Thursday, July 06, 2006

Get Into Swimming! Work All Of Your Muscles

Get Into Swimming!! Work All of Your Muscles

All of your major muscle groups are working hard when you are swimming. Especially if you mix up a variety of strokes such as the backstroke, breaststroke, and the front crawl or freestyle. Propulsion activates abdominal muscles, triceps and biceps, deltoids, lats, other back muscles, glutes, hamstrings and even the quadriceps. We don't have gills so we have to coordinate our muscles while we are breathing during our swim. When you perform these strokes you get the results of better coordination and balance. This helps reduce injuries in sports that you perform on land.

Water: A magical healing effect.
As we know our bodies are made of 60% of water. When we were developing as a fetus we were in a watery environment. When our bodies are in water we weigh about1/10th of our usual land weight. Waters bouyancy effect does not have the same brassy effect land based training has on each of our joints. Swimming allows you to concentrate on muscular strength as well as flexibility. Because of all of this, swimming becomes and amazing way to come back from an injury that you received playing a sport, recovery from a surgery or just keeping up your fitness while you wait to get back into your own sport.

Swimming boosts your stamina, suppleness, and strength. It has every single cardiovascular benefits of running paired up with the strength building effects of strength training. This arises from the resistance the water offers you as you are propelling yourself forward in the water. The use of a variety of strokes helps promote balance as well as your coordination. Not only does swimming cause you to use all of your muscles groups it also is a highly demanding aerobic exercise to help your heart and lungs to be healthy. It also helps your joints to stay flexible especially those of the shoulders, hips, neck and groin. In conclusion, you can increase your intensity of your physical activity by clearly, swimming faster or changing your strokes. This increases your caloric output, which is a vital component with weight management.(Alive, No. 281, p 94, March 06)

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