Is swimming good for fitness? I've heard both bad and good about it.. Never really tried it much personally, anybody on here swim much?
It improves your cardiovascular endurance, your flexibility, your muscles will get better conditioned, your coordination can improve, etc. It's good.
Sprinting/running is the best form of conditioning for boxing. If ya wanna get into the Swimming vs Running stuff. Swimming is ****, you can add it into your program....thats all good. But most real athlete's, only swim when they are injured and during rehab. Because its low impact, and its not even plyometric.......! not quite. Swimmers in everyday life, are some of the shittest athlete's........i could probably beat Michael Phelps at almost everything........accept swimming. Swimming does not cross over into any other sports. But it can become a usefull conditioning tool.
What if you're a **** swimmer like me? I've been thinking about this actually. I quit the gym (exercise gym, not boxing) a while ago to pay for boxing lessons. Anyway, I'm thinking of going back to the gym to use the pool, they had a nice pool. No U18s allowed in the gym, which is good and usually empty. But I'm a rubbish swimmer, really bad. I can't go 5 metres without either drowning or putting my foot down lol. It's a real ****ing effort to do a couple of laps. It is tiring, I get more tired trying to swim than running. Am I actually gaining anything by flapping away like a moron?
A pure swimmer, yes. But you could say the same for a pure runner, I'd **** up a marathoner at almost everything. That does not mean swimming is not beneficial, for most people a regular swim would drastically improve numerous aspects of physical fitness. Running very long distances has very little crossover gains. Cycling long distances has barely any crossover gains. Swimming is no different. Together they'd make you a triathlete, and those are pretty well conditioned. If it's not sports specific it's suboptimal, it's as simple as that. I just make sure I do as much different suboptimal stuff as possible and focus on sports specific work, so my body will never adapt to suboptimal tasks. Swim, run, cycle, surf, canoe, play soccer, etc. Be allround athletic.
i never liked swimming but i hurt be back and could not box for 2 years and all i could do was swimming me backs better now but i still go swimming coz it works every muscle in your body
I was hopeless at swimming and had the same problems as you, but same with anything the more you do it the better you get. I think it depends on what stroke you do as well. I can't do front crawl without taking in a lung full of water so do breast stroke and can go a lot longer without stopping. When you are get tired the best thing to do is just power through it!. As strange as it sounds, it doesn't really get much harder as you carry on (obviously if you're concentrating on speed it may change but i'm not that good atm) and you can still do a lot of lengths while tired.
Wat? Overall a terrible post, but you just totally contradicted yourself at the end. Conditioning crosses over into pretty much every sport.