4 Swimming Workouts To Boost Your Fitness

Swimming workouts have huge benefits and can increase your cardiovascular fitness as well as strength.

They’re a great way to change up your training if hitting the pool isn’t something you usually do and you want some variety on top of your bread and butter sessions.

One of the biggest benefits of swimming is that it works your whole body, targeting several major muscle groups and helping you to improve core stability and strength too.

It’s also something you can do year-round as an escape from cold rainy days in the winter and searing hot days in the summer.

For ideas about how to incorporate the pool into your workouts and maximise fitness gains, see four workouts below.

Swimming Sprint Drills

Sprint intervals will work your upper body and cardiovascular system, but be prepared to dig deep mentally.

Do five sets of:

50-meter sprint freestyle;
rest for 20 seconds;
100-meter sprint (any stroke);
rest for 60 seconds.

Push-Ups & Abs

To add some extra core stimulus into your session, you can mix up some bodyweight exercises with your swimming. Some people find swimming length after length pretty boring, so this is a great way to change up the workout.

Try 5 sets of the following:

swim 100-200m at a moderate pace;
30 seconds of push-ups;
One minute of your choice of ab exercise (e.g. crunches, sit-ups, flutter kicks, leg levers).

Diving Swims

UFC fighter Jon Jones does a lot of swimming, and this is a workout he likes to use to test himself. Jones does it to exhaustion, but you might want to start by picking a target of between 20-50 reps depending on your fitness.

You simply dive into the pool from one edge, swim a width, pull yourself out the other side, dive back in and repeat. You’ll quickly start to feel a burn.

Flutter Kicks

Using a kickboard to practise flutter kicks will really work your abs. Hold the kickboard out in front of you, keep your core tight and stretch your legs behind you. Flutter kick your way across the length of the pool, breaking up the work by resting if you need to in between lengths.

This will work the deepest parts of your ab muscles. You can even add this workout in as a 10-minute ab burner at the end of a strength session.

A pro tip is to try and point your feet downwards and keep them locked.