10 Impressive Health Benefits of Swimming

Can Swimming Impact Your Health?

Swimming is one of the most effective yet natural forms of exercise. It utilizes all the muscle groups individually and helps you maintain a very high fitness level. Not to mention that it can be such a casual activity, it is sometimes hard to notice you have been working out until later that night when you have calmed down. You can start to feel the stiffness in your muscles. Besides being a great way to work out, cool down, and have fun. Swimming can have significant health benefits that can help dramatically improve your quality of life and general well-being. The best part is, anyone can do it – from newborn babies to the elderly.

Many physiotherapists will use swimming to aid some of their patients into the process of physical therapy. Nursing homes often offer swimming to their residents. Aquatic exercises can help the elderly combat things like osteoporosis, Arthritis, and general stiffness in the joints.

What are the Health Benefits of Swimming?

Let’s take a look at ten of the top health advantages of water workouts and lap swimming.

1. Helps Improve and Maintain Good Cardiovascular Health

Maintaining good cardiovascular health is the most important thing you can do for the general health of your whole body. It entails taking good care of your heart, lungs, and circulatory system. Having good cardiovascular health reduces your risk of diseases like coronary artery disease, cardiac arrest, strokes, and numerous others.

Keeping your circulatory system in good condition ensures good transportation of hormones, oxygen, nutrients from food to necessary parts of the body, dramatically lowers your blood pressure and also rids the body of waste products.

The breathing exercises you practice while swimming helps your body transport and process oxygen better throughout the body. Swimming laps will oxygenate your blood cells to a greater extent than when breathing normally and not very deeply.

In addition to keeping our lungs and our blood vessels healthy and pumping, swimming also keeps you fit by raising your heart rate in a safe way that does not put you at risk of any damage. Ensuring proper blood circulation through the heart and main arteries.

2. Accommodates Those With Disabilities

Some individuals with disabilities naturally find it difficult to find a suitable way to exercise, as there are many possible limitations. Things like having to stand upright by themselves, lift heavy objects, or having to face any resistance to achieve motion could get in the way of staying healthy. Swimming is an exercise that makes one weightless in the process, allowing a more extensive range of activities. Being weightless also provides for individuals who suffer from things like paraplegia to be able to be upright and equipped to do more exercises than they would outside of the swimming pool.

3. Safe For Pregnant Women

Often during pregnancy, many women will, at some point, start experiencing joint and muscle pain from the additional weight they have gained. When it comes to that point, it can be challenging to find a useful exercise that doesn’t put you and your baby through too much physical stress. Swimming offers a soft, weightless feeling that is safe for your body and your baby. The water will also protect you and your baby from sudden or harsh impact or the risk of falling over and potentially causing massive damage.

4. Great Way To Lose Weight

Like all other cardiovascular exercises (cardio), swimming burns fat at a fantastic rate. When we do activities like running and swimming, our heart rates increase, and our bodies start to burn through fat as fuel. Meaning the number of calories you spend depends on your current weight and how vigorously you work out – cardiovascular exercises utilize your bodyweight. So the faster and longer you swim for at a time, the more fat you will burn in the process.

5. Boots Your Mood

There are many ways in which swimming can boost your moods, one of the most obvious ways is biological – when you do any exercise, cardio, resistance or heavy lifting, your brain releases a flood of endorphins that will instantly make you feel happier and leave you with a sense of well-being. In addition to your body’s natural responses to exercise, your mood will also substantially improve when swimming because your brain will recognize it as a just-for-fun activity and think you are in a stress-free situation, helping relieve stress and tension and improving your mood.

6. Combats Insomnia

Studies have shown that swimming can dramatically affect your sleeping patterns and how much of it you manage to get. When you do exercises that take endurance above strength, your body gets more tired than it would with just the day to day activities. Making your brain more comfortable to shut off when you are ready to go to sleep at night. Swimming also improves the blood and oxygen flow to your brain. Having proper circulation helps the chemicals that put you to sleep to be adequately released.

7. Tones and Builds Muscle

The fact that swimming is a full body workout also benefits our muscle development. When we swim for training or competition, the vigorous style of swimming and what it demands from your body will end up building and toning your muscles at the same time. Many types of exercise only do one of these at a time. Making you have to choose which to do, but swimming is a one-pack answer to both your muscle building and sculpting needs.

8. Improves Your Energy Levels

One of the biggest reasons for aging is inactivity, by not staying active, our joints, bones, and muscles will start to deteriorate faster and earlier on in life. It is a well known natural remedy to muscle and joint deterioration. To swim regularly as it keeps your whole body active and like a properly oiled machine. After a few weeks of swimming regularly every day, you will start to notice a permanent increase in your general energy levels.

9. Increases Flexibility

The strange range of motions and efforts required for swimming workouts are all things that help your muscles stay flexible, limber, and stretched. The resistance we get from paddling and kicking the water provides us with a range of movements that cause our muscles to contract and then expand in a continuous motion. This constant stretching of the muscle keeps you flexible and will eventually help you swim better and faster.

10. Reduces Inflammation

Some studies have shown that swimming can have significant anti-inflammatory effects. Aerobic exercises like running, jumping, and swimming can reduce one’s risk of things like atherosclerosis build up in the heart by decreasing the levels of inflammation throughout your entire body. This decrease in inflammation can also reduce the risk of many other illnesses throughout the body since most ailments aggravated by untreated inflammation.

Swimming Benefits

If you aren’t one for the morning jog or cycle, maybe consider going for a surf or a swim as it can drastically improve your health and your general quality of life. Put on your suit, grab your towel, and head to the pool or beach for that swim!