Swimming is not for weight loss

I think it is a complete myth that swimming is not good for weight loss. I myself lost almost 30 pounds by swimming and limiting calories. And I happen to have had my blood lipid profile done recently, and the improvement was profound. Resting heart rate and blood pressure are also excellent. The truth is, you can gain weight, lose weight, or stay the same depending on your calorie intake versus calorie expenditure. Swimming is superb for burning up calories, and is excellent exercise for many other reasons. The participants in the study simply ate too much to lose weight and to see improvement in their lipids. I believe it is also false that the "heat sink" effect of the pool works against swimmers who want to lose weight. In fact, some people reverse the argument, saying that drinking ice water causes you to lose weight -- believing that the body is burning additional calories to warm up from the ice. The heat sink and ice water arguments contradict each other, and in fact both are false: our metabolism is not driven by the ambient temperature. We're warm-blooded, forgoshsakes! Sure, there are tiny, marginal effects (e.g., if you're very cold, you'll shiver, which expends some energy). But the effect on weight loss is utterly negligible.

soooooooo.............that doesn't really mean much to me. i'd swim anyways, no matter what! you can lose weight swimming. were the people in the study swimming 2x day, 4,000 in the morning and 6-7000 at night? i kept my weight constant swimming that much and eating about 3000 cal/day. i believe you can lose weight if you decrease your calorie intake and increase your yardage and effort a bit (i don't know how much you are swimming). doing some dryland 3x wk wouldn't hurt either. i had a friend lose a ton of weight over the summer, about 30 pounds by eating sensibley and swimming about 3000yds 5x wk. also how many people were in the study? how much did they eat? what was there weight/bmi/muscle mass before they started the swimming program? how long did they participate in the program for? how much swimming did they do? what did they get their heart rate up to? if it's one thing i've learned from school and being a nursing student-- never take a research article at face value. if this article was worth anything, it would have answered all of those questions above.

Swimming has always left me with a healthy appetite. No, make that an abnormal appetite. Picture Jethro from the Beverly Hill Billies. I used to brown bag my lunch with a *shopping* bag. Whether or not you're dropping the weight all depends on the amount of calories you intake. Don't be mistaken that all the back and forth action in the water isn't fat burning just because there doesn't appear to be any sweating involved. Bon Appetito!

It is all about calories in, calories out. If swimming helps you burn more calories than you eat, you will lose weight. I personally have lost 35-40 pounds this year and I know swimming helps. I do other things, such as weight lift and some aerobics, but I am in the water 3-4 times a week, 2500-3500 yards each time. When I take a break from swimming, I gain weight if I don't cut my calories. That tells me swimming helps me lose, and helps me maintain my loss. I know age group kids who struggle with their weight. When they get back into the water after a break, they slim down.

I don't know about their studies, but I can assure you that my personal experience and example is contrary to their study. Besides, no exercise alone (not combined with proper diet) will do a whole lot for weight loss, if the old eating habits are maintained.

I've seen it bandied about wuite often that we lose less weight in the water due to the water taking away the excess heat. I've also seen it used to explain why most folks heart rates don't get as high in the water. (I've seen other things too.) But I haven't yet seen the link between the heat loss and weight loss tested. This is a good example of this, the study showed no weight loss in subjects. That's all well and good but from out of nowhere here comes the idea that this is due to heat loads. Nothing else to back it up; it's just tacked on the end and left for us to accept. I personally don't buy it.

Individual examples are fine, but I think it would be more useful if we can determine where the studies went wrong. (And if they didn't, then that is important!) I decided to go looking for the articles cited. The library I went to does not carry those journals. The full articles are available on the web, but for a hefty fee. :( I am going to make some judgements based on what information I have (the abstracts). If someone else has the entire article, hopefully they will comment. 1- Original article 2- Colorado study in 1997, abstract 3- Journal of Sports Medicine 1987, abstract Lets start with oldest to most recent article, and the points that jumped out at me... Article 3: Are they comparing apples to oranges? - The exercise was listed as 60 minutes daily, for 6 months, but I can't judge the intensity level. You are going to get a decent workout with a "brisk walk", the question is how "brisk" was the swim? - No dietary restrictions. This would have been a lot more interesting: did their food intake increase as they did more swimming? - They compared two leg-based land exercises, to a mostly upper-body aquatic exercise. I'm guessing that leg strength increases with body weight (even for sedentary people), but that upper body strength probably doesn't. It would have helped if they had an upper-body land group (rowing machine) and a leg-centric aquatic group ("walking" in a pool with a life vest??), to make sure all of the bases are covered. Article 2: Much better abstract/study! :) - They start off by stating that there was no data studying the efficacy of swimming for treatment of obesity and cardiovascular risk factors, as opposed to many studies for land-based exercise. - The exercise was 45 min a day, 3 days a week, for 10 weeks, at 60% of maximal heart rate. (I don't know about you, but I can get 60% on an easy recovery swim.) - The study found a significant improvement in resting and submaximal heart rates, lactic acid concentrations, and perceived exertion. If swimming affects your heart rate, can you really use that as your guide to how hard you are training? (I'm not sure what they could use, if not heart rate, but I think this should be noted.) - The last statement is that "swim training of the duration, frequency, and intensity used in the the present study" did not help. It did not say that swimming (of any kind) will not help. I don't have the citation, but I remember a study that showed that low-intensity aerobics had no improvent in body fat or aerobic capacity (but high-intensity did). Article 1: You need more than 1 data point to determine the slope of a line! - With only two studies in the last 16 years, I think this is a pretty wild overstatement. I think a better statement would be "a low-intensity swim program with unrestricted diet fails to improve (blood factors)". - As Kevin pointed out, that body temperature thing came out of left field. (Is that "Kevin in Maryland" or "Kevin in medicine"?) - To be nit-picky, the Colorado article was in the June 1997 issue, not the July 1997 issue. It pays to be accurate with your citations.

Originally posted by jane The theory that swimming does not lead to weight loss is popular. However, many of the studies that claim to show this do not really use swim training but leisurely swimming. It would be interesting to review the study this article references and see what sort of swimming the participants did. I'm sure it was nothing close to any of the workouts posted on this site. It would also be interesting to see a study that started with out of shape former swimmers and returned them to regular, high level training. The results would probably show changes as many of the posters in this thread have noted. The number of calories burned in a workout is much different for 3000 yards with intervals and a 500 swim in 30 minutes. I'm in the former swimmer that gained weight category. When I got back in the water 5 years ago, I weighed just over 200 pounds. I pretty quickly got down to around 165 and I've managed to keep in the 165-175 pound range. I didn't conciously change my eating habits but I certainly changed my exercise habit. I don't run at all. I swim on average 4 times per week for a total of around 20,000 yards. People can lose weight swimming but just like anything else, it takes patience, time and effort.

From my personal experience, swimming has helped me to go from 200 lb to 175 lb in about half a year. I try to swim about 5 days a week, 1 hour at a time... However, due to my stamina, I actually only swim about half of that time... The other time I am simply resting... :) I find that along with swimming, and with no change in my diet (quantity and quality, however I am not a big snack/sweet person, so this is a major thing I guess), swimming is really effective for losing weight. The reason why I think some ppl might not lose weight in swimming is: a. Some experience a dramatic increase in appetite, and thus food consumption as well. I am lucky in that currently that doesn't happen for me. However, I remembered when I swam as a kid, the appetite definitely went up... Others think that swimming justifies more consumption of food that will lead to weight gain...excessive sweets...etc b. because of the weight/size issue, some find it discouraging to swim in the water because of the tremendous amount of effort it takes to overcome the friction/drag, particulary if one is a beginner in swimming. Therefore, the person in question might not do, or want to do all that much when he/she is in the water, or rests too often, or both. my 2 cents... :)

We've been over this many times. No one can deny the fact that swimming burns calories. And that's what weight loss is about. It's a game of burning more calories than you consume. One thing I've noticed at the pool. Swimmers who train in intervals look ten times better than those who do endless laps with an emphasis on freestyle/front crawl. Sometimes, when I see someone entering the pool, I can tell how they're going to swim. Lean people usually prefer intervals. Heavier, less muscular people with a gut, usually prefer a more continuous style with less intensity, and always swim freestyle. Their buoyancy comes in handy. I'm starting to think that if you perform intervals, including intervals of sprints, followed by cool-down periods, you'll burn more fat, and build more muscle than by just going up and down the pool. Right now, I'm cutting back on swimming due to time constraints in my life. Here's my current 3-day a week workout: Day one: 30-min cardio Day two: Swim one mile Day three: 20-min cardio and one-hour weights I have to admit, I look and feel better doing this workout. But I'll start hitting the pool twice a week by next year, when my job gives me more time.