What is research telling us about the health benefits of swimming?
I’ll start with heart health. When you submerge a human body up to the shoulders in water and this is true in a hot tub as well as in a pool hydrostatic pressure is exerted and the body responds over the course of time. How? Simply due to the increased pressure, more blood is forced into your central organs, and your heart pumps a greater volume of blood with every stroke. Also, your heart stretches in order to do that. There are two basic things you heart does when it gets exercise: It pumps faster and it stretches to pump more blood. When you look at heart health, the key metric isn’t how many times the heart beats, but how much it stretches to pump more blood with every stroke and thereby get more oxygen into the body. Let’s talk about elite athletes. Their resting pulse rate is lower than yours or mine. If ours is, say, at 70, theirs may be at 60 or 58. Elite athlete’s hearts are able to beat fewer times per minute not because they need less blood and less oxygen pumped through the
