Most people would agree that swimming is a fun activity, especially in the summer. It’s also very beneficial to your body as an exercise. If you’ve ever gotten inside a pool for a cardio workout, you’d understand that swimming feels harder compared to cycling and running. Like other forms of exercise, swimming is best coupled with a healthy diet for optimum results.
Swimming is one of the most effective ways to keep in shape, as you won’t feel sweaty and haggard. When you’re a child, swimming seems like all fun and games. But as you grow up, you’ll understand that this activity also requires discipline to reap its full potential benefits. For people looking to lose weight, this exercise is scientifically proven to be one of the most efficient.
When talking about losing weight, it’s mainly about burning calories. For this reason, diet is essential when you’re swimming if you want to achieve overall health and well-being. However, there’s the question of just how many calories does swimming burn? Also, you might have asked how many calories burned swimming vs. running or jogging.
How Swimming Burns Calories
Swimming helps burn fat, build strength, shed weight, and enhance overall health. Many health experts will agree that when you’re swimming calories burned are at the optimum. Swimming is intense, but it’s not as high of an impact in terms of making you feel exhausted. This fact means that it’s also an excellent alternative for active recovery from injuries and preventing future ones from occurring.
Every time you pull, kick, or do a stroke, you’re going against the water’s resistance. Water is much denser than air, so it requires more strength and, therefore, burns more calories. Your muscles also become leaner, so you both look and feel strong. Moreover, swimming regularly prevents you from becoming tired quickly compared to doing other activities, so you can do more.
Maximizing your body’s power
If you weigh more, you’ll spend more calories when you swim than someone lighter. This principle is supported by the fact that more energy is needed to move a bigger body than a smaller one. In addition, when you use your body to your advantage, you create more water surface area. When this happens, you also resist and use more strength to keep swimming.
Swimming faster
No doubt that the question, “how many calories do you burn swimming” when you’re doing it faster has crossed your mind. Indeed, your speed affects the number of calories you burn. Swimming at a lower pace requires less energy, resulting in fewer calories burned. On the contrary, swimming faster requires more energy. You can utilize devices for swimming like pull paddles, pull buoys, bands, and parachutes to increase drag or resistance to up the calories you burn.
Using better swim strokes
When people ask how many calories does swimming burn, they often forget the fact that swimming takes on many forms called strokes. These strokes determine the metabolic equivalent of task or MET, which measures the intensity of an activity.
Some strokes are more tactical and consume more energy than others. For example, the butterfly stroke involves using both arms out of the water and right in front of you. The most common stroke among swimmers, called the freestyle or crawl, requires 5.8 METs on a light to moderate effort and burns 369 calories.
Regular treading on the water equals 3.5 METs and eliminates 223 calories every hour of swimming. Backstroke can burn 305 calories per hour when executed with a 4.8 MET rate. You’ll burn 337 calories every 60 minutes of swimming when you go for a breaststroke, while the butterfly stroke is the most powerful and intense stroke that can make you burn as much as 878 calories per hour.
Mind your time
Swimming is a discipline in which you must invest time and courage to make it effective. A moderate pace of 30 minutes of swimming daily can make a huge difference in your life. So avoid pushing yourself too much, especially when you’re still in the beginning phase of your weight loss journey. Likewise, strive not to be lazy and afraid of the cold.
How to Burn More Calories with Swimming
Swimming can make a significant difference in your life if you stay disciplined. A 30-minute splash daily can significantly help improve your heart and entire circulatory functions. Naturally, to get more out of swimming, you must do other things to make swimming more effective in your weight-loss journey.
Establish more resistance
The more resistance in the water, with or without equipment, the more calories you burn. Use a loose swimsuit on top of your Speedo or drag suit to feel more comfortable. You may throw fins or hand paddles to make your daily swimming fun and interesting.
Integrate intervals
When you add more minutes to your swimming, you burn more calories, but this doesn’t have to be successive. Swimming for 30 straight minutes or an hour can make you lose interest in swimming. Try swimming hard for 30 seconds straight, then swim more relaxed for 60 seconds. This interval training can maximize your effort, improve your overall physical performance, and eliminate more calories.
Do individual medleys
Freestyle, breaststroke, backstroke, and butterfly stroke are the four swimming styles that can help you optimize the benefits of swimming. Performing each of these four strokes back-to-back can stimulate your body to burn more fat. Try swimming one butterfly lap, then backstroke, followed by a lap of breaststroke, and ending it with a freestyle lap. You may vary the sequence or choose only the ones your body can handle.
Eat balanced meals
Count your calories when you’re taking the bold step of losing weight for a healthier lifestyle. Sport a calorie deficit that will give you enough energy for each day. Eating at least half an hour before swimming or any workout is enough to give you the strength you need.
Conclusion
Starting slow to get a good feel of things is essential in every new endeavor, including swimming. Get more creative by throwing in more strokes when you swim. Build up your intensity as you go along, and your endurance will come out naturally. Of course, always eat the right food so that you won’t have to burn those excess calories in the first place.