Water is a great fitness tool. It’s a wonderful way to exercise without impact to your joints and, done right, you get a fabulous calorie burn. Here’s how to exercise in the water and why water fitness works.
Why Water Exercise Works
In exercise, there are three types of movement. These are:
- Isotonic, where you move your muscles at varying speeds as when doing a biceps curl
- Isometric, where your muscles don’t move, like when you push against a car that won’t budge
- Isokinetic, where your muscles move at a continuous speed. Whatever force you’re pushing against, pushes back just as hard
Exercising in water is isokinetic exercise. You can only move your body at a constant speed because the water pushes back. There’s no chance of making quick, jerky movements, so there’s less impact on your body and, because your arms and legs aren’t moving fast, your joints don’t have to work too hard to slow them, making water exercise at lot easier on your joints.
Water exercise is especially beneficial if you need to work out but struggle with being overweight, have arthritis or have a sprained or strained muscle.
Types of Water Workouts
Swimming
Regular swimming is an excellent form of exercise providing a low-impact, high calorie-burning workout. It gives you a great cardio workout and also stretches and lengthens your body. Stretching is something we all need to do more of.
Swimming strengthens your arms, legs, shoulders and glutes and is also beneficial to your core. You will also benefit from a stronger heart.
Water Aerobics
You’ll likely be able to find a water aerobics class at one ofToronto’s indoor pools or at your local gym or health club. In water aerobics, you don’t need to know how to swim in order to participate. You stand in waist-deep water and use special foam dumbbells and ankle devices to offer more resistance to the arms and legs.
Exercises include jumping, hopping, lifting and dancing, very similar to a regular aerobics class. It’s important to note that the water will only push back as hard as you push against it, so if you’re movements are slow and light, you won’t burn many calories.
Aqua Jogging
Aqua jogging is a very good form of a low-impact, high-calorie burning exercise. It’s very similar to running on land, but without the impact to your joints. Aqua jogging will be the most effective when you are:
- in water that is too deep to touch bottom;
- wearing a flotation belt; and
- wearing aquatics shoes.
To aqua-jog, begin running by swinging your arms and legs briskly while leaning slightly forward. Besides running, you can also do high knee drills, heel to butt kicks and Frankenstein style walking with straight arms and legs.