Benefits of Swimming for Martial Artists
Swimming is a great low-impact activity with many health and fitness benefits for people of all ages. But what about martial artists? How can martial artists benefit from swimming? Even top tier athletes like Georges St Pierre add water training to their regime. Let’s find out why.
Following your favorite boxers or MMA fighters on social networks and looking at their training regimes, you can often see them hit the pool at least once a week to get a workout. But why? How swimming is benefiting martial artists, what does it do to their bodies, and how it increases their performances?
In this article, we will bring you a detailed explanation of all the benefits.
It is a low-impact Workout
One of the reasons why swimming is so popular is because it is a low-impact workout. Each time you take part in hard sparring sessions or do grueling cardio workouts in martial arts, your body will suffer a lot. The same stands for workouts like weight lifting, HIIT, CrossFit, and other intense workouts that put a lot of stress on your body.
However, swimming is one of the rare activities that does not put a lot of stress on your body. But on the other side, water is 800 more dense than air and offers enough resistance for you to improve strength and endurance.
Swimming is a great way to recover
Through martial art training, your body will suffer a lot and muscles get teared up, sprained, and strained in each training session.
In order to stay consistent with your training and achieve your goals, you have to pay extra attention to recovering, and swimming might be a great solution. Hitting the pool just once a week reduces the inflammation caused by intense martial art training. Whether you have issues with contusions, sprains, or joint pain, swimming will reduce the pain and improve recovery time.
Of course, don’t jump into the pool and start doing 10x100m sprints and swim as fast and as hard as you can. That will tear up the muscle tissues even more and may even result in an injury. Instead, focus on relaxed, less intense, and light movements to keep the heart pumping and muscles active.
Builds strength and endurance
Physical size and strength play a big factor in martial arts and combat sports in general. In fact, superior fitness is often the decisive factor between winning and losing.
However, being physically stronger and bigger means nothing if you don’t have the ability to perform at a high pace over an extended period of time. Once in a self-defense situation or a match, your muscles will consume so much oxygen that your heart and lung capacity couldn’t handle it, which results in you gassing out and losing.
And this is where the benefits of swimming come into play.
Propelling yourself through the water provides enough resistance for you to improve muscle strength, but more importantly, build strong endurance at the same time. It is one of the rare workouts where you are evenly improving every single muscle group in your body and increasing cardio. And that’s why martial artists are loving it.
Improves cardio
Unlike running long distances or doing grueling sprint workouts up the hill that put a lot of stress on your joints, swimming is a low-impact workout that offers very much the same benefits. You can hit the pool and work on enhancing both aerobic and anaerobic fitness without worrying much about injuries.
Anaerobic workouts are the ones responsible for building explosiveness, speed, and power. To improve this aspect, you will swim intense short sprints, for example, 10x100m or 10x50m with few breaks in between. Of course, the type of workout you do is based on your fitness level and other factors.
But at the same time, doing only anaerobic workouts won’t do you any good. Instead, you must mix it with the aerobic segment, which builds slow-twitch muscle fibers responsible for performing at the optimum level over an extended period or the entire length of the match.
This means developing a solid swimming technique to swim long distances without any tension. You must be relaxed, focused on pacing yourself, managing energy, and not making any big breaks.
Over time, doing both aerobic and anaerobic aspects of swimming will improve your cardio, and performance in training and competition.
Improves lung capacity
According to a study performed in 2015, swimming can make your lungs bigger. It will also process the oxygen more efficiently throughout the body, which results in better endurance overall. The researchers got these results by comparing the swimmer’s lungs with athletes from other sports such as football players.
During swimming, your heart rate goes up as with any other workout. The body needs more oxygen which is supplied by your lungs, which then causes you to breathe harder and harder while the majority of your body is underwater. Plus, you will have to hold your breath underwater for longer than you would like, which also has many benefits, but more about that in the next section. The study has shown that this will result in certain structural adaptations of the lungs, such as increased capacity.
In martial art, having a bigger lung capacity pays dividends in those grueling wars inside the ring or cage. In those later rounds when both athletes are tired. This is a moment where endurance comes into play as the fighter who has better cardio usually ends up winning the match.
Teaches you to control your breathing
Learning how to time and control your breathing is one of the most important aspects of swimming. Your freestyle or breaststroke technique might be perfect, but it means nothing without the correct breathing technique. So, swimming teaches you all the aspects of how to control your breathing. How to inhale, hold your breath, exhale, all while propelling yourself forward through the water and burning a lot of energy.
And the same concept applies to martial arts. Breathing is a big part of fighting and you have to develop your own breathing pattern to pace yourself. There will be situations, especially during the wild exchanges, where you will need to hold your breath, and then reset and get back to your normal breathing pattern to calm down.
Overall, swimming will help you learn how to manage your breathing correctly, and how to control the oxygen intake more efficiently.
Adds new dynamic to your training
Regardless of the martial art style you train in, training can, and will, at some point, become monotone. Doing the same workouts all the time, coming to the same gym, and meeting the same people becomes monotone and this is normal. The only way to stay motivated is to make some small changes, and swimming might be a great solution.
First, swimming as an activity is the total opposite of martial arts. This will serve as a positive distraction as it enables you to finally focus on something else. You will do a totally different workout, and learn swimming techniques. On top of that, you will meet new people, and overall, develop a new passion.
If you combine this with the benefits of swimming you will experience in the gym, you will realize how these small changes can improve your martial art journey.
It is a great stress reliever
Martial art training can be stressful at times, especially if you are in a professional competition. Going through grueling workouts, hard sparring, and constant ups and downs can accumulate stress and swimming is a great way to get rid of it.
Swimming alone, hearing nothing but the blurring sounds in the water, seeing blue around you, focusing on technique, all of this will put you in some type of a meditative state. A state of mind where you will feel relaxed, and not think much about the problems at home, your career, or anything else.
Like all other physical exercises, swimming as an activity improves your mood and makes you happier. While in the pool, your brain will release various chemicals responsible for making us feel good such as serotonin and endorphin.
Conclusion
Do not hesitate to explore and find new ways to improve your skills outside the martial art dojo. If you are looking for a way to improve strength and build endurance and cardio, swimming might be an ideal option. Training regimes of many professional athlete include at least one swimming session per week, and your should too. Above all, swimming is injury free, and can only help your body recover.
