While swimming is pleasant, this activity is also excellent for your health. And its benefits are far from being limited to improving your physical condition.

1st benefit: swimming boosts health and mood

Swimming has a relaxing effect, because the water gives you a feeling of lightness and allows your heart to rest. Swimming in a relaxed manner reduces stress and depression.

Swimming is also a cardiovascular workout. Such sessions improve your mood and increase your self-confidence. This is because when you swim, you produce more of the hormone serotonin.

The efforts of swimming give you more energy than it requires. Often after exercise, you have more energy than an hour earlier, when you came home tired from work.

With all of the above, swimming boosts your mental and physical health.

2nd benefit: swimming improves your sleep pattern

Your general health also depends on your sleep, as your body and mind repair and regenerate during the night. Sleeping well is therefore of crucial importance, and a good workout helps you to do so. (Intense) exertion releases hormones which then lead to better nightly rest.

3rd benefit: swimming keeps blood pressure low

Because the water in a swimming pool exerts more pressure than the air outside the water, your blood will flow more easily to your heart. As a result, it is 10 to 15% less used!

4th benefit: swimming burns 500 calories per hour

Swimming (not floating ;-)) burns about as many calories as running at a speed of 10 km / h. In half an hour of swimming, you easily spend 300 kcal.

5th benefit: swimming reduces the impact on the joints
Swimming is a low impact sport, which means that this activity is beneficial for your muscles, tendons and joints.

In water, you weigh 90% less and therefore spare your body much more! This is the reason why injured athletes often start working again in the pool.

6th benefit: swimming strengthens muscles

While swimming improves your fitness and burns fat, it also goes hand in hand with resistance training and weight training. Water directly offers you this resistance: to move forward, it requires more effort than air. Swimming therefore allows you to build muscle mass.

If you vary the types of swimming as well, you train muscles in different ways. This sport helps you to develop a balanced body and corresponds to an integral and ideal physical training.

7th benefit: swimming reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease

Like other forms of cardiovascular exercise, swimming reduces blood pressure and cholesterol levels, and therefore the risk of cardiovascular disease. To do this, you must swim or otherwise exercise your heart rate at least three times a week for 30 minutes.

8th benefit: swimming strengthens lung capacity

Doctors frequently advise patients with asthma to swim, preferably in an indoor pool. The hot, humid climate is better for the respiratory tract than the drier outside air. In addition, indoors, the amount of pollen in the air is restricted, which is beneficial for people with asthma and hay fever.

From a general point of view, too, swimming offers benefits to patients with asthma. It increases the capacity of the lungs and improves breathing, which are particularly beneficial for these people.

If you play sports regularly, you have more lung capacity. This observation is not the preserve of swimmers: it applies to all sports. If, for example, you go swimming once a week, you will quickly notice that you are less quickly out of breath when you go upstairs.

9th benefit: swimming strengthens bones

Sports associated with weight bearing such as running are renowned for increasing bone density. As your body has to carry more weight during these exercises, your bones get stronger.

It has long been thought that as a low impact sport swimming does not have this advantage. However, a recent study has shown that swimmers have lower bone density than runners and weightlifters, but still higher than non-athletes. Swimming therefore increases your bone density.