Learn to swim tips 2

Warming up and stretching for your swimming lesson

My left shoulder hurt for days after my last swimming session. My whole body ached.

Swimming is a physical activity, much like other physical exercises, where you can develop cramps without proper warming up. This is because our muscles will be doing movements it is not used to or pushed beyond its normal level. So by the time you want to start practicing your strokes and leg movement, it is wise to do some warm up exercises. I had to learn it the painful way.

Just think that you’ll be doing a lot of arm and shoulder movements, legs too and of course your whole body will be put under pressure. So before you swim do some general warm up plus focus on shoulder and arm muscles and leg muscles. If you’re shy at the pool then do it in your room before you come down, or make it look natural as you’re making your way to the pool.

If you’re not sure then there is this 4 warm up exercises article on ezine you might want to refer to. It involves, arm swing, clap, lunges and start jump.

This tip is more geared towards to avoiding muscle injury rather than increasing performance as this is more important when we are just learning to swim, where we will be only practicing certain strokes or movement, rather than swimming some laps, and the lack of experience swimming means that our muscle will indeed be doing something they’re not used to. Swimmers actually warm up by doing warm up laps to increase their swimming performances during competition.

Now warm ups usually includes stretching exercises, and though personally I feel that stretching my muscles help to reduce the soreness that comes after, there are actually different opinions and conflicting research findings on its benefit or effectiveness. So you’ll have to do your own reading on that. Basically they say warming up is good, but stretching might only be beneficial to limited type of sport and can lower performance or harmful in other instances.