While swimming, you use just about every major muscle group in your whole body! You’ll find yourself using your arms, core, legs, and even your back. Water serves as natural resistance, causing the body to have to work harder to move through it. This helps develop lean muscle mass, which speeds up metabolism in the long run, helping you lose weight and keep it off! Furthermore, it’s a great source of cardio. So while building your body’s muscles, it also helps strengthen your heart too. 

Since swimming is a full body cardio workout, it’s also the ultimate calorie burning form of exercise. You can burn up to 500 calories in an hour. This can increase based on the intensity of the workout and the length of time, getting up to ~700 calories in an hour! This is an extremely important part of losing weight. Dieting and eating healthily are also very important when trying to lose weight, but exercise and building muscle will provide faster and longer lasting effects on weight loss. 

Because water is buoyant, it is less stressful on the body than non-water activities that can sometimes cause pain and excess stress on your joints. Water exercises, like swimming and water aerobics, provide an exercise environment that’s easy on the joints and cooler for maintaining body temperature. Water exercises are so easy on the body that it’s even recommended to pregnant women. It’s also a great way for those with disabilities, injuries, arthritis, and other complications to continue to workout and incorporate exercise into their weight loss journeys. 

Any type of exercise, including swimming, can help with insomnia and managing stress. This affects weigh loss because lack of sleep and increased stress can prevent you from losing weight! Cortisol is a stress hormone in the body that can play a role in causing cravings for high-fat foods and stress eating. Therefore, by swimming and doing other exercises, you can increase your sleep and decrease your stress, ultimately leading to a healthier lifestyle and easier weight loss.