Swimming To Burn Fat

!: Swimming To Burn Fat

In this article I am going to discuss the act of swimming to burn fat, and a little bit about what kind of energy expenditure one could expect from swimming.

I hold the opinion that people who need to lose weight shouldn't have to count calories, since that is very unnatural and humans lived perfectly healthy for hundreds of thousands of years without having access to calculators.

That being said, I do think calorie counting can be of benefit for people who are preparing for something like a fitness competition or photo shoot. In those cases, counting calories, both from diet and from exercise, can be a good way to ensure that they will be in the perfect shape at the right time.

Swimming is usually taught to kids at a young age, and this is done for a very important reason: Swimming can save your life. If you were to ever fall out of a boat, or fall off a cliff and into the ocean, you might drown if you didn't know how to swim properly. Therefore having a basic knowledge of swimming can be considered a necessary skill for anyone who ever wants to go close to the ocean or go sailing.

Swimming also has health benefits, and swimming to burn fat can help you lose quite a bit of weight. When you swim, you engage a lot of muscles at the same time. Obviously both the arms and legs, but in order to keep your body steady during the swimming motion then you also need to engage your shoulders, back and abdominal muscles. Therefore swimming pretty much works all of your body at the same time, enabling you to burn a lot of calories.

It is pretty difficult to guess exactly how much you will burn while swimming, as this depends on several factors. If you are heavy, you will burn more calories than if you are light. If you are very unskilled at swimming and produce a lot of turbulence in the water, then you will also burn more calories for the same distance. If you swim hard enough that your muscles go into anaerobic respiration, then you will burn more calories for the next 24 hours or longer.

If you are light and swim quietly, you can expect to burn about 200 to 250 calories per hour. If you are heavy, and swim hard, then you might expend closer to 900-1000 calories in an hour.

I wouldn't recommend swimming very hard for beginners, since you don't want to cramp up or get extremely fatigued in the middle of the pool, that can be dangerous and could result in drowning. I also recommend swimming in a pool where there are lifeguards around, going to swim in the ocean by yourself is a very bad idea.

So to sum up, if you want to try to get yourself rid of some calories then swimming to burn fat would be a good idea, as long as it is done in a safe environment.