Swimming is one of the most popular sports in Germany. Whether you swim laps professionally or enjoy gliding through the water every now and then in your free time, swimming has numerous benefits for the body and mind with lifeguard class near me.
Swimming is so healthy
Like running or cycling, swimming can be categorized as an endurance sport. You strengthen your cardiovascular system and expand the capacity of your lungs.
Compared to sports on land, swimming has the bonus that the water pressure increases these effects on your fitness. Because the blood vessels under the skin are constricted in the water, your heart has to work harder to transport oxygen to every single cell. In this way you train the heart muscle and increase your heart volume in the long term while reducing your heart rate at the same time.
The same applies to the lungs: the chest is also slightly narrowed by the water pressure and your lung muscles have to fight against this pressure. As a result, they work harder and your lung volume increases, which improves your endurance enormously.
The more intensive work in the lungs also ensures better evacuation of mucus from the airways. This makes swimming a recommended sport, not least for asthmatics.
However, beware of high blood pressure and heart disease: in some cases, the conditions in the water can have a negative impact on your health. Talk to your doctor beforehand about whether swimming is right for you.
Gentle on the joints and relieving
What swimming can score against other sports is the gentle and relieving effect on joints and intervertebral discs.
This is due to the buoyancy of the water. You probably know the feeling that you feel wonderfully light and weightless in the water. This makes it much easier to move around and is perceived as more relaxed.
After all, there is no gravity in water. Instead, the water always pushes you slightly upwards and you are actually only carrying about a seventh of your body weight. This relieves your joints and intervertebral discs enormously.
This makes swimming accessible to those who suffer from joint pain (e.g. caused by arthrosis) or are overweight.
Swimming training strengthens your muscles
- Many hope that swimming will help them build muscle . Not without good reason, because if you look at professional swimmers, you see well-trained bodies.
- In fact, moving in water activates all muscle groups. Legs, arms, shoulders, abs, back and buttocks are all used and trained in the strokes.
- The training effect is significantly higher in terms of muscle building than jogging, for example. Jogging primarily puts a strain on the leg muscles and there, too, serves more to maintain existing muscles than to build new ones.
- In addition, the water density is about 14 times as high as the density of air. This means that you have to fight against a higher resistance than in endurance sports on land. Muscle builds most effectively when you work with resistance.
- But: Strength training does not replace swimming. On the one hand, the resistance in the water is not great enough for this and, on the other hand, you are not working against gravity in the water, which relieves not only the joints but also the muscles. However, swimming training does not claim to replace intensive strength training.
- Incidentally, swimmers look particularly tight because the gentle pressure of the water massages the skin and connective tissue and acts like a kind of compression stocking.
