Swimming Burns Calories!

Can swimming help you lose weight? We take a look at how swimming can help you achieve your weight loss goals.

Swimming helps lose weight, burn calories and puts little stress on your body. Swimming works all the major muscles, and will tone you up and slim you down!

You can train to swim at a competitive level or you can enjoy a few healthy lengths at your club or building pool; you decide how much you want to achieve in swimming and set your own pace.

Whatever level you choose, swimming is good for you and it's never too late to learn or improve your swimming skills. A relaxing form of exercise means weight lost by swimming is fun too!

Many clubs and building pools now offer swimming combined with aerobics(aqua-aerobics), to help lose weight. This is high impact aerobics without the high impact. Aqua-aerobics (or swim-nastics) will help to shed those kilos, and tone you!

Swimming burns calories, so helps you lose weight and swimming for weight loss has been regularly praised for its cardiovascular health benefits, especially for older people. As swimming uses so many muscles in your body, your heart and lungs must work hard to supply them all with oxygen. This means that swimming will give your cardiovascular system an excellent workout.

Any exercise that makes you breathe a little heavier is good because it means your body is working hard!  As your heart and lungs get stronger you will be able to go for longer before you get tired, your resting heart rate will decrease and blood pressure will lower.

Regular swimming when losing weight will improve your health and may reduce the risk of chronic illnesses, such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes and stroke. 

Swimming is known to be one of the best all round aerobic exercises because it works all the major muscle groups so targets every area of your body.

There are 4 main strokes to choose from:

Freestyle

Breaststroke

Backstroke

Butterfly

and you can tailor your swimming sessions to exercise specific areas of your body.

Top athletes use swimming to aid recovery from injury as it is low impact but still builds excellent muscular and cardiovascular endurance. So if you have had an accident and want to get back into exercising, taking up swimming is an ideal way to do that.

It’s fun. You don’t have to just do length after length in the pool. Things like treading water burns calories too. So if you have kids take them down to the pool and enjoy it. It will be excellent for their health too.

Swimming can be relaxing and give you a little ‘me’ time away from it all. Burning calories might be the last thing on your mind but what an excellent bonus.

Depending on your weight and exertion level you'll burn between 90-550 extra calories in a half-hour session.