The Benefits of Water-Based Exercise

Water is awesome. It’s necessary for our very survival. It’s wet. It’s fun to ski and surf upon. It allows things to float on it. It supports forms of life too numerous to list here. It’s perfect for balloons and squirt guns. It falls from the sky. Mixed with dirt, it creates mud. It can magically turn into a solid or a gas. There’d be no hockey without it. It’s comprised of hydrogen and oxygen. It’s great for cleaning ourselves. I could go on and on listing the reasons why water is awesome, but let’s finish with the focus of this post; it’s a great substance to exercise in.

Why is water such a great environment for exercise, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you…

• Water provides weight resistance without the weights. When you move through water, whether it be swimming, walking or running, the water itself provides your muscles with resistance. Even if you’re just moving a body part (leg, arm) through water it’s like doing the same motion on land with weights. You can also increase the resistance by wearing hand webs and fins. Therefore, a round of water aerobics is, in a sense, killing two birds with one stone. You get the benefits of both a cardiovascular workout and a resistance workout. This is especially important as we age and begin to lose muscle mass.
• Water provides support for your joints and connective tissue. Most land-based exercises, such as running, hiking, and ball sports, place a great deal of stress on your joints, especially your knees, hips and ankles, and your connective tissue, primarily your tendons (which connect muscle to bone) and ligaments (which connect bone to bone). Land-based exercises also wear down the cartilage that cushions our joints, such as the meniscus in our knees and our intervertebral discs between our vertebra. Exercising in water is a low impact endeavor and eliminates almost of that stress to our joints as it supports our bodies. When we run, the force to our knees is anywhere from 7 to 11 times our body weight. This is why most people rehabbing from an injury perform quite a bit of exercises in water.
• Exercising in water provides an entire body workout. As mentioned above, doing just about anything in water exercises numerous muscle groups as well as our heart and lungs. It’s a great time saving form of exercise as there’s no need to perform separate resistance and cardio workouts.
• Water keeps your core temperature down. There’s a reason why people flock to water during the summer…to cool off. That same principle applies to exercise as well. Exercising in cool water keeps us…well, cool. There’s no need to worry about heat exhaustion or heat stroke while exercising in water. This coolness allows one to spend more time exercising, especially when the temperature soars during the summer months.
• There are a variety of exercises, aside from swimming, that one can do in water and a variety of supplemental items, such as kickboards, fins, inflated balls, Styrofoam noodles, water weights, and hand webs that can be utilized. Just to name a few activities, there’s water walking, water jogging, water aerobics, water polo, water volleyball, and water basketball. If all else fails, try swimming while using a variety of different strokes. The strokes that involve your arms and/or legs leaving the water are the most difficult. Freestyle, butterfly, and back stroke would fall into this category. Strokes where your limbs stay submerged tend to be less work. Breast and side stroke being two examples.

Look, water-based exercise doesn’t have to be done daily. We are, after all, not fish. However, it should be done in on a regular and consistent basis to derive maximum benefit.