Here we celebrate the benefits of swimming – both for the swimmer and for your pool.
Benefits of swimming for you
Swimming is an excellent way to work your entire body and cardiovascular system. An hour of swimming burns almost as many calories as running, without all the impact on your bones and joints. Swimming:
- improves muscle definition and strength
- builds up bone mass
- helps you stay flexible
- works your whole body and your insides too
- reduces inflammation
- burns calories
- helps habilitate injuries, arthritis, and other conditions
- can improve exercise-induced asthma
- lowers stress and depression
- Improves sleep
- can make you smarter (we like this one)
- may lengthen your life (and this one!!)
Swimming benefits for your pool
Swimming is great for you, but also there are benefits for your pool from having people swim in it. We see a reasonable number of clients in-store who have a pool that for one reason or another, is hardly ever used. Having people swimming in a pool regularly improves water circulation. Bodies in a pool diving, jumping, kicking and playing give the water a good stir up. They help to move water around and any ‘dead’ areas or areas of poor circulation get some agitation. This in turn helps to push dust from dead areas so it can be filtered out.
The water in dead areas can have completely different pH and chlorine levels to areas of high circulation. Swimming helps to stir up the water and get a more even mix of chemicals throughout the pool. If a dead area stays with low chlorine (or high pH) for extended periods of time then algae can form and possibly spread onto the rest of the pool.
While we are discussing dead areas, we just want to remind you to check your return jets (where the water comes back to the pool after going through the pump and filter) are angled down at a 45-degree angle. Jets that are pointing out horizontally across the pool only move the water on the surface of the pool and don’t create good circulation on the lower level of the pool water.
So the moral of the story – both you and your pool benefit from having a swim. Enjoy your pool as much as you can!
So don’t delay. Swim as much as you can. Encourage your family to dive in too. Everyone wins.
