Swimming For Weight Loss

Most people believe that if they are looking to lose weight, only registering themselves in a gym, running mindlessly on a treadmill, or lifting a few dumbbells can help them achieve their weighty goals. While working out sensibly in a gym can help a person lose weight, it does not mean that there are no other ways of losing weight. For an alternate approach to the desire of losing weight and the dream of looking lean and mean, you can try swimming. It is a known fact that swimming works out your body like most other exercises cannot. Swimming here, however, doesn’t stand to represent the way people swim when on a holiday. It, instead, stands to represent a toned down variation of how professional swimmers train. It is swimming like this that can help you achieve your weighty goals. Nothing else, but this, can get you closer to your dreams of losing weight!

• The first thing to do when looking to lose weight by swimming is to determine the size of the pool you are going to be swimming in.  Olympic sized pools are fifty meters long, but the chances of the pool in your gym or club being this long are extremely low. However, this does not mean you can’t get a great workout in smaller pools. It only means that you will have to swim to and fro more than you will have to when swimming in an Olympic sized pool.
• Once the size of the pool is determined, don’t decide to jump in right away for a big swim. You can jump in alright, but don’t swim a thousand laps before actually warming up. Swimming, after all, is an exercise and like all exercises, it too needs to be performed after warming up. For that perfect warm up before you get started on a challenging swimming workout, it is advisable to swim freestyle for hundred meters or so! This will actually help warm your body up!
• Once your body is warmed up, you can go right ahead and start off with your sprints. Begin by swimming as fast as you can for fifty meters. Follow this up by taking a break for sixty seconds, then go right ahead and finish off another fifty meters. Follow this routine until you execute a minimum of ten fifty-meter sprints. By the end of this, you should be pretty tired. If you are not tired, it only means that you haven’t been swimming hard enough, or have been taking long breaks between sets.
• Since you may have challenged yourself quite a lot in the previous step, you can give yourself a day of rest, and that is only because you deserve it! This will also give your muscles time to heal, making your body feel a lot stronger for what is to come.
• Begin the next swimming workout by swimming for hundred meters. Here you will have to swim as fast as you can, but you can size down when it comes to the number of repetitions. The ideal thing to do is to swim for hundred meters for five times and mix up strokes to add variation to your workout. Once you’re done with this, you can give your body a day of rest.
• The third and most challenging stage of this workout will see you swim for around five hundred meters. The challenge here lies in the fact that you will have to swim for five hundred meters continuously, stopping before you swim for five hundred meters will make the whole workout plan seem less challenging.
• For the next week, start off the same routine all over again. Remember, in each of the workout plans mentioned above, you swim for the same distance, but it is the small variations in the plans that make all the difference.