Is Swimming A Good Workout?

Swimming offers a good workout by building several major elements of physical fitness. You recruit nearly all of your major muscle groups when you swim with proper form and technique. Swimming offers an aerobic workout, which improves your body's ability to produce energy with oxygen. You can also use swimming for a muscle-building anaerobic workout, particularly for your upper body.

Cardiorespiratory Endurance

Swimming provides a good workout for developing cardiorespiratory endurance, which is the prolonged ability of your heart and lungs to deliver oxygen and nutrients to working muscles. Building cardiorespiratory endurance promotes higher energy levels. Cardiorespiratory workouts, such as swimming, control your weight by burning calories and fat. "Paraplegia" published a paper in June 1980, which observed the cardiorespiratory effect of swimming training for paraplegics. The cardio-respiratory system of the paraplegics under observation was four times more efficient after three years of training.

Muscular Endurance

Swimming offers a good workout for developing muscular endurance, which is the ability of your muscles to perform repetitive or sustained contractions against resistance for extended periods of time. Swimming builds muscular endurance with repetitive dynamic contractions throughout your upper and lower body. Your arms and legs contract against resistance produced by the water as you perform swim strokes, such as the front crawl, back stroke, breast stroke and butterfly.

Muscular Strength

Sprint swimming involves shorter bursts of intense energy, a type of workout that helps build muscular strength. Swimmers overcome the drag created by the body during the pulling motion of a stroke with upper body muscular strength. According to Dr. David Costill's March 1993 "U.S. Master's Swimming" article, swim workouts that involve five to 10 sprints that are 25 to 50 yards long may help build muscle strength, particularly for the front crawl or freestyle strokes. You may rest between 30 and 120 seconds between sprints, because each sprint requires maximal muscular force.

Core Workout

Core workouts build functional fitness, which improve your ability to perform basic daily activities. Core exercises improve stability, support a healthy posture, and may help you avoid back and hip injuries. Your core muscles, such as your obliques, transverse abdominus and rectus abdominus, coordinate your arm and leg movements while swimming. Swimming workouts help develop your core with body rolling movements during the front crawl and backstroke and undulating torso movements during the butterfly and breaststroke. Dolphin kicking under water also creates core strength.