Five Health Benefits of Swimming
Here at SwimOutlet.com, we obviously love the sport of swimming! It’s a sport that you can do at any age provided you have learned how to swim or are learning to swim with the first-hand help of a teacher.
Besides being fun, swimming has some genuine health benefits, too, so whether you are swimming for recreation, fitness or more serious competition, your body is getting something positive out of it.
Here’s a list of five great health benefits you get from swimming and why we think it’s one of the best sports for your lifetime!
First off, like any sport, swimming helps build endurance, muscle strength and cardiovascular fitness. In particular, because of the physical exertion needed to swim through water, you are getting this workout in a very compact period of time when compared to other sports.
Perhaps the biggest and best characteristic of swimming when compared to most other activities is that it’s low impact. Unlike running, tennis or basketball, for example, where your joints and knees can take a pounding upon impact or change of direction, swimming’s lack of high impact as you move through the water makes it an activity that is lower stress on your joints. This helps prevent injuries, while making your body stronger at the same time.
Swimming is a terrific all-body workout. A lot of sports can give you a great workout in one part of your body, but very few can provide a full-body workout like swimming, since nearly all of your muscles are used while doing the main strokes in the water (unless you decide just to use a kickboard, for example). On top of that, you can mix up your stroke variety to work your muscles in different ways and motions. Swimming is unique in this sense because it can help minimize your muscle imbalances that you might have built up over time from other sports or repeated activities that don’t feature the same all-body workout.
Since swimming is a good activity for calorie burning, regular swimming has the benefit of helping you maintain a healthy body weight. We might not quite be able to eat the 10,000 calories that Michael Phelps claimed he was eating during his Olympic days, but it’s not unheard of to burn 1000 calories regularly during a lengthy swim set. Those are some pretty impressive numbers – unless you’re Phelps perhaps.
Lastly, several studies have shown that swimming has the ability to reduce stress levels for individuals who make swim workouts part of their day. So at the end of a long day at the office or at school, jumping in the pool isn’t just physically good for you but it can be mentally reinvigorating as well. Or kick-start your day with a lower stress level by doing an early morning swim. We’re confident that it will give you a better outlook to start the day!
There are many other benefits to swimming from camaraderie of a swim team to self-discipline to mental focus, but all of these depend on various other factors. The five health benefits listed above are the fruits of your labor that you will get no matter what kind of swimming you do: fitness swimming, casual swimming or top level racing.
