Swimming as cardio: Is it worth it?

I've always avoided swimming as a form of exercise unless it was part of an event I was training for. I was a really strong swimmer in my teens but never really considered it to be exercise because it just seems so much easier than other cardio.

Well I did a bit of research and found out that I was wrong all along, and that swimming is actually one of the best exercises that you can do, especially if you are older.

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I think that for most people, this is not a viable form of exercise because in order to participate in it you need to either be near a large body of swimmable water or be a member of one of the more expensive fitness clubs. Real-estate comes at a very hefty price where I live in Chicago and the only places that have lap pools are what most people would consider absurdly expensive. Even in the gym I am part of, which costs near $100 a month, only has a 25 meter pool, which is half the length of a "real one."

Even people I know who own pools at their houses don't use it for exercise because for most home pools, you are simply turning around all the time.

However, if you do have access to a pool or body of water, there are several benefits to swimming that I think actually make it superior to other forms of cardio and most of this should be fairly obvious.

The main one is that it is going to create a lot less stress on your joints because of the lack of stress impact as well as the fact that you are in a more natural position during the entire exercise. Sometimes when I was running every day, I would have terrible pain in my knees. When I was cycling I would experience neck an back pain because of the rather unnatural position that being on a bicycle puts you in. Also, if I did any cycling distance worth talking about, I wouldn't be able to feel my butt after 30km or so.

It wasn't until I joined this gym after they dropped all of their stupid Covid restrictions that I actually started to investigate how much caloric burn effect swimming could actually have on your body.

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This is per hour and if you can butterfly for an hour you are in a league all your own. I can barely do 2 lengths of the pool without stopping. For me, breaststroke is the easiest of the 4 and I am delighted to see that it comes in at second place. I developed a "frog kick" for some reason as a child so this kind of kick just seems more natural to me.

Jogging will burn more calories per hour than all of these but butterfly, but this takes me back to what I was saying before about the chance of injury: There is virtually none in swimming whereas a lot of the running / jogging injuries I have sustained in the past, I wasn't even aware of them until after the job was done. This has never happened to me in swimming.

Another benefit of swimming for cardio is that unlike a lot of other cardio activities, it uses your entire body. So if you are looking to tone EVERYTHING this is going to be a lot more effective than jogging which barely uses your upper body at all.

I know that like most men I am interested in keeping my muscle mass in my shoulders, biceps, and abs and swimming nails all of those things in one exercise.

For me another benefit of swimming over other exercises is that you don't really overheat. Since the pool I use is indoors it is also not affected by what time of year it is. The temperature control system insures that every pool experience is exactly the same. I am a guy that despite his dedication to fitness, sweats a lot and not overheating in the pool is a big advantage for me because in the summer here in Chicago, it gets brutally hot to the point where there were times that I thought I had heat exhaustion and simply could not cool down afterwards. In the winter here you need special gear to not freeze to death even during a run.

I also don't feel bad about taking breaks while swimming, I quite enjoy the feeling I get when I stop for a bit to get some drinking water, still in the pool, and I can feel my heart racing. Sure, you can feel these things in other cardio sports as well, but at least you aren't sweating like mad during the process.

I've always avoided swimming as cardio in the past because I felt it was "too easy" but the "no pain no gain" mantra is a dumb one, especially if you are older like me. Therefore, I am changing my exercise regimen to do around 30 minutes to an hour of swimming during each gym visit and so far, it is working out nicely.

_{After a very irresponsible 30's I lost over 50 lbs and am now the strongest I have ever been in my life. There is no ONE WAY to do this but you need to make small, manageable changes to your life and you can do it too!}