The swimming workout is a great form of exercise, it provides a great workout for your entire body and it’s also easy on your joints.
Swimming is mainly an aerobic exercise, which is also known as cardio. This kind of exercises is better for heart health and losing fat rather than building bigger muscle.
This swimming workout will incorporate many styles or ‘strokes’. Doing this provides variety and it will also work your muscles in different ways to produce the best workout. There will be three different strokes in this workout, but you can feel free to do you favourite one. Make sure you change it up once in a while to get a better workout.
Before we actually start the workout, make sure that you warm up first to prevent injury. Do each of the following strokes at a ‘jog-like’ speed for two minutes each (for a total of six minutes) before starting the actual workout.
Butterfly
Start off with the butterfly stroke. Do twenty strokes as fast as you can and then do ten more strokes at a relaxed speed. Then move onto the next kind of stroke, freestyle.
Freestyle
This will be the second kind of stroke. Do 30 strokes as fast as you can and then ten relaxed strokes. Then move onto the next kind of stroke, breaststroke.
Breaststroke
This is probably the most physically demanding stroke in this group. Do twenty strokes as fast as you can and then do ten at a relaxed speed.
These three strokes make up a cycle, do eight cycles. I recommend that you start with only doing four cycles and build your way up to eight cycles. Increase your swimming workout by 1 cycle every after every workout until you can do the full eight cycles.
Once you get used to doing eight cycles, you can increase the amount of fast strokes in each cycle. Ideally, you want to go all out for twenty seconds and then slow down for ten seconds and then repeat. If you follow this guideline, the eight cycles should only take four minutes.
The Tabata Protocol
This sequence of twenty seconds on and ten seconds off is called the “Tabata Protocol”. It takes less time and is much more effective than the conventional slow and steady approach of doing aerobic exercises (running, biking, swimming).
When the eight cycles get easy, you can do another either cycles in a row. You don’t need to do more than five cycles. With this kind of workout, you want to keep it around twenty minutes maximum.
If this is the only form of workout you are doing, you can do this three times a week. If you are also working out at the gym and trying to build muscle, only do the swimming workout once or twice a week.
A Word On Caution
Make sure that you’re always watching for what is ahead of you to avoid bumping into the wall. It can be dangerous if you’re going all out and bump your head into the edge of the pool.