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How Swimming Can Improve Your Mental Health

By Swim Advice
11 Mar 2022

Swimming is perfect for physical exercise, working out all of the muscles at once, but it can also be mentally beneficial. It brings a therapeutic state to your mind and helps to bring a positive effect. Swimming is very beneficial for the mind, here is why:

Swimming is an effective way to relieve stress. The regular, repetitive motion of swimming through the water is often relaxing and can help focus the mind on one task. Swimming is a sport that releases endorphins into your brain and can help to bring a positive outlook to life. Being immersed in the water boosts blow flow to the brain, which can have a positive impact on its health. Swimming can lead to at least a 30% improvement in self-worth and satisfaction in life.

Regular swimming can also help to lower the effectiveness of anxiety and depression. The release of these natural endorphins helps to boost happiness. Swimming is also a great way to help improve memory, focus, and concentration as swimming often takes a lot of focus into your swimming technique. The water can help to relieve the tension of muscles, the floating effect of the water is calming to the mind and helps people to feel happier in themselves.

Swimming has a big community of fellow swimmers who support each other, give each other advice, and help to influence each other. Social interaction with other swimmers to share experiences, tips, and tricks, or simply to enjoy swimming together, can help to boost serotonin and to find some like-minded people to support you.

There is scientific evidence that suggests that the colour blue/being in blue spaces can improve mental well-being, for example looking up at a blue sky, or looking at the blue sea. It is abundant throughout the natural world and is associated heavily with water.

In conclusion, swimming is perfect for your physical health, but it can be perfect to help your mental health too. At ProSwimwear, we offer a large range of swimwear, accessories, and equipment to dive into the water with a smile.

Posted in News, Training, Swimwear, Competitive, Equipment, Swim Tips and Social Media

Why You Should Begin Dryland Training

By Swim Advice
10 Feb 2022

Dryland training is important to swimmers, and should also be used to maximise swimmer performance. The purpose of swimming is to improve the swimmer’s power and overall speed in the pool, but this is not enough to maintain muscle strength. Therefore there needs to be exercised outside of the pool to improve the versatility of the swimmer’s muscles.

Despite the repetitive movements and use of the whole body whilst swimming, gaining muscle just by swimming is a tricky task. Training outside of the pool can help assist with this task. When weight is placed onto a muscle, that muscle is working to resist the gravitational pull which causes a muscle to contract and tense. When muscles contract against a weight applied, micro-tears in tissue appear that cause that soreness you feel after a workout, but as the body repairs these micro-tears, the muscle builds up and gets stronger.

At Proswimwear, we offer a range of protein powders and nutritional products that can help with muscle gain and repairing muscle after a workout. These also help to increase your protein intake to hit nutritional goals without having to consume vast amounts of meat and costing a fortune.

https://www.proswimwear.co.uk/nutrition-hydration/nutrition-and-hydration/after.html

Weight-bearing strength training for swimmers helps increase bone density too! Swimmers naturally have a low bone density because they spend the majority of their training in the pool rather than putting weight onto their muscles through dryland training. The extra weight on your bones helps to form stronger bone tissue.

Having a strong core as a swimmer can help you maintain the correct body position in the water that helps to minimise drag. This will help a swimmer to move faster and carry more acceleration into a dive with clean entry. Core training can help to improve your breathing flow in the water, improve posture and upper body strength. You can do many dryland workouts that help to improve core strength, such as using resistance bands or doing sit-ups. At ProSwimwear, we have resistance and dryland training aids to use during your training routine.

https://www.proswimwear.co.uk/swimming-accessories/swimming-training-aids/resistance-training.html

Dryland training requires strong focus and coordination. Having the correct body position for the different kinds of exercises that can be used when training outside of the pool is very important and can be learned over time. Balance and stability can be improved with single-legged exercises. When a swimmer gains a constant level of strength, there are a huge variety of exercises that can be done with quick bursts of energy. This helps develop power in your legs and arms, such as squats and push-ups, which then can be applied in the pool.

Dryland training helps to vary your training regime, introducing new movements and challenges to the muscles. The repetitive motions in swimming can lead to injuries and dryland training can target these areas that are underdeveloped. Training out of the water can also help to relieve some of the pressure placed on strained muscle groups. Introducing these exercises can help to develop stronger muscles, letting the muscles get stronger in the weaker movement which will put less strain on them overall.

No Pool? No problem! At ProSwimwear we have everything a swimmer needs to stay sharp for their next race, even when they are out of the pool. Whether it’s a warm-up, strength and conditioning training, or recovery, when you aren’t able to get in the pool we have the best variety of swimmers’ land training equipment so that you can stay race-ready.

Make sure that you check it out below:

https://www.proswimwear.co.uk/swimming-accessories/land-training.html