Enjoy the Health Benefits of Swimming in the New Year

New Year’s Eve is almost here. For many of us, that means getting dressed up, celebrating with friends, and staying up way past our usual bedtime to properly greet the New Year. It’s also a time for us to stop and assess how our year has gone; what we’ve accomplished and what our hopes, goals and dreams are for the year to come.

This inevitably brings up the topic of New Year’s Resolutions.

Resolutions come in many shapes and sizes. And, in fact, for many of us, the resolution itself is to change our own shapes and sizes. If getting more fit and feeling more healthy in the New Year is on your list, here are the health benefits of swimming to get you there.

1. If exercises such as jogging are too jarring for you, swimming is a great way to get the health benefit of getting your heart pumping without the high impact stress of pounding the pavement.
2. Swimming tones your muscles and builds strength. It provides a full body workout.
3. In addition to increasing your overall strength, swimming can improve your coordination, balance and posture.
4. There’s no better exercise to improve cardiovascular health. Swimming just 30 minutes a day will result in lower resting heart rates and lower blood pressure.
5. Swimming is a very peaceful activity, so it’s great for stress reduction. Much like practicing yoga, there’s not much else to think about other than the motions you’re moving through, so it’s a great way to calm and clear your mind.

Measuring the success of your New Year’s health resolutions is not always as simple as seeing the numbers on the scale go down by ten pounds. (In fact, this is often the least effective way to measure success, because those numbers don’t tell the full picture of your overall health and well-being.) It’s really more a question of how you feel.

Feeling more energetic, fit and happy in the New Year is an achievable goal for all of us. For many of us, it’s simply a case of prioritizing our own health and making time to take the actions that will get us there. 

If you’d rather swim in the comfort of your own backyard, it’s not too late to tell Santa that you want an in-ground fiberglass pool for Christmas! That way, the entire family can be enjoying the health benefits of swimming by the time spring rolls around. To learn more about how easy it can be to own an in-ground fiberglass pool and start enjoying the health benefits of swimming by spring, click here.