You don’t have to be an Olympic swimmer like Michael Phelps to benefit from the sport. People of all ages, from all backgrounds, and with various levels of experience can benefit from swimming. Swimming is one of the few sports you can do from a young age and all the way up into your 90s and beyond.
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Why not jump in? It’s not too late to gain from the hidden benefits of swimming. Swimming is perfect for your mental health and physical health. It is a low-impact sport that provides more resistance than dryland exercises and it has a therapeutic cooling effect on the body that contribute to its many benefits
Swimming improves social well being
Swimming is very much a social sport. Swimmers of all ages can take classes together, train together, or work with a coach in the pool. Even if you have a pool at home, it is where you gather with your friends and family. A study revealed exercising and socialising together leads to improved mental health. Participants in the study had lower levels of anxiety and depression than their peers did.
Swimmers become goal-oriented in their personal and professional lives. Swimming gives kids and adults something to strive for. Whether it is kicking a kickboard across the pool, improving a lap time, or recovering from an injury with water rehabilitation, setting goals and achieving them is the key. The skills swimmers learn in the pool to realise and achieve such goals are skills that can and will be used out of the pool as well.
Swimming makes you smarter
Regular exercise, such as swimming, improves memory function and thinking skills. This is good not only for the classroom and work, but it is beneficial for us as we age too. Regular exercise reduces inflammation and insulin resistance in the brain, which fosters new brain cell growth. Swimming also improves mood, anxiety, and stress, which increases the brain’s ability to think more efficiently.
When you compare swimming to running, you can burn more calories swimming laps around the pool than you can running laps for an hour. One hour of vigorous lap swimming can burn as much as 715 calories. The same amount of time running at 5 mph burns only 606 calories.
