Benefits of Swimming For Weight Loss
Swimming is a great cardiovascular activity that helps you lose weight by burning calories in the body. It involves major muscle groups of your body helping them to build strength and tones your body. People try several hard routines to lose weight and eventually fail to gain results due to some injuries or lose of interest in it. Also, there are people who are prohibited from lifting weights due to medical reasons. Swimming is good for all people irrespective of how old you are or your physical strength.
Why swimming works:
Water is about 800 times denser than air. So, it provides more resistance to each move that is performed under water. This leads to burning more calories in the body. As per studies, a person can burn about 500 calories by 1 hour of easy swimming. Little hard efforts can burn up to 700 calories in an hour time. Swimming mostly involves arms, hips, core, glutes and shoulders so, it also helps you build lean muscle in these areas. Swimming puts a lot less pressure on your joints as compared to workouts in the open air. So, water makes you near about weightless putting less stress on your knees, shoulders and other joints reducing the risk of getting injured.
Benefits of swimming:
As already explained, swimming makes your whole body work. So, it burns a lot of calories and helps in weight loss. It is especially good for older people due to all cardiovascular health benefits.
Since about all your major muscle groups gets involved while swimming, your heart and lungs need to stretch their efforts to pump extra blood as well as oxygen to these working muscles. This extra pressure over time makes your heart and lungs strong and ensures that these organs stay up to par.
Swimming builds up stamina and endurance in the muscles. So, you will do more than earlier before you actually feel tired. Strong muscles ensure increased metabolic rate, leading to regular calories burning and thus will help you lose weight.
Swimming regularly will help you build a strong immune system leading to good health and reducing the risk of heart problems, strokes or diabetes.
Swimming also tones your muscles and brings your body in shape.
Different swimming styles: Each of these swimming styles involves different levels of intensity and muscle involvement.
- Sidestroke swimming
- Front Crawl swimming
- Backstroke swimming
- Breaststroke swimming
- Butterfly style swimming
Getting started: Some basic tips that may help:
1. Find swimming pool in your local area and try to make a routine of at least 2 visits a week with both visits on non-consecutive days.
2. Before to enter the pool, always stretch your muscles and do a little warm up. This ensures regular blood flow to the muscles.
3. You can try different swimming styles to add intensity to your swimming workout.
4. Remember to carry a comfortable swimming costume, goggles and earplugs to prevent water getting into ears while swimming.
5. Keep your body hydrated by drinking water regularly after short time spans.
