Is swimming actually good cardio exercise?
The answer to this question may seem obvious: as aerobic/cardio exercise, swimming should be essentially the same as running, biking, elliptical, and any other comparable sustained, rhythmic activity. But as this week’s Jockology column in the Globe discusses, there’s a surprising lack of research to back this claim up — and in fact some evidence that swimming doesn’t provide the same cardiovascular health benefits as other activities like running: The problem is that your body gets a fundamentally different physiological challenge from being horizontal in water compared with being upright on dry land, thanks to the hydrostatic pressure and high thermal conductivity of water, according to Hirofumi Tanaka, director of the University of Texas’s Cardiovascular Aging Research Laboratory. Dr. Tanaka reviewed current evidence for swimming’s effects on cardiovascular health in the journal Sports Medicine last year. He found solid evidence that regular swimming improves control of blood-sugar
