People often ask me why I talk about other types of exercise, which don’t involve coming to Evolution Lifestyle Fitness or linking to our website. It’s because I want everyone to enjoy the joys of being active and swimming is a very active sport. It’s fun and a good way to spend time with the family, while burning extra calories for weight loss.
Swimming burns lots of calories.
Just like any type of cardio, swimming helps burn calories. Not only does it provide a great workout to boost your heart health, it also helps boost the calories you burn. Unlike walking, running or bike riding, when you swim, you have an additional obstacle to face. That’s the extra resistance that water adds to the workout. It forces your body to use more muscle. Just walking in a pool that’s waist high can be far more wearing and difficult, burning more calories, than walking the same distance on dry land.
Swimming helps build strength as it burns calories.
The resistance of water works your muscles to burn extra calories as you do it, but it does even more than that, it builds muscle tissue. Muscle tissue requires more calories 24/7 than fat tissue does, so you’ll be boosting your metabolism as you build more muscle tissue. One study showed that middle aged women that spent just 60 minutes swimming three times a week lost substantial amounts of body fat, not just weight.
You’ll lose abdominal fat, too.
Visceral fat, which is the fat around your belly that crowds organs and is the most dangerous, is also the hardest to lose. When you lose weight, you lose it all over your body, but you can target core strength and burning abdominal fat with certain exercises. Butterfly kicks builds obliques and flutter kicks increases the strength in the lower abdomen. A study done in 2015 in the Journal of Exercise Rehabilitation found that swimming as little as three times a week caused the swimmers to lose more fat to come off the waist and hip area than their counterparts who walked that often.
- Swimming is healthy for people of all ages due to its low impact. It’s far easier on the joints than running and many other cardio workouts and also causes less damage than lifting weights.
- The number of calories you burn when you swim depends on how vigorous you are and your present weight. It can burn as much as 800 calories an hour for an intense workout to 500 calories an hour for a moderate one.
- Swimming helps build core strength and works both the upper and lower body. It helps improve muscle definition, too.
- Don’t forget that you still need to eat healthy, so if you spend the day at the beach, take a long a cooler of healthy snacks and meals to avoid buying unhealthy food at the concession stand.
For more information, contact us today at Evolution Lifestyle Fitness