12 Health Benefits of Swimming
Swimming is a great cardiovascular workout that can help you burn calories and build endurance while having fun and protecting your joints.
1. Build Endurance
Swimming will build your cardiovascular ability, burn calorie and fat and improve your health without putting too much pressure and wearing down on your bones and joints. Many fitness experts consider swimming equal to running and cycling in terms of getting into shape or maintain a healthy body weight.
2. Diversify Your Abilities
Focusing on several types of physical activity will allow you to become a more capable athlete overall and build new muscles that complement those you’ve already developed.
3. Boost Your Metabolism
Participating in a variety of fairly intense physical activities can help you give your metabolism a major boost, meaning it will help your body continue to burn through calories even when you’re not doing something physical.
4. Avoid Injury, Potentially
swimming is considered a low-impact physical activity. This mean swimming can save you from sore knees, ankles, hips, and calves, and could also prevent some of the more dramatic injuries associated with activities like cycling and running.
5. Heal Up
Swimming will allow you to stay in shape when you are recovering from pulled, strained, or even torn muscles as it tends to place significantly less pressure on the bones and joints than many other sports or activities.
6. Enhance Flexibility
Swimming can help build flexibility because it presents participants with lots of resistance without all the impact of other activities. The more flexible you are, the less likely you’ll be to sustain a muscle injury, such as spraining a muscle in your knee or groin.
7. Strengthen Your Core
Swimming offers an excellent core workout because it requires the participant to balance themselves in the water. You may not even notice how this leads to the tightening of the core muscles, but in reality a solid session in the pool can do more for your abdominal muscles than a series of crunches. A stronger core can help us become more flexible and may alleviate pressure on other parts of our body, such as our lower back, reducing the potential for injuries.
8. Build Stronger Legs
Most forms of swimming require constant movement of the legs strengthening your lower body without all the undue pressure placed on the muscles, bones and joints.
9. Stronger Arms, Shoulders
Swimming places a huge amount of pressure on the upper body muscles, strengthening your arms, shoulders, or chest, unlike cardiovascular exercises like running and cycling. So, if you’re tired of arm curls, push ups, and bench presses, go for a dip and do some laps in the nearest pool.
10. a Friendly Activity
Swimming is a cardiovascular activity that can be enjoyed with others and the pool is a great place to meet and get to know others.
11. Weight Loss
If you take swimming seriously as a cardiovascular activity, then it can be an excellent weight loss tool. The key is to make sure your heart is pumping, which usually means pushing yourself to the point where you run out of breath. In this case, you can shed pounds in a reasonable amount of time.
Additionally, simply being put in a position where you must don a bathing suit can be enough motivation to get in better shape :).
12. Learn a Life-Saving Skill
Becoming an effective swimmer could save your or someone else’s life should you or someone else be put in a position where swimming becomes a life-or-death situation.
Source: https://www.activebeat.com/fitness/12-health-benefits-of-swimming/