Take the Plunge

You can do more than just beat the heat the next time you go to the pool. Whether you swim or do aquatic exercises, working out in water improves strength, flexibility and cardiovascular health.

Water provides more resistance than air, allowing you to exercise at a higher intensity with less wear and tear on the body and less risk of injury. That’s great for people with joint pain.

Swimming is a perfect water workout, according to the American Council on Exercise. Doing a half hour of the front crawl at an easy pace can burn about 250 calories, depending on your weight. If you pick up the pace, you can burn about 400 calories in the same amount of time.

If you’re new to swimming, start with 5 to 10 minute sessions. As you build stamina, add more minutes. Mixing up your strokes can keep your routine form getting boring as well as work different muscles.

For instance, the breaststroke is great for chest and shoulder muscles. The front crawl and backstroke target many muscles in the back. And the butterfly does a great job of engaging core muscles.

Not a strong swimmer? Consider a few swim lessons or find other ways to work out in the water. Take your jogging routine to the shallow end of the pool. Run in place, lifting your knees up toward the surface and pumping your arms vigorously.

Wisdom Wednesday: Cross Training

Cross training technically refers to an athlete training in a sport other than one they compete in with the goal of improving performance in their chosen sport. For our purposes, the goal is to improve overall fitness.

All sports focus on specific parts of the body but also ignore other parts. Running places a lot of stress on the legs, but little on the arms. Cycling is very similar in that regard. Swimming places more emphasis on the arms and significantly less on the legs, especially in long distance swims. All these sports benefit from a strong core, but none of them work the core hard enough to really create the strong core you need. Weight training can quickly strengthen the core and strengthen virtually every muscle group but it tends to cause some loss in flexibility. Stretching, an important aspect of any workout will give you that flexibility but it is often neglected because of time restraints.

Rest is the other vital factor in this equation. By cross training, you can workout several days in a row, but still allow alternating parts of your body to rest.

Let’s use my current workout plan as an example. On Monday and Wednesday, I lift weights. Monday is chest and triceps and Wednesday is back and biceps. I do some abs every workout and hate every minute of it. I’ll cover weight lifting in more detail next week. After I lift weights, I swim. Part of it is convenience; the pool is at the gym. However, swimming after lifting elongates the muscle in the arms and helps drive the lactic acid out of the muscles, speeding recovery.

On Tuesday and Thursday I spin. If I missed a lift, or want to do a little extra work in the weight room, I usually do that prior to spinning class. If I were training for a triathlon, I might swim prior to spinning and then run after spinning to mimic an event.

Wisdom Wednesday: Swimming

Swimming is kind of like riding a bike, once you learn you never forget. However, for many of us we never got beyond the basics of swimming. It can be a little daunting and maybe embarrassing to try to learn how to swim well as an adult.

The benefits of swimming are well worth the effort. It is one of the few non-weight bearing sports so it’s easy on the joints as we age. Anyone with a decent swimming stroke can continue swimming through their entire life.

It is also excellent cardiovascular exercise. The rhythm of the arm stokes and breathing create a pattern that naturally puts you in your aerobic zone. With a little bit of training, you can sustain that pattern indefinitely.

There are two basic approaches to swimming distance. First, there is the long distance swim. I see many people just get in the pool and swim a mile or more without stopping. While the cardiovascular benefit is great, form and efficiency usually suffer. Most of these swimmers display very poor arm motion as their muscles fatigue and appear sloppy and slow in the water.

The second approach, the one I prefer, is interval training. Intervals create short periods of rest that allow your arm muscles to recover, removing some of the excess lactic acid. This allows for much better form and in turn, more effective stroke production and speed.