Is regular swimming good for Health?

Swimming is one of the favorite exercises among people of every major demographic.  Whether you are young, middle aged or old, man or a woman, obese or thin, swimming is beneficial for health in every demographic category.

Swimming regularly at least three to four times a week has been proven to be excellent for heart, musculoskeletal system and provides a good work out for almost every major organ in the body.  Swimming also has advantages over other aerobic exercises such as running, walking and cycling since it does not create sudden impact on joints in the musculoskeletal system due to water’s soft resistance.

Aerobic exercises such as running, brisk walking and cycling specially on hard surfaces such as walkways made of concrete, asphalt coated roads or stationary treadmills can lead to extensive wear and tear and adverse impact on joints. Many athletes such as basketball players, soccer players and American football players face persistent problems with their knees, ankles and spinal columns which exacerbates over many years if long period of rest and recuperation is not involved. Therefore running as a form of aerobic exercise cannot be sustained for many years by professional athletes as well as general public without a long list of injuries.

On the other hand regular swimming provides the same benefits as running or cycling without damaging joints over a period of time. Regular swimming can therefore be undertaken without any side effects in the long run. Swimming is also very helpful for those who suffer from chronic heart problems, arthritis, and is proven to be helpful for accident victims with spinal injuries.  People with arthritis might find excruciatingly painful to run or even walk, but they can easily do light swimming and keep themselves healthy in the long run.

Regular swimming is perhaps one of the best sports for overall mind body well being as it provides impact free workout, is sustainable over the long term and facilitates mental focus.

Filed Under: Excercises, Swimming Tagged With: ,

The Important Strokes

When you begin to swim, you may find that you are only doing the most basic stroke that almost everybody knows- the dog paddle.  And while you can mull your way through the pool using the dog paddle (and it can even save your life), you have got to move beyond that level if you are ever going to experience any kind of success at the sport of swimming.  After all, having a skill is great, but being able to show if off to people is a whole lot better still.  There are four different types of strokes that are typically done in competitive swimming.  They are the back stroke, the breast stroke, the butterfly and freestyle.  Each one has its advantages and disadvantages, but you can get good at any of them.

The breast stroke and the butterfly involve keeping your legs moving in the same way as one another.  The back stroke and freestyle, on the other hand, are flutter kicking strokes, because your feet move in opposition to one another during them.  And this is a fairly important distinction, because you will generally find that you are better at one type of kicking than you are at the other.  While some people master all four strokes (and become individual medley stars), most people will be doing very well just to get one stroke down really well.

There are situations in which every kind of stroke is important.  For example, you are more likely to end up saving your own life in a bad situation by using freestyle swimming.  It is the fastest and the second easiest to handle.  The breast stroke, on the other hand, tends to be easier when you are out to be aware of where you are going.  There is no better looking swimming stroke than the butterfuly, for when you want to impress people with your power.  And the back stroke is just good for keeping afloat effectively.

Filed Under: Swimming Tagged With: ,

Training to Swim

When you want to learn how to swim, there are a couple of different ways that you can use.  For many people, just being able to swim effectively enough to save their own (and anybody else’s) life is plenty to know for their purposes.  For some other people, being able to do complex, beautifully choreographed synchronized swimming techniques is the way they want to go with it.  And for some other people, swimming is a great way to win races.  Naturally, these are three very different ideologies, and as such they will involve using three entirely different strategies for getting to your goals.  And while they will all feed each other (becoming good at one will naturally push you a little bit of the way toward becoming good at the others), they are far from the same pursuits.

If you have ever seen a group of synchronized swimmers, you may notice that a lot of their time is actually spent outside of the water.  These young ladies will typically spend more than half of their training time on the pool deck, simply rehearsing their routines.  They get it down to the point where they could do the motions in their sleep (which would be very dangerous underwater).  But the most impressive thing about a synchronized swimmer is in her ability to hold her breath under water- their average amount of time is about two minutes.

By contrast, most people who are just swimming for their lives (or even competitive swimmers) are very rarely going to have to hold their breath for more than twenty seconds or so.  They spend their time in the water, doing lap after lap, after lap.  The training is more about getting the strokes down than it is to do anything to the beat of a song.  While there is no right or wrong, how you train is very much informed by what you are out to accomplish when you swim.

Filed Under: Fitness, Swimming Tagged With: ,

Pushing Yourself During Practice

A lot of people who first get into a swim team will develop a mindset that gets surprisingly complacent.  When your coach tells you that you have got to step outside of your comfort zone while you train, they are not simply telling you that you have got to come to practice.  While this is definitely an important part of it, consider how well you would likely do at a job if all you ever did was show up for it.  Of course, you would probably be mediocre at it on your best day.  And in a sport, which is perhaps even more competitive than many jobs would be, this is doubly the case.  You have got to push it a lot harder than that, if you want to be truly successful.

A large part of your success is actually going to come out of your mindset.  Some people say that how you train is how you perform.  And while there might be some exceptions to this rule, swimming is not going to be one of those times.  If you show up to practice every day and pretty much day dream your way through your practicing, you should not be all that surprised when the other swimmers and up passing you when the crowd is watching and the water is flying.

So when you get into the pool, you have got focus on your objective.  If you are swimming to get a lean, sexy look, focus on that as if it were an obsession.  And if you are swimming with the objective of winning races, you have got to push with all of your might, with the right intention to do so.  After everything, your ultimate success in the pool, just like your ultimate success in life, is going to come down to a roughly even mixture of thinking about it and actually doing it.  If you do that, and push yourself, you will succeed.

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Perfecting Your Strokes

When you first jump into the water, you are almost undoubtedly going to be a pretty bad swimmer.  Everybody starts out that way, even if they will later go on to win Olympic gold.  No matter how great you may one day end up, you start out a raw rookie, just like everybody else.  And this is definitely a good thing, because it teaches you the humility that you are going to need, either when you lose, or when you want to inspire other people in a positive manner.  Between the first time you hop into the water and the first time you win a race, you are going to have to do a lot of practicing.  Your strokes are going to need to become very good.

The first step is, you are going to need some proactive feedback on how you swim.  If your strokes get really bad, you are going to be seriously inefficient.  While every professional athlete has some kind of technical faults in their game, they can overcome these imperfections through their sheer athletic grace and their ultimate ability to visualize what they want to achieve and make it happen.  You are not going to start out with these capabilities (though learning them is a big part of the sport, too), so you might as well get your form to the highest level that is humanly possible for you.

Once you get to the point where your strokes are very good, you are going to have to practice them successfully over and over again, until you have your muscle memory tuned to the point where you can do your strokes perfectly without investing any kind of thought into doing so.  It has got to be a completely automatic action.  And when you swim your very best races, you are going to find universally that this is the case.  Just remember to practice successful strokes, and you will learn to be great.

Filed Under: Swimming Tagged With: ,

Butterflying

There is no other stroke in the entire sport of swimming that makes you look as powerful as you do when you are butterflying.  While its name may sound a little bit sissy, most people will never even think about the title of the event while they are watching it happening.  In fact, in most cases they will be too focused on watching the powerful people who are rocking the water to even care that the stroke that they are practicing has a silly sounding name reminiscent of an insect.  But the butterfly does take more than just powerful shoulders, if you want to practice it properly and really succeed with it.  All of the best butterfliers know that technique is at least as important as raw power.

Granted, the technique that you use is naturally going to be supremely important.  If you butterfly improperly, for instance, you are going to get disqualified.  And if you end up going too far to one side and hitting the lane line, you are going to end up doing even worse, as your battered arm struggles to keep up the proper stroke (it has happened, and it is a very painful thing to watch).  The better your technique is, the more likely you are to actually be able to win.  But technique is nowhere near the entire thing.

You have also got to develop good strength.  And while everybody can recognize that a good butterflyer is going to rely a lot of his or her shoulders, not everybody realizes that your abs, legs and back (both the upper and the lower parts) come into play with every stroke you take.  When people say that swimming is a very full bodied exercise, they are neither kidding nor exaggerating about it.  As important as your form is, throwing your hands forward with great force requires you to rise out of the water effectively.  Your entire body must be quite strong.

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An Athlete’s Appetite

When you start to swim, or really to do any sport that requires a lot of moving around, you are going to notice something about how you eat.  Namely, that you are going to be wanting to eat a good deal more than you did before you started with your athletic regimen.  Naturally, you are going to be burning more calories while you train than you did back when your greatest athletic endeavor was going from the couch to the fridge and back during the commercial break.  It has been said that some of the most active athletes (such as Michael Phelps) can eat 12,000 calories in a day, without any significant changes to their body composition.  If that sounds incredible, you have never seen what a lot of professional athletes have to go through in their training.

If you want to be a great athlete, you have got to eat.  Unless you want to be as anorexic and weak as a lot of European models are, you have got to replenish the calories that you burn off while you work out.  As great as it is to be slim and trim, it is possible to take it to an unhealthy level.  You will know that you are malnourished when, in spite of a lot of great workouts and some decent rest periods, you are not recovering (let alone improving) to the extent that you know you should be doing.

In order to repair your body properly, you have got to eat.  If possible, eat six to eight times a day, balancing it between roughly forty percent carbs, thirty percent proteins and thirty percent fats.  Naturally, you could just scarf pizzas, burgers and fries all day long.  But if you do that, you will probably notice that you are not getting up to your maximum potential.  Keep in mind that no matter how hard you work out, you are what you eat no matter what.

Filed Under: Excercises, Fitness Tagged With: ,

Las Vegas Pools

An above view of a roof-top swimming pool when...
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It might be hard to believe that someone would actually travel all the way to Las Vegas to hop into a pool when there are hundreds of local pools and spas in your local area. After all, Las Vegas is often known as the casino capital of the world and many people head there just to play the casino poker tables and share their experience with others. However, Las Vegas is becoming popular for its elaborate resort style pools.

These pools that are located at some of the most well known hotels and casinos have some of the most extreme pool layouts. This is evidenced by the Mandalay Beach’s pool layout. Mandalay Beach isn’t just a pool—it is a beach experience. It has over 11 acres of poolside that resembles a beach with palm trees and a sandy ground. There are several pools including a general pool, kiddy pool and an over 21 pool. Mandalay Beach also has a lazy river raft ride that allows visitors to soak up the rays as if they were floating down a lazy river.

Mandalay Beach isn’t the only extreme pool available throughout the Vegas area. The Palms Place Hotel and Casino offers a more secluded version of swimming. The Palms Place has a wide open pool area that is open up to the general public. However, at the far end of the pool is a pool enclave that allows swimmers to swim through a secluded grotto that feels mysterious and magical. The Palms Place also has a wonderful waterfall that falls into the pool. While not all Vegas pools are as elaborate as the Mandalay Beach or Palms Place Hotel, they do give your local pool a run for its money. No matter what hotel you choose, you will have plenty of lounge chairs to lie around in, palm trees to set the mood and sunrays to soak up.

Filed Under: Pools

A Slow Heart Rate

When you start to really exercise with vigor, you are going to notice a very peculiar change in your body, and a lot of people will be afraid at first.  But there is absolutely no reason to be afraid of this.  It is nothing more than your resting heart rate going lower and lower, until it reaches a level that can rightfully be called “conditioned.”  Granted, it is possible for a person’s heart rate to be too low, but you should not be in any danger of that happening to you.  After all, you most likely had a physical before you started working out.  And if you do not have any negative symptoms (and you probably do feel great), there is more than likely not anything wrong with you.

What a lot of people do not realize about your heart is that it is a muscle, much like your abs.  Most folks do not think of their abs first when a muscle comes to mind, but they are the same slow twitch variety that characterize your heart (except that your heart has a few differences to it).  When you condition a set of muscles, they obviously become stronger.  If you condition your abs, it becomes easier for you to do things such as standing, running and lifting heavy objects.  And when you condition your heart, it becomes easier for it to beat.

When it is easier for your heart to beat, you can sit there with it only beating every couple of seconds.  Seriously, you can get your heart rate down to 30 beats per minute without any kind of health risk (provided you do not have any heart conditions).  The stronger your heart gets, the less it has to beat- but when it does have to open up the proverbial throttle, you will be happy for every ounce of strength it can summon up.  There is nothing like a competition to kick it up.

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Building a Strong Body

There is a lot more to being good at any given sport than just having a strong body.  But of course, those other topics are for other articles.  In this one, we are going to talk about how you can go from wherever you happen to be right now (and it is all right if you are a little less than mighty, or even an absolute wimp) to where you want to be.  Even Hercules had to train himself, to become the strongest man in the world.  And if the sons of Greek gods have to do it, you do, too.  You can train for strength using weights, yoga and pilates, standard calisthenics, and through cardio.  They all have their place, if you want to build a well rounded, powerfully muscles athletic machine.

First off, not everybody who is very strong lifts weights.  You can develop a lot of power and stamina through calisthenics and other bodyweight centered exercises.  While you can train yourself in a lot of unusual angles if you add weights into the mixture, they are not critical.  But you are going to need to push (and pull) yourself through a lot of movements, if you are going to develop your muscles and joints into what they are going to need to be for a solid athletic performance.

Naturally, yoga and pilates are great ways to condition your muscles into solid, flexible powerhouses (yes, that is a pilates joke).  But when you do more traditional calisthenics like pushups, pullups and squats, you can condition yourself for greater stamina and power.  Just remember that to keep your cardiovascular endurance up to where it has to be, you need to cross train, too.  Swimming, biking and running are all great ways to do that, as well as skipping rope.  Basically, anything that forces you to push yourself out of your comfort zone is going to cause you get stronger.  Just keep pushing the envelope.

Filed Under: Excercises, Fitness Tagged With: ,
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