How often should I go swimming to lose weight effectively?
- Wednesday Dec 2,2009 11:32 AM
- By diddy
- In Others
How many times a week should I go and for how long in each session? What is a healthy amount? I want to go swimming and I’ve already started eating healthily - I just need the excerise to tone up! I want to lose around 30 pounds in the next few months preferably… Thank you!
Excerise, Swimming To Lose Weight
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Swimming is fantastic exercise and, done vigorously, can work off more calories with less impact than virtually any other exercise. However it also tends to make you hungry! If you find yourself eating more as a result of swimming then, unless you’re an extremely active and intense swimmer (which it doesn’t sound like), then it might not be the best weight loss exercise.
Of course to some extent this is true with all exercise, so you might as well swim. Other excellent, whole-body, low impact, high calorie-burning exercises are circuit-training/weight-lifting, martial arts, and skiing (but skiiing machines are boring and most of us don’t have slopes nearby).
So anyway, what I’d do is try to learn calorie counting or at least be very conscious about everything that I ate. That way you’ll know if you’re actually eating more as a result of the swimming or not.
Here’s a site with the calorie burning rates of various exercises. The fourth table is probably the one most useful to you. As you can see, 30 minutes of moderate pace swimming only burns the calories of one soda!
http://k2.kirtland.cc.mi.us/~balbachl/calorie.htm
And here’s a site that lists how many calories you’d typically have to burn or consume to lose or gain one pound … 3,500. This is why exercise alone is somewhat over-rated as a weight loss technique.
http://www.annecollins.com/weight-loss/calories-per-pound.htm
So this means that you’d have to swim for one hour (540 calories) at a moderate pace for about 6 to 7 days to lose just one pound. That means that, assuming no eating habit changes, you’d lose your 30 pounds in about 8 months. That’s actually great if you can do it. There’s generally no reason to lose weight any faster. If you swim only 3 to 4 days a week for one hour then it would take you over a year.
This all might not sound good to you. Too slow! Too slow! In fact it might sound very bad. But the fact is that it’s the right way to lose weight. You probably didn’t gain 30 pounds in a few months so you shouldn’t expect to lose it that fast either. Losing the weight will, presumably, be a permanent life change. But if you lose it fast just to put it or more right back on then, well, that’s not permanent!
Of course you can lose the weight faster, but it means that you have to carefully watch not only how much you eat and what you eat but when you eat. If you’re exercising while consuming significantly fewer calories than you’re accustomed to then you’ll need to consume them near the time of your workouts.
I’d shoot for losing your 30 pounds in no less than 4 months. In my opinion, slower is better. You could do it faster but it wouldn’t be the way you really want.
Another word of warning is that you might not be burning calories at exactly the rate listed in the first site’s tables. There are too many factors at stake … swimming experience, stroke efficiency, cardiopulmonary condition, etc.
Also, you should know that calorie burning of any exercise decreases/increases exponentially with lessening/increasing of intensity. You’re better off running full tilt for 7 minutes than you are walking slowly for an hour. This has a downside and an upside. Downside is that you might not burn as fast as you’d like. Upside is that, if you work at improving your speed and endurance, then you’ll be able to burn them much faster.
So if you do get into swimming a lot more then you’ll probably eventually want to push yourself a bit with speed training, learning a variety of strokes, etc. There are a variety of exercise plans available if you websearch for "swim training" and you should be able to find one that is right for you.
Good luck!
edit: I just want to say that what the previous poster said about calories, sweating, and weight is both completely false and ridiculous. Firstly, you do sweat while swimming … it goes in the water! Secondly, he’s promulgating a complete myth: how much you sweat, or even whether you sweat at all, has essentially nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not you lose fat weight. Other than surgery, the only way to lose fat is to catabolize it, and that means to sufficiently increase your caloric expenditure relative to your caloric input. Sweating has essentially nothing to do with that … if you’re skiing naked through the snow you might not be sweating at all but you are radiating, transpiring, burning calories, and losing weight. Please talk to any well-informed nutritionist, physiologist, biologist, chemist, etc., if you doubt this … or just review Michael Phelps diet … or hey, why not swim several extra miles daily without increasing your caloric consumption and see what happens!
look up HIIT cardio. Its amazing stuff. Way better than normal stretched out cardio. Back to ur question. Any time u can go swimming u should go. There isnt really a set ammount of how much u should or should not do it. Michael phelps swims for like 5 - 6 hours everyday.
As long as you can manage, every day if possible. Swimming is low impact, so you don’t really need rest days unless you’re up in the elite competitive range swimming 10000 yards or more a day.
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Note to Hennessey:
LOLOLOLOL
1. Yes, you sweat while swimming. You just don’t notice.
2. Sweat has nothing whatever to do with burning fat. Its just your body’s way of shedding excess heat via evaporation.
If swimming is going to be your only cardio exercises then you should plan to do it 3-7 times a week. Ideally you should get some cardio every day but it doesn’t always need to be the same thing. You could swim a couple of times a week and go for walks or dance etc the others. Depending on how fit you are now, you should start with sessions that are 20 mins or longer and then build up over time until you can swim for 45-60 min.
If you want swimming to be your diet you’ll have to do some math. Figure out how many calories you burn per min or hour of swimming by your calorie intake for the day. Of course your calorie burn will need to be higher than your intake.
3 or 4 times a week.
I lost 55 LBs just by not eating crap and going for a FAST twenty minute walk twice a day.
The first thing you should lose is sugar it the worst thing you can put in your body
For good exercise, every day. BUT, since pools are always so busy, that’s impossible. So I would say 4 times a week, for at least an hour each. Go 3 times during the weekday and once during the weekends. The days you’re not swimming (3) should be replaced by some aerobic exercise like running if you want to lose weight effectively.
the very least you should do is 30 mins 3 times a week, but you should do as much as you can, like seeing if you can do a 40 min session, and if so try do this as often as possible, also you’ll get fitter over time and you’ll find you can do more. then you should increase the length of the session or the intensity of it. you want to at least feel out of breath by the end of the session or it means you haven’t worked hard enough.
you cannot lose weight by swimming. why? because when you swim, you do not sweat. yes, you can burn calories which will tone muscle. but if you are looking to lose weight, swimming is not the cardio you need.
many people believe that you can lose weight while swimming, but it’s not possible. sweating means you are burning fat. and burning fat will help you drop pounds. but since you CANNOT sweat in a pool, you cannot burn fat and in turn, cannot lose weight
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I tried going to a gym with a strict diet once and within a week later, I stopped going to gym and started eating more than before. It brought me back to where I started again. I am sure you happen to experience it like me.
One day, I was watching CNN news and they interviewed this hypotherapist guy, his name is Steve. I myself do not believe in hypnotherapy but the hypnotherapist was rather convincing so I visited his site (http://www.betterlivingwithhypnosis.tk/) and he has a "Weight Loss Powerpack". I bought the part 2 "Weight Loss Powerpack 2" which consist of Weight Loss, Stop Binge Eating and I Love To Exercise. It is more affordable than a month of subscription to the gym and having those strict diets.
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