The Benefits Offered by Swimming For Bodybuilders

Swimming is an excellent exercise to get the body moving and increase your heart rate. It exercises your entire body, is low-impact, and is a lot more soothing than working out for over an hour in a gym. This makes swimming one of the best exercises to promote general mental and physical well-being.

Other than being beneficial to the general population, swimming is a good exercise for bodybuilders looking to stay fit and gain mass muscle. Regular swimming can have a lot of advantages, including:

  • Enhances cardio
  • Builds endurance
  • Strengthens muscles
  • Alleviates stress and anxiety
  • Improves flexibility
  • Improves posture, coordination, and balance
  • Maintains weight
  • Reduces inflammation

A lot of bodybuilders shy away from swimming due to the challenges associated with swimming with a bulky body. As your body mass increases, there will be issues with buoyancy, and you will struggle to stay afloat in your melbourne fibreglass swimming pool. This makes it more challenging than your average cardio exercise on the treadmill. But swimming offers several advantages that can be beneficial for a bodybuilder. Some of them include:

Improved recovery time

Our heart and circulatory systems need to work extra hard when swimming to keep us floating and to help with propulsion. In fact, a good focus is needed while swimming with muscle mass to avoid sinking. This will keep you alert and focused on the exercise. Swimming, in particular, when done properly, aids in cardiovascular training, which intensifies our pursuit of hypertrophy.

Bodybuilders are encouraged to continuously push their hearts and lungs to the limit. Swimming is a great way to boost cardio performance. It also helps swimmers to increase the overall capacity of their lungs, all the while giving their hearts a proper workout. This will allow the body to be more efficient at utilising oxygen during an intense exercise regime. It will also give you a picture of how efficient your heart is and the amount of blood it can pump immediately during intense workouts.

When the cardio is improved, the recovery or rest time between exercises can be shortened. This is extremely vital in the case of bodybuilders who have an intense exercise-packed schedule. Swimming greatly improves the aerobic fitness of bodybuilders.

Help in correcting muscle imbalances

Muscular imbalance is an issue affecting almost all bodybuilders. Human beings do not have a completely symmetrical body, which may make this issue seem insignificant. But avoiding it might give rise to bigger problems for bodybuilders in the future.

A big example of this issue can be seen in people who go into bodybuilding for the sole purpose of getting Instagram likes. They train only their arms and chest, completely ignoring their back. Over time, the highly developed chest muscles will exert force on the weaker delts, traps, and lats. This will lead to health issues like thoracic pain and muscle injuries.

Swimming is a good way to avoid this issue. Swimming is a full-body exercise. This means all the muscles in your body will be equally engaged and developed. This is also a low-impact exercise, reducing the chances of injury arising from overcompensation. Hence, swimming will help bodybuilders correct any muscle imbalances that may have arisen due to some issues with their regular workout schedule.

Reduced chances of injury

Running on hard surfaces like concrete is not an ideal exercise for bodybuilders. It can cause additional stress on the bodybuilder’s body that is getting rigorously challenged with the intense exercises and can likely cause injuries to the shins, hips, and knees. But swimming, being low-impact, will not affect you in this way. Floating around will create minimal impact and stress on the body and protect our essential joints from injuries.

Swimming, as an exercise, provides all the mobility and cardio benefits without the risk of serious injuries associated with land-based exercises.

Strengthens core

Swimming is an exercise that engages your core to stay buoyant and balanced. Bodybuilders can use swimming as an easy way to engage their core muscles. Bodybuilding is directly correlated with core training. Core muscles help support your spine when you do heavy lifting. Bodybuilders do lifting on a regular basis, raising the importance of strengthened core muscles for them.

Bodybuilders can challenge their spinal stability while swimming. The added strength obtained from the swimming pool can be used to improve performance in heavy lifting. Thus, swimming will help bodybuilders become structurally strong.

Good exercise during times of recovery

Injury is very common when you regularly lift weights. In some cases, it may require you to stop training rigorously for some time. Swimming is a good low-impact exercise suitable during such recovery periods due to some features:

  • minimal chances of tripping and falling
  • body weight carried by water so reduces the strain on legs
  • the resistance level can be controlled by the swimmer
  • helps prevent muscle wastage

After a major injury, swimming is a perfect way to start training your muscles and get back on track. You can control the resistance and support you need during the recovery period.

A break from the boring treadmill routine

Monotonous exercises can lead to boredom and a lack of motivation in many bodybuilders. In such a case, swimming will be like a fresh breath of air, alleviating mental exhaustion and improving enthusiasm. It will give you a fresh environment to work out in, and the new challenges will improve your mood and motivation.

It is also important to be safe while swimming. You should remember to wear eye goggles every time you go swimming to avoid eye burns. It is also advisable to keep ear drops with you to reduce the chances of contracting swimmer’s ear. It is also important to remember that swimming as a bodybuilder is hard. So, you should start slow and try to increase the challenges as you get better at swimming.

To Conclude

Swimming is a great exercise for bodybuilders. When done correctly, it is a natural, safe, effective, and cheap way to gain and strengthen muscles. It not only helps maintain physical strength but also helps to reduce the mental strain of the intense daily schedule. Swimming can also be used as a good stretching exercise.

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