Why Swimming Is the Best Summer Workout

By Christy Flom on July 28, 2015

During the warmest months of the year, there are many more ways to stay active outside. Besides the generic workouts of running or cycling, one of the best workouts is swimming.

There are a multitude of reasons why swimming is such a great workout, but a main reason is that it builds lean muscles. For both genders, swimming creates smooth and strong muscles. However, the endurance you build from swimming is considerably different from the endurance of running, cycling, or lifting weights. On any given day I would say I could run three to five miles for a good cardio workout. However, if I decided to swim instead, my goal would be reduced all the way to me finishing a slow mile.

Image by Jacob Walti via Unsplash

This leads to the next point that swimming utilizes muscles and body parts that are rarely used in other activities. Out of the four main strokes used competitively — butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, and freestyle — every single one of them uses different muscles. After taking a break from swimming during high school, it took only six laps of breaststroke for me to be sore in my legs because the motion is so different from running. I don’t even want to mention how difficult one lap of butterfly was for me to complete.

Other than working new muscles, swimming also helps your lungs. The main reason my parents threw me in the pool when I was little was because I grew up with pretty bad asthma. Swimming forced me to learn how to control my breathing and gave my lungs the endurance I needed to compete in other sports such as basketball and soccer.

I seriously believe that the proudest my parents have ever been of me was when I joined the “No Breath” club on my swim team when I was eight. This highly exclusive club consisted of swimmers who could swim one full length of the pool without taking a single breath. I even earned a cool t-shirt with fish on it that eerily resembled the main characters of the movie “Finding Nemo.”

Years after joining that club I am now eternally grateful to my parents for dragging me to swim team practice each and every morning every summer of my childhood. Swimming has become one of my favorite workouts as I have grown older. Aside from the beautiful and lean muscles I now have, swimming is best in the summer because I avoid having sweat pour out of me like I do when I run.

Another reason I love swimming as a workout is because I have seen how great of a skill being able to simply swim laps is for people to have as they age. While working at a family camp the summer after my freshman year of college, I was a lifeguard in northern Michigan right on the shores of Walloon Lake. One of the best parts of my job was talking to campers who would come and swim laps every day.

For anyone who knows what the weather is like in Michigan, even in the summer it can be pretty chilly. I was amazed at the dedication the swimmers had to get in the lake and swim at least a mile each day. From triathlon trainers to retired competitive swimmers, it was always evident that the people who came to swim laps every day in the lake were by far the most in shape and most athletic campers each week.

Image via flickr.com

The majority of the campers I met would come and swim a mile each day but there are many ways to get in a good workout swimming.

Starting simple is the best way to go for people newer to the water. Grabbing a kickboard and kicking backing and forth in a lane line is a great leg workout. And, an easy way to increase the level of difficulty is to sprint the last half of the length, kicking as hard as you can.

Other good swim workouts consist of slowly swimming several laps and then sprinting a lap and then repeating. Or, you can do a certain number of laps swimming each stroke.

Finally, if anyone vacations or lives near a lake, swimming along the shore or across a section of the lake is a different take on a swim workout. It is like going for a run on the countryside rather than running on a treadmill staring at a wall or TV. Swimming across a lake gives swimmers new scenery to take in that is remarkably different than swimming laps in an enclosed swimming pool.

No matter where you decide to swim, the important point here is that it is a different form of exercise that will make working out a new challenge. So, instead of baking in a lounge chair on the side of a pool in the steaming hot sun go and jump in to swim some laps. It’s said you get more tan in the water than out, if anyone needs a little extra motivation!

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