If you are overweight, or even just a little round, you might have heard that swimming burns calories, which is a great way to lose a few pounds. However, the intimidating question is, can swimming help you lose weight?
Yes, you can swim to lose weight, and it is an entire body exercise. Swimming burns a massive amount of calories and fat, resulting in losing weight faster than most other workouts. It’s a fantastic workout routine for weight loss.
Is Swimming Good for Losing Belly Fat?
The swimming workout will hit your entire body since it’s a full-body exercise. With that being said, you can’t focus only to lose belly fat. You won’t see much of an output soon, resulting in demotivation. An actual fact is that you can’t determine which body part of your fat stores and which doesn’t. It entirely depends on your genetics and body composition.
But on your weight loss journey, the swimming technique will help you target a specific spot. It’s the simple math of calories being burnt. The more the better. Your core will engage more if you stick with backstroke, breaststroke, and butterfly. As a consequence, you’ll be targeting more specific areas.
Since you’re surging to lose fat from your tummy, you need to concentrate on taking a well-balanced and healthy diet side by side for super health benefits. That way, you’ll witness weight loss and leaner muscles soon.
How Much to Swim to Lose Weight?
You don’t need to embark on your swimming training hard right from the beginning. Instead, try to start swim workouts at a slower pace, like for thirty minutes three times a week. That way, you’ll get more benefits. You’ll be surprised by feeling the hidden muscle groups in your body after you start swimming sessions.
You must eat less and burn more calories; this food intake process is called a caloric deficit. It is one of the most important things to keep in mind as losing weight depends more on how many calories you’re burning. If you fundamentally want to lose a few pounds per week, you need to smash 500 calories a day.
Let’s create a picture for you; if you’re a 130 lbs. adult who can do a thirty-minute butterfly swimming workout, it equals 472 burned calories. This style can surprisingly burn more calories than others. The choice is yours; either you can let calories burned or take fewer calories.
How Can You Burn More Calories by Swimming?
Swimming for weight loss is a great go-ahead. Since it’s a water-based exercise, you must know what and how to get things done properly. Otherwise, all your swim laps in the pool will go in vain.
Switch up Strokes
As we mentioned earlier, you can burn the most calories per hour by the butterfly stroke. However, it’ll be difficult for you to continue this for half an hour, even at a moderate pace, let alone one hour. You, therefore, better switch strokes to freestyle, backstroke, and breaststroke to make swim workouts easier.
Whenever you feel tired during the physical activity after hard strokes, switch to other strokes. That way, you’ll get more energy to hit different muscles.
Gain Resistance
To increase your cardio activities during swimming, you need to kick and stroke harder through the water. You can achieve that kind of fitness level by creating resistance in the pool. There are options like buoys, flippers, or resistance bands which you can add for creating that grinding down type force.
Interval Training
It is vastly suggested to incorporate specified intervals while swimming. You will burn more fat if you swim faster. On the other hand, swimming depends on your health conditions, and if you exercise for an extended period, you will tire out.
That is why you must split your routine into sections. Start with 30 seconds of swimming laps three times a week, with a 30-second pause. Then progressively increase the number of sets you accomplish as much as possible.
Get a Swim Coach
Is swimming good? Yes, but if you know nothing, it won’t bring fruit. And you can only accomplish all that we mentioned above by getting a skilled swim coach.
Look swimming can help with weight loss, but if you’re a beginner, you have to learn before diving. Thus, you will get proper swimming training to strengthen your mental health and breathing exercises, leading to fat burn.
You’ll also be able to develop speed and timing within a few months, allowing you to burn more calories.
What Are the Best Swim Strokes for Weight Loss?
Since you’re fully dedicated to dropping pounds and getting in a lean shape, you have to burn calories as much as possible. You can do that by picking the right swim strokes and sometimes trying to mix them up during the workout.
Butterflystrokes
This is the most effective stroke that can burn more calories than others. It’s quite intimidating for beginners, but it’ll cut down some extra pounds if you can get used to it. The name comes from its movement, which imitates the butterfly wings. There comes a time when it can reach top speed than other strokes.
To start with the butterfly, you’ll start on your belly and face the bottom of the pool. At the same time, bring your arms over your head, and dip them into the water to move forward. Throughout the process, you’ll rise your head up and down above the water surface. Keep your legs straight and together, looking like a dolphin’s tails, called a dolphin kick.
Breaststrokes
This style comes in second place and is almost as effective as the butterfly stroke. And it is the easiest and slowest one. As a beginner, you’ll get to learn this technique at first. You’re going to admire it as it doesn’t require your head to immerse underwater.
In this swimming style, keep your tummy flat in the water, then move your arms up the front of your body in a half-circle motion. According to peer-reviewed studies, thirty minutes of breaststroke swimming can burn almost 200 calories depending on gender, weight, and body.
Backstrokes
You can also go for a backstroke workout that involves your back movements. It’s a safe stroke to keep your head above water in the pool. It can ease the injury on your back while toning up the muscles.
With these swimming strokes, you’re going to dip your back under the water, rotate your hands with a sweeping motion and move backward. Your legs should be in moving back and forth movement.
Freestyle
You probably have heard of swimming front crawl; you can also call it freestyle. It is the most efficient and fastest among all the strokes and is mostly used in freestyle events.
To begin, lie on your stomach in the pool and, like a windmill, thrust your arms forward in reverse motion. You’ll be going further by pushing water behind you in this manner. Meanwhile, you need to kick in fluttering movement and breathe with your strokes.
Tips for Swimming to Lose Weight
To get the best result in weight swimming, consider following our tips below.
- It would be ideal if you focused on swimming faster and harder. Because as your swimming skills and efficiency improve, you must increase your heart rate. To calculate your maximal heart rate, subtract 220 off your age.
- If you’re more physically active, whether you’re swimming, jogging, or walking, you’ll get the best results. It has the same recurrence rate as any other cardiovascular workout. As a result, you should swim four to five times each week.
- You need to have a better sleep to restore your muscles after an intensive workout, and proper sleeping also helps to lose weight. If you don’t obtain a high enough rest, your stress levels and appetite will soar.
- When it comes to reducing weight, diet management is significant. Since you’re burning more calories, you’ll need to supplement your diet. On the other hand, when you swim in cold water, your hunger will start to skyrocket. Therefore, you must alter your diet proportionately.
How Long Should You Swim a Day to Lose Weight?
You’ve probably learned that weight loss is possible through swimming, but how long should you swim? This question is important and completely relevant.
So, the answer is that it depends on your timing and intensity. If you want to lose weight by one pound, you need to burn 500 calories per day a week.
At the same time, if you can continue to do the same amount of swimming four times a day for a whole month, you’ll be able to cut down three to four pounds. Look, everyone is different; some get lean faster than others.
Because a low-intensity swim only burns 300 calories, you need to focus on performing intense motions. To sum up, if you can build a daily caloric deficit of 2,000 calories, you can lose four pounds in one week.
