Does the research indicate that swimming can help people live longer?
As I’ve noted, various projects we’ve supported have shown that if people immerse themselves or exercise in water on a regular basis, they’re going to live healthier lives. But until now, researchers have essentially been making hypotheses about the longevity of people who engage in aquatics. Now we actually have a study that takes this out of the realm of supposition. A longitudinal database has been compiled at the Cooper Institute in Dallas from health research on men who’ve been studied for the past 37 years. Over the last two years, NSPF has funded Dr. Steven Blair, a professor at the University of South Carolina and, by the way, a former head of the Cooper Institute to examine the database and look at the population of swimmers versus the population of sedentary people, the population of walkers and the population of runners. What Dr. Blair and his team have discovered is pretty eye-opening. They found that the risk of premature death for the swimmers was half that of the sedenta
