Swimming & weight loss - advice

There's no doubt that swimming is a great form of exercise - it uses muscles throughout the body, and gives you a great cardio workout. But what if you want to lose weight? We investigate the role of swimming in weight loss and come up with some surprising answers.

Quick quiz - is swimming good for weight loss, yes or no? It sounds like a trick question, but in fact it's not - it's actually a highly debated issue in the fitness field. Here are the facts.
At face value, swimming should be excellent for weight loss. It involves almost all your major muscle groups, can place a vigorous demand on your heart and lungs, and is popular with a wide variety of people including those who are pregnant, extremely overweight, or have some kind of injury.


Swimming breast stroke or backstroke can burn about the same number of calories as a fast walk or a slow jog, while freestyle (front crawl) can burn as many calories as running. But for some reason swimming appears to be less effective than other forms of exercise when it comes to weight loss.

A look at the research literature shows that this is not just word of mouth.


The prestigious American Journal of Sports Medicine compared three exercise groups over the course of three months - one walked every day, one cycled every day, while the third swam every day.

After three months they found that those on the walking program had lost an average of 17 pounds, those in the cycling group had lost an average of 19 pounds - and the swim group? They actually gained an average of 5 pounds!
While the mechanism of weight gain is not certain, and some of it could have been muscle, researchers speculated that the most likely explanation was that they must have eaten more. They theorized that whereas running and cycling raise your body temperature and thus suppress hunger, swimming in cold water stimulates the appetite - so although it burns calories, people tend to eat more after swimming.

It is undoubtedly true that competitive swimmers have body fat levels higher than those of runners or cyclists - indeed, when swim coaches want their athletes to lose weight, they prescribe 'land training' (running or cycling) in addition to their swimming.

Indeed, one survey that compared collegiate swimmers and distance runners found that the runners carried significantly less body fat (see table below).

	Swimmers	Runners
Men	12%	7%
Women	20%	15%

Swimming & weight loss practicalities

So what does all this mean to you as a recreational swimmer?

The bottom line is that swimming is a great form of exercise, and makes an excellent part of anyone's workout program. But if you are swimming regularly and wondering why you're not losing weight, it may be time to get out of the pool and hit the streets - minute for minute, running is the most effective form of cardio training for burning excess calories.

This does not mean that you should not swim. But if you are trying to lose weight, be sure you are doing other forms of exercise, particularly those that are proven to burn off the fat - running, interval training and weight training for example.