Water Exercises

In winter it can be a good idea to visit your local pool to do water exercises such as swimming or walking, and moving in the water.

With bad winter weather putting me off exercising outdoors, I decided to visit my local swimming pool again for the first time in months.

I noticed that pool exercises are very popular here in Japan, maybe because of the elderly people who may suffer from joint pain due to arthritis?

But I have seen young people doing it as well, so was curious to give it a try. My local pool is run by the city, so it’s low cost to use. Also, as well as swimming lanes, it has a spa pool with a jacuzzi and water jets to massage your back. Oh the luxury!

So I went to the pool, and the atmosphere was very pleasant compared to the harsh winter weather outside. There was one freestyle area in the pool, together with 2 lanes (one for walking, and the other for swimming).

To start with I started to warm up by doing front crawl. I used to prefer breast stroke but found it aggravates a knee injury that I sustained a few years ago, but the up/down kicking action of front crawl produces no knee pain for me. After years of practice I feel that my technique is quite good for front crawl, with something approaching total immersion effortless swimming.

I felt that I had reached perfection with breast stroke, achieving an arrow-like glide through the water, and able to keep up with most free-style swimmers in my local pool. But now I focus on front-crawl when swimming. Anyway, it is the fastest stroke, but a downside is that you spend most of the time with your eyes under the water so don’t see much apart from the bottom of the pool. If there were fish in the pool, it would be a lot more fun.

Total immersion swimming is where you try to keep your body almost fully submerged for maximum efficiency as you pierce the water like a dolphin. Your arms enter the water with minimal splashing, and you breath by tilting your head to the side with your mouth in the trough of the bow wave produced by your head, so you don’t have to lift your head up to breath.

After about 10 lengths of the 25m pool doing front crawl, I am starting to need to breath on almost every stroke, whereas at the start, I can do maybe 6 stokes between breaths. So I suspect that my upper-body swimming muscles may need a bit more power. So after these 10 warm-up lengths, I thought that I would give the water exercises a try.

Since there were quite a few other people doing this, it wasn’t embarrassing at all. So I started by walking forwards with my lower arms by my sides with palms facing forward for greater resistance.

By walking as quickly as possible, there is quite a lot of resistance generated. This was a shallow pool, so it was possible to walk the whole length. I found my foot grip slipping a bit when I really pushed, so if it was any deeper, then it may not have been so good. I guess I was walking about 50% faster than some of the older folks in the pool so I tried to keep well clear of them so as not to produce too much of a wake, or catch up behind them.

After 10 lengths I was starting to sweat, and could feel some back strain setting in so I started walking backwards, and did this for a further 10 lengths.

Then I went back to swimming, doing some intervals where I race to the end of the pool and rest until I get my breath back, and then repeat for 10 lengths.

Then back to the water exercises. Then another round of swimming.

After 50 minutes I was done, and relaxed in the spa pool.

It seems like in a shallow pool, you are limited to walking or striding exercises in a forwards/sideways/backwards direction, but in deeper pools, there should be a variety of other exercises that you could do (probably best done as part of a water aerobics class).

So next time you are at a pool, why not give water exercises a try?