Swimming, in my opinion is the best form of exercise. If you’ve been around people that swim, then you’ve probably heard this opinion before. There’s a reason for it.
Swimming is a pretty amazing sport that requires coordination between many parts of your body. This coordination develops a natural balance and control of your body that can’t be taught on land. Because I love to swim for exercise, whenever I go to the gym, I look for and hope there is a pool so I can get in a real workout. You catch my drift?
As far as swimming is concerned, you can literally improve different aspects of your body by performing the activity. If you want to increase your strength, you can do a lot of laps or more aggressive strokes like the butterfly. If you want to increase your flexibility, you can stretch, perform wider kicks or do land kicks (front/back/side kick) while in the pool.
WATER VS AIR (H2O)
But first let’s talk about water and why I love to swim. Water is 830 times more dense than air. So when you walk around in the gym, you walk through air, which you don’t even put a second thought to. You just happily move from one exercise machine to the next.
Try and do those same exact steps while in a pool, and now you realize you have to work to get from point A to point B. You’ll also realize walking is not the most efficient way to move from point A to point B. Have you ever tried to run in a swimming pool? You can’t really run .. right? You’re just sorta moving side to side really slow because you’re moving through a dense liquid .. water. So when you do anything in the swimming pool, you automatically get much more resistance than you would walking around on land.
Because air resistance is very light compared to liquid resistance, when you’re in the swimming pool and doing the exact same exercises that you would do on land (in air), you’re probably getting 4 to 5 times the workout. That fact alone is pretty amazing.
And you can do a lot of stuff in the swimming pool that you can do on land, but people don’t take advantage of that because they would rather suggest they can’t swim, and therefore never to go the pool. That’s not my advice .. I love to swim and you’ll find me at the pool for any serious workout I do. Whether you can swim or not, you can get amazing workouts at the pool. Can you squat in a pool? (food for thought)
SWIMMING FUNDAMENTALS
Now, let’s discuss actual swimming. When you’re swimming, you get to workout all parts of your body at essentially the same time. That’s pretty phenomenal. Based on what you want to improve, as I was saying earlier, if you want to increase your flexibility, then you’ll do stretches or wider leg kicks in the pool. When you’re moving around in water, you don’t feel many of the limitations that you do in air for some reason. Just try it and you’ll see. My flexibility has improved tremendously although I’m not a flexible person in general.
There are 4 basic strokes when it comes to swimming. Freestyle, Breast Stroke, Back Stroke, and Butterfly. I think the most aggressive of these strokes is Butterfly which seems to take A LOT of energy regardless of how you perform it. The other strokes are more like running where you can swim aggressively (sprint) or swim for distance (long distance running). The workout you get with these strokes depends more on how you swim and how balanced you are.
SWIMMING TECHNIQUES
In order to swim WELL, you must be balanced. Think about that. To swim well you MUST be balanced. So if you workout with swim, that means you’re balancing as you workout. It’s not necessary to be balanced to push weights up and down. It is necessary to be balanced to swim well. Notice I said swim well. Of course you can swim unbalanced but that is different from swimming well.
So you’ll want to try all of the different strokes as you learn to swim. I’d start with freestyle which is the fastest type of swimming to get a good foundation and to be able to swim in the case of emergency (such as a tipped over boat). Then flip on your back and do a bit of backstroke to ensure you are balanced.
Finally, I’d move to butterfly and just wing it to see how I do. Butterfly is a very tough stroke, that will probably require you to build the muscles necessary to do it. So rather than just trying to do the whole stroke, you’d take small steps and first try to just move both of your arms at the same time while under water. Then you may work on the back fin kicks. And as your muscles develop, you’ll be able to just do it after a lot of practice. It is a phenomenal stroke that is second to none as far as exercise while in the gym.
If you are in need of swim lessons, then choose one our plans to get on the fast track to overall fitness. You can’t beat swimming, you can only envy it so better to get with it!
