Swimming has a lot of amazing benefits, but did you know you can swim every single day? We broke down the top 10 reasons you should consider adding a swim to your daily routine.
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1. Total Body Workout
Water is 800 times more resistant than air. This extra resistance requires all of the muscles in your body to work a little bit harder, and engages all of the different energy systems for a full-body workout.
Recruiting the whole body in your workout helps you burn more calories in each session, which can increase your metabolism.
Related: What Happens to Your Body When You Swim
2. Improves Your Flexibility
When you are in the water, you are stretching out your body with every stroke. Swimming gives you the opportunity to bend your body in ways it doesn’t normally move throughout the day. For example, if you do a flip turn in freestyle, you could do more than 100 flips throughout a 2,000 meter workout.
3. Great Cardio
As a primarily aerobic activity, swimming engages and strengthens the cardiovascular system. What separates swimming from running and other types of land-based cardio is that you can swim for longer periods of time — and even every day — since the water is very low impact.
4. Low Impact
When you swim, you aren’t putting a lot of pressure on your muscles, joints and ligaments as you would in other sports. Swimming has minimal impact on the body, but allows you to complete higher repetitions, or longer workouts.
However, incorporating dryland workouts is important to improve overall swimming performance. While you can’t go to the gym every day, adding 1 or 2 dryland workouts to your routine can help you get stronger in the water.
Since water is “zero gravity,” swimming is great exercise for anyone, including athletes who are working on injury prevention.
Related: Dryland Exercises for Swimmers
5. Improves Your Sleep
Swimming fatigues your entire body, causing you to be “equally tired” all over. Better sleep each night helps improve your productivity during the day. When you swim each day, your body adapts to the new routine and you’ll find that you will wake up refreshed each morning!
6. Builds Character
Establishing a swimming routine builds confidence and mental strength. Each day, you don’t have to decide if you want to go swim — the answer is always “yes!”
7. Makes You Feel Better
Sometimes you just don’t feel like getting in the water. Maybe you swim early in the morning and don’t want to get out of bed. But if you are disciplined and swim each day, you will find that you always feel better after you swim! Remembering how swimming makes you feel will help you stay motivated.
8. Life-Long Fitness
Swimming is one of the only fitness activities you can do every day of your life — from cradle to grave. Whether you are young or old, or if you have a disability, an injury, or if you are pregnant, you can still swim every day!
Related: Swimming is My Moving Medicine
9. Escape from the World
Swimming is like meditation. If you put your face in the water, there are no distractions from what you are doing at that moment. This “moving meditation” can reduce stress and anxiety and help you find your happy place!
Swimming is also a great way to take a break from your phone, making it almost impossible to check your email, social media or talk with friends.
10. Puts a Smile on your Face!
Swimming makes you happier! Numerous studies have shown that swimming — including racing and simply being in the water — causes the brain to release endorphins, which are also the cause of the “runner’s high” that many runners experience. Think about endorphins as a legal drug that makes you happy.
Related: 12 Swimmers Share Why They Love to Swim
How often do you swim? Let us know in the comments what you love most about swimming! If you’re looking for swim training tips and workouts, download the MySwimPro app on your iPhone or Android!
