Swimming – Physical, Emotional and Mental Health Benefits

Swimming is a common individual or group sports that makes use of all the body’s muscles to proceed through the water with the use of lungs. The sport also involves a lot of strategic thinking and proper breathing techniques. The whole game is completed within a swimming pool or open water because it can be done both in shallow water or in deep water with some kind of pool equipment. Swimming is a popular sport for children and adults all over the world.

With swimming, a person is able to build up his/her self-esteem since they will have to face various challenges in order to stay afloat and reach the end of the pool. This will further encourage a person to become more disciplined especially if they are being coached by an instructor. In a safe environment, kids are more likely to learn how to swim and keep fit at the same time. Therefore, swimming is a great way to teach the youngsters to maintain a healthy lifestyle and develop their social and psychological well-being.

There are three basic swimming strokes that are often used in swimming competitions. They are the breaststroke, freestyle and backstroke. There are also four types of swimming positions that are also recognized internationally. These are butterfly, open water, competitive swimmers and backstroke. Competitors compete in swimming events based on the point system. The winner of the competition is declared when a swimmer has reached a certain distance through each stroke.

It can be said that swimming has many physical, mental and emotional health benefits for the swimmers. This is especially so for competitive swimmers as they are required to constantly go underwater and work hard to finish even when their oxygen level is low. They are able to do this in a swimming pool or in a lake or sea. Therefore, it is not surprising that many physical fitness experts have reported numerous health benefits from regular swimming.

There are many benefits from competitive swimming. For one thing, swimmers are constantly working out their muscles which helps build their endurance. The constant swimming also increases the resistance of the muscles and the swimmer is thus able to use every muscle in his body. Moreover, competitive swimming gives the swimmers a chance to improve their performance in other swimming activities.

Some of the common physical workout exercises done by swimmers include the freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke and the butterfly. Apart from these, swimmers can also choose to swim in the event of backstroke, freestyle and the butterfly. For those who want to do more than one event, they could always combine different swimming moves in order to create a particular course. For example, in the butterfly race, swimmers need to learn to turn quickly while swimming at high speed.