While owning a pool can certainly provide you with an excellent way to relax on hot summer days, it can also benefit you and your family's fitness. Exercising in a pool can often provide you with a safer and more comfortable workout, as the movements are slower and less impactful on the joints. Because of those factors, water exercises are often recommended for people with arthritis, pregnant women or people who are overweight.
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Swimming builds endurance, increases muscle strength and improves cardiovascular fitness. This form of exercise can also serve as your workout's cross-training component. Utilize your swimming pool for a warm-up activity to increase your heart rate and warm up your muscles before a workout, or cool down in the pool post-workout to ease your muscles into a resting state and help you relax. You can also use the pool for your entire workout, swimming is perfect for all-around fitness! Wondering how swimming compares to other workouts? Swimming burns 3 calories a mile per pound of bodyweight.
Fitness Expert, Pilates Instructor and Lifestyle Weight Management Coach Francesca Pucher of Fitness 121 Exercise Studio in New Jersey shares the following tips:
- Pool Jogging is probably the best and my favorite. It is non weight bearing, elevates the heart rate and is extremely challenging.
- Push-ups off the step or kicking holding on to a board or the wall. Or inner thigh circles to target the quads/hamstrings and thighs.
- Laps are also great. I like to swim a lap get to the end, hold onto the wall and kick 20x, then swim to the other side and repeat. My favorite is breast stroke, easy to learn but gets all major muscle groups.
She says, "There are so many different forms of exercises, it is really based on what your goals are workout wise, and your swimming skills."
Many trainers can design a specific water exercise routine to match your fitness goals, or you can use one of the many great resources available online to model your routine after.
In the pool you can always make a workout harder or easier. Some of the easiest ways to intensify a workout is to limit breathing (i.e., breath every other stroke, every 4 strokes or every 5 strokes), to swim faster and to kick hard off every wall in a tight streamline.
Swimming, like most forms of exercise, is best when diversified. By this I mean swimming lap after lap is less beneficial than swimming a few laps, kicking a few laps, and throwing in a drill or two. One of my favorite workouts is 4 x 100 (25 swim, 25 kick, 25 drill, 25 swim). If you're feeling adventurous, boost it up to 8 x 100 or maybe 4 x 200. The goal of this exercise is to intermix swimming, kicking and drills.
Drills are important not just for exercise but also for improving the stroke. The more effective the stroke, the more effective the workout can be.
Kicking, although it relies primarily on legs, can be done such that it engages the core as well. The standard way to kick is with a kickboard, holding the top of the kickboard with your head out of the water. An alternative way of kicking is to kick on your front or your back, either with your arms at your side or in a tight streamline. If you're interested in getting a good core workout, be sure to kick in a streamline. The best kicking exercise to tone the abs is dolphin kick in a streamline position on your back. Another way to use your whole body while kicking is to kick on your side. Kicking on your side requires that you engage your core in order to maintain balance. The last, but not least, form of kicking is vertical kicking.
Vertical kicking intensifies the leg workout as your leg is kicking water the entire time (unlike when you kick with a board and your feet come out of the water a bit). Vertical kicking is just that, completely vertical. Try vertical kicking first using your arms like you would while treading water. Bump it up a notch by holding your hands outside of the water and then, for the ultimate work out, put your arms in a tight streamline above your head while you kick.
Another important element to a good swim workout is timing. Push yourself by swimming intervals. Those 4 x 100 you were working on? Let's make them 4 x 100 on the 2 minutes. Now you have a choice; do you swim really fast to get extra rest before your next 100, or do you swim at a moderate pace and get little rest? An easier way to practice intervals is to simply limit your rest (e.g., 4 x 100 with 10 seconds rest between each 100).
Obviously, the pool provides a variety of ways for you to help keep yourself fit. Aside from our experts, there are plenty of other locations around the Internet that will help you achieve your fitness goals. Here are some of the better ones we've found:
