The Benefits of Swimming: healthy body and mind. Part 1/2

The benefits of swimming are widely recognized. Swimming as regular part of your fitness program has great positive influence on your body and soul balance. Swimming indeed, completely fulfills the Latin saying “Mens sans in corpore sano” which means “A healthy mind in a healthy body”. In the first part of this post on benefits of swimming I will explain why swimming is such a good body fitness exercise. In the second part, I will focus on the mental benefits of swimming.

Physical benefits of swimming

As we mentioned on several of our posts on swimming workouts, swimming provides a great all-around cardiovascular fitness training, improves strength and endurance and keeps your body flexible and injuries free. The standard swimming strokes, freestyle, butterfly, breaststrokes and backstroke, engage all the major muscle groups into a symmetrical physical exercise. Other physical activities such as tennis, jogging or cycling, just to mention a few, do not provide the same complete and harmonious training for your body.

Tennis is fun, but certainly is not symmetrical. Have you ever seen professional tennis players? Unless they go through a heavy compensation program on the gym only half of their body is developed. If they are right-handed, only the right hand side of their upper body has well trained and healthy muscles. The benefit of the swimming strokes is that all muscles of your body get the same amount of quality training and will make up a great looking body shape.

Jogging, is a very nice activity to do outdoor, enjoying nice scenery in the country side or in a nice city park. However, it mainly trains the lower part of your body and it is an injuries prone activity. The shock that your back, ankles and, knees receive at every step can easily create injuries in a body which has not being prepared for it. The benefits of swimming instead are that, because of the support the water provides, you have the luxury of training both the upper and lower part of your body in a weightless environment. You do not have heavy impacts with the ground and your joints and ligaments are kept safe.

Cycling, as jogging, trains only your legs and can be heavy on your knees. Depending on the intensity and the workout program you follow, all these activities train your cardiovascular system, lungs and heart but none has the full benefits of swimming.

If you start swimming as fitness activity you will see results on your body already after few weeks of training. Let’s break down the benefits of the different swimming strokes.

Freestyle works out your shoulders and your back giving you a more robust upper body. After few weeks of training your upper body posture will change. You will seem having broader shoulders just because your muscles will be more tonic and you will naturally keep your shoulder blades back and your chest forward. Abdominal muscle as well as your gluteus and legs will become stronger providing a strong support to the core of your body.

Breaststroke trains mostly your breast and legs. So if you want to make your breast more tonic, no matter if you are a man or a women go for some breaststroke laps.

Backstroke and butterfly also work your full body but are especially good for abdominals, back and shoulders.

The great advantage swimming has over gym workouts is that, because you workout your muscles in the water and, because the swimming strokes include long and smooth movements, your muscles fibers will keep being flexible and well stretched. Every fitness trainer would go on and on on the importance of stretching for a healthy body. But let’s face it, we all cut the stretching part short in our training sessions. This is very bad. If you do not want to get injured next time you get a tennis match with a friend or go out on the golf court, you need flexible muscles and the key for that is stretching. Swimming will make your muscles more stretched because of the very movement you do. If you will swim properly your muscles will be stretched and flexible, you will keep injuries away from you.

Doing swimming workout routines such as swimming interval training is highly effective also on your cardiovascular system. Swimming regularly, your hearth and lungs will become capable of providing more oxygen to your muscles increasing the lactate threshold. You will then be able to train harder or simply to get less tired doing any other physical exercise. While you are having fun working out in the swimming pool you also lower your sugar levels and burn calories which keep you healthy and good looking.

So, do you need any more reasons to get your swimsuit and towel and go to get wet?
Keep healthy keep swimming.

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Tags: benefits of swimming, swimming weight loss, swimming fitness, Swimming Training