THE BEST FORM OF EXERCISE

Experts now recognize that swimming is the best and most complete form of exercise. It provides most of the aerobic benefits that running does, with many of the benefits of resistance training thrown in. Further, unlike running and most other forms of exercise, swimming works all the muscles of the body. Possibly most important, it does not put the strain on connective tissues that running, jogging, aerobics, and some weight-training regimens do.

It seems that more and more people are taking to the water to stay in shape—former senator and presidential candidate Paul Tsongas, supermodel Kim Alexis, writer Stephen King, television anchor-woman Paula Zahn, businessman Vidal Sassoon, designer Donna Karan, even Pope John Paul II, who gets in a workout at his Castel Gandolfo pool whenever he can.

And many are returning to the water after a decade or more on dry land. Take Pat Richard, for example. Married for twenty-six years, the mother of three grown sons, a nurse with her own practice monitoring high-risk obstetrical patients, Pat had not swum since the early sixties, when she was a member of the Michigan State University varsity squad. In 1991, at age forty-six, she took stock. “I had gotten so overweight it was ridiculous,” she recalls. “As a nurse, I realized what that meant, so I decided to do something about it.” She went on a low-fat diet and started swimming again. A year later, she had lost over forty pounds, “with a few more to go.” She had also regained her competitive spirit and finds that she not only enjoys her workouts but also savors the return to competition Masters meets afford her.

But swimming’s strongest recommendations come from highly successful competitive athletes in other sports, people who know well the strengths and limitations of the human body but who would be expected to be partial to the sport that provided them their success. A surprising number of such champions, past and present, now rely on swimming to keep them in shape: Parry O’Brien, the former world-record holder in the shot put, who competes for a southern California Masters squad; Yuri Vlasov, the 1960 Olympic heavyweight weight lifting champion, who swims backstroke for the Kiev Masters in Ukraine; Dwight Stones, the former U.S. record holder in the high jump, whom you met in the last chapter; and NBA “mighty-mite” Muggsy Bogues, who stays in shape by swimming when he isn’t playing basketball, to name just a few. Countless other athletes have used swimming to rehabilitate from injury: Nancy Kerrigan, Bo Jackson, Joan Benoit Samuelson, and Larry Bird come immediately to mind. Even racehorses are swimming to stay in shape as they recover from injuries. It never ceases to amaze me how many former runners are now swimmers. I don’t know how many times I have heard people say, “I used to run to stay in shape, but now I swim.” As our population grows and ages, the number of people making this switch will increase.

To reap the benefits of swimming, you do not have to be a household name. At age forty-seven development economist Carl House began to suffer lower back pain. It was excruciating, and nothing seemed to help. Desperate, House went to a specialist who told him that exercise, especially swimming, might help a little but that basically he would simply have to learn to live with the chronic pain.

House had never exercised as an adult, but he was willing to grab at any straw. If exercise could help, even a little, it was worth a shot. So he began running. “It was boring as hell and I hated it,” he recalls. “What’s more, it didn’t help my back at all. In fact, it made things worse.” So he quit. He tried biking next.

About the same result. Then one day he read about Masters swimming in a local newspaper. The next day he simply showed up at the pool. He was hooked immediately. “Within three months my pain was completely gone,” he reports. Six years later he’s still swimming, and he is still pain free. “As long as I swim four times a week, about an hour and a quarter a day, I have no problem with my back.” At first barely able to complete one lap, House has come along surprisingly well, even sneaking occasionally into the national top ten rankings in the 200-meter butterfly. “But you have to remember,” he qualifies, modestly, “that that’s an event no one likes to swim.”

Ever-growing numbers of people are taking the plunge, drawn to swimming for a variety of reasons nearly as wide as the number of swimmers joining in. Virtually all report immediate therapeutic benefits, but there are also joys that keep them at it, and this book will discuss both.

As mentioned in the last chapter, all exercise provides at least some benefit for those who do it regularly. Then why is it that exercise physiologists and fitness experts agree almost unanimously that one form of exercise—swimming—is the best?

Much of the remainder of this book is concerned with the many ways to answer that question. For now, I will focus mainly on the fitness benefits swimming confers. Later chapters will discuss the health and psychological benefits that come with regular swimming.