Swimming is a great sport. It is non-weight bearing but in some sense gives a power workout close to what you can get in weights.
When you swim, you breathe and exercise your lungs. You move your arms and legs and from fingers to toes, every part of the body is working, including your abdominal muscles. Swimming has different strokes, so the combinations add to different muscle workouts with one stroke complementing the other. In addition, in the water you can swim with fins for an extra cardio workout. Using a kick board gives the legs a great workout. Moreover, as you get tired the water refreshes and soothes you to recovery. These days there are combinations of water exercise that offer great benefits for non-swimmers of all ages and fitness levels.
While swimming is a great sport, it can also get dangerous if you go beyond your limits. For instance, if you can only swim a few yards and venture too far in the open sea you stand the risk of death by drowning. Second, even good swimmers can get into deep trouble when caught in currents or other rapid water flows. Third, there are creatures in the deep ocean, from sharks to poisonous sea snake and jellyfish and other unknowns that can devour you for a meal. Caution and commonsense can prevent these disasters.
In addition, before I conclude, we have to remind ourselves that kids love water. Teaching your children and grandchildren to swim should be one of the first priorities of life. I was surely glad to hear recently that UNICEF was offering some learn to swim programs in Vietnam in order to save kids from drowning. In many a third world country, kids go to the water to fish as a means of satisfying their hunger. After swimming away for many years competitively, at a very young age, I began on a program to teach others to swim rather than train further for competition.
Back in my home country Sri Lanka, I did a lot to teach kids to swim in my younger days. The best swimmers in the country came only from elite families who could afford entry to swimming pools in this poor country of mine. Kids in the villages knew nothing other than the dog paddle. On the initiative of one Boris Kazmiroff from the National Council of YMCA’s, I teamed up with him and Greg Roskwoski, a Sri Lankan citizen of Polish and Japanese descent and prominent English radio announcer in Japan to form the Learn to Swim Movement in Sri Lanka. In essence, we trained swimming instructors and then taught children in the poor villages to swim. There were no swimming clubs or swimming pools, so we taught the kids to swim in lakes, rivers and the open seas. Guess what. Less than a decade later, the best long distance swimmers appeared from the poor villages of Sri Lanka. Excelling and surpassing the Colombo swimmers in events such as the annual 2-mile open sea swim. That was my contribution to the swimming movement in Sri Lanka in the early to mid 1960s.
The main purpose of this short essay is to promote the idea that swimming can provide a lifetime of fun and fitness for people of all ages and is a great cross-training exercise for runners and bikers as well.
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