Swimming Training is Absolutely Recommended for Several Reasons!

Ah, swimming! Hands down one of my all-time favorite exercises. I am by no means a Brendon Hansen, but honestly, one does not have to be a world-champion swimmer to enjoy this activity. Like any worthwhile endeavor, it takes time to master the basics. It will take some real training to feel comfortable as a “swimmer” but is it ever worth it! A very fun activity, indeed.

Swimming is a great endurance trainer, one that utilizes mostly the shoulders, but does include some leg and abs training as well. It is also a great lung conditioner, because after a few laps, if you are a beginner, you will find yourself huffing hard. You can train in a lap pool at a gym or recreation center near your home, and when you reach a sufficient level of proficiency, you can go swimming in rivers, lakes and oceans (use caution and always tell somebody where you are going, because if you fatigue in the middle of a lake or the ocean, well…).

Swimming is also a very useful skill to develop because one day you could find yourself shipwrecked or you could witness someone drowning way offshore with no lifeguard in sight… in these life-or-death situations you will thank God that you had swimming training. This is the kind of training that always comes in handy sooner or later!

There are many “styles” of swimming, from the breast stroke to the butterfly to the backstroke, but I recommend if you decide to add swimming to your natural fitness lifestyle, start with the most basic stroke of all-the freestyle. I could explain an endless number of techniques here, but speaking from experience, there is really no substitute for taking a class. A competent instructor will teach you the basics then watch you and point out your weak areas. He or she can also push you to swim higher numbers of laps during class time through timed races, team races, etc. This is a very useful way of safely testing your limits and knowing where your fatigue point is in swimming. It is a lot less scary pushing your limits in a swimming class than when training all by yourself.

Really, if you decide to take up this activity, and you have never done so before, take a class at your local community college or swimming center. After you have mastered the basics, you can train on your own. I do not recommend a beginner who has never taken a class to ever train on his own! Besides the obvious fact that you don’t want to fatigue in a large body of water with nobody around, you simply cannot improve your swimming technique very well without someone more skilled than you observing you. There are so many things to improve: stroke technique, stroke speed, breathing technique, body positioning, kicking technique, kicking speed, etc. Unless you already are a skilled swimmer, you cannot just “feel” where corrections in technique need to be implemented; feedback is the absolute best teacher in this case.

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