How Swimming Shapes Your Body

If you’re looking to strengthen and tone all your muscles and perhaps even drop a few pounds, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better way to achieve those goals than by adding swimming to your fitness routine.

Any type of physical activity can build muscle and change how your body looks, feels, and moves. But swimming has the particular benefit of helping build strength without adding massive amounts of bulk and while putting minimal strain on your joints, says Bart Tulick, PT, DPT, clinic director and partner at therapy and balance center FYZICAL Garfield Ridge in Chicago.

“Swimming can definitely change the shape of your body in positive ways,” says Dr. John Hinson, a shoulder and elbow specialist with the Palm Beach Orthopaedic Institute in Florida.

The improvements start in the upper body—think of the well-developed pecs, deltoids, and lats of elite swimmers. They didn’t get those by accident—swimming concentrates much muscle development, strength, and stamina in your upper body due to the repetitive nature of the overhead movements. This can pay dividends in creating smooth, strong upper back, chest, and arm muscles.

“While most aging swimmers are not going to see the body shape of an Olympic athlete, they can strive to see increased mass and tone in these areas,” Hinson says.

The core muscles in your trunk, lower back, and abdomen, are also important in powering swimming strokes, and as such, can tighten and become more defined, especially if you’re running a calorie deficit that helps you shed excess weight. This can help uncover those 6-pack abs everyone seems to want these days.

Though many trainers and doctors note that abs are best chiseled in the kitchen, meaning that dietary changes can lead to more noticeable changes in how your body looks, swimming certainly can contribute to your daily expenditure of calories, which can help you shed some weight and reduce belly fat.

Lastly, the big muscles in your lower body, including the glutes, quadriceps, hamstrings, and calves, can also become more defined without becoming too bulky through swimming. Each time you push off the wall or kick down the lane, you’re helping chisel the long, lean leg lines that elite swimmers have running from the hip to the ankle.

What’s more important than how your body looks is how these changes can improve your performance in the pool and how you move and feel on land. Swimming builds strength, stamina, and flexibility, which can help keep you more mobile and independent as you age.

In addition, because swimming requires the use of the core muscles of your abdomen and lower back, it can be particularly good at helping support good spine health and preventing the common lower back aches and pains that tend to worsen with age.

But swimming’s whole-body benefits go much deeper than how you look in your swimsuit, Tulick explains. “As an aerobic exercise, swimming helps strengthen the heart, improves circulation, and increases endurance. Controlled breathing during movement in the water also improves overall respiratory health, increasing both lung capacity and efficiency.” These changes can cascade into reducing your risk of several chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, and arteriosclerosis.

To achieve all these aims—including the cosmetic ones—Tuclik notes, you’ll need to put in some real effort and commit to a regular swimming habit. “Swimming three to four lengths of the pool is not enough to feel the beneficial effects of this activity once you leave the pool.”

Instead, make swimming something you do several times a week. Seek to make this consistent habit one that’s varied, involves others for the social benefit they can provide, and that incorporates a mix of strokes and training intensity to keep things interesting. Building a focused program—which is easy to do when you work with a Masters swimming coach or program—can help you build the body of your dreams.

So, if you want to slim down, tone up, and find the flexibility, stamina, and confidence to keep you independent into your later years, look to swimming to support you, one physique-boosting stroke at a time.