Introduction
Swimming is one of the absolute best overall exercises you can do. I really don’t have enough good things to say about it. It burns a huge amount of calories, supports your weight (so it’s easy on the joints), builds muscle strength and endurance, does wonders for your cardiovascular fitness, keeps you cool in the summer, and you can still do it when you’re old and grey.
Calories Burned Swimming
So, how many calories do you burn during this great exercise? The rule of thumb is that you’ll burn 3 calories per mile, per pound of bodyweight. If you swam at the rate of 1 mile per 30 minutes, and you weigh around 150 pounds, you would burn approximately 900 calories an hour swimming. How many exercises can say that?
Granted, this means you’d have to be swimming 1 lap of an Olympic length (50 m) swimming pool approximately every minute. This is pretty quick, and not everyone is able to do that. It’s more than likely that you’ll have to build yourself up to that level of fitness and speed. Starting off, expect to burn around 8 calories per minute while swimming.
If you’re significantly slower than this, your calorie burning will also be reduced. As with any exercise, there is a minimum intensity threshold that you must surpass to reap good weight loss benefits from it. If you’re not swimming hard enough, you won’t have any affect on weight loss whatsoever. Try to always increase your intensity or speed every time you swim. By doing this, you can be sure that you’re benefitting from your workout.
Benefits
- Swimming works nearly every muscle in the body.
- Swimming increases the body’s overall strength.
- Swimming increases your cardiovascular fitness.
- Your endurance will improve a large degree with regular swimming
- It provides you with a break from weight-bearing exercises like running
- Acts as the perfect cross-training activity
- It’s an exercise you can still do with leg-joint injuries
- It’s a perfect warm up or cool down exercise if you lift weights
- Increases your lungs capacity for oxygen
- Swimming reduces the risk of heart disease and stroke by reducing the level of cholesterol in the body.
A Beginners Swimming Routine
Start off swimming just two or three days a week. Slowly build your routine into more days a week, as you see fit. During your first week or two of swimming, try alternating 30 seconds of swimming with 30 seconds of rest. Do this 10 times per workout, for a total of 10 minutes.
Use a kick-board if you need to!
The following week, do the same routine, while only kicking and not using your arms. Optionally, you can use a kickboard to make this a little easier; they’re provided at most public pools.
As time goes on, add variations in your intervals, slowly increasing the amount of time you spend swimming while reducing the amount of time you spend resting. Do this until you’re able to swim continuously the entire time. From them on, try to increase the amount of time, or alternatively the speed of your workout. You’ll be a pro in no time. Have fun!
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I know about negative calories, and I know it’s just a term for food that take more energy for your body to burn, than the food has itself. . . So like my question says, do frozen and canned food count as foods with negative calories or do they all have to be fresh? Also could you list some negative calorie foods?. I know alot, but I’m not sure if that’s all:. asparagus. beets. broccoli. cabbage (green). carrots. cauliflower . celery. chicory. chili peppers. cucumbers. endive. garlic . lettuce. onions. papayas. spinach. turnip. zucchini. apples. cranberries. grapefruit. lemons . mangos. oranges. pineapple . raspberries. strawberries. tangerines.