
Low Impact
If you’re older, recovering from injury, or easing back into exercise after a few years of living a sedentary lifestyle, swimming can be a great way to work out without putting too much strain on your body. That’s because swimming is a low-impact exercise. Low-impact exercises ramp up your heart rate at a slower, more gradual pace. Low-impact activity also puts less pressure on your joints and muscle tissue than more intensive exercises. That doesn’t mean that low-impact exercises are ineffective! You can absolutely build strength, lose weight, and better your health through low-impact workouts.
Burns Fat
When it comes to ‘return on investment,’ few activities pay off in terms of the amount of calories burnt versus effort put in like swimming. As a whole body workout, swimming actively engages several different muscle groups, which burns calories. An added benefit of swimming is that it can help increase your metabolism. An elevated metabolism can increase your energy levels throughout the body and boost the amount of calories you burn during workouts.
Weight Loss
While swimming is a low-impact exercise, it can have a huge impact on your health! Swimming burns a considerable amount of calories because of the resistance of the water. When you’re swimming, your body is burning up a lot of energy to struggle through that water, energy that burns through your reserve of calories.
Improves Quality of Sleep
Having trouble falling asleep? Do you wake up feeling exhausted and tense? A big benefit of swimming is that it can improve your overall quality of sleep. There are several reasons why swimming can have such a relaxing effect on our bodies: the post-exercise exhaustion; our body temperature rising/lowering due to being immersed in hot or cold water for an extended period of time; and exposure to sunlight if you’re swimming outdoors. If you plan on swimming on a regular basis, time your swims for later in the day so you can benefit the most from that post-workout fatigue (you definitely don’t want to go to work feeling sleepy!).
Eases Pain
If you’re suffering from arthritis, chronic back pain, or fibromyalgia, swimming could bring you much-needed relief. The buoyancy of the water, coupled with the low-impact swimming strokes, can help ease joint pain and stiffness while improving your muscle strength. Swimming is also a good choice for people dealing with reduced mobility.
Article by Austin Brietta
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