Chapter 11. Swimming and Sexuality: How to Enhance Your Love Life

IT DOESN’T MATTER if you are twenty, forty, sixty, or even older: if you want an active and rewarding sex life, start swimming.

The first section of this book provided a lot of good news about the benefits of exercise in general and swimming in particular. No matter your age, regular workouts can improve your health, increase your resistance to disease, help you lose weight, increase your energy level, reduce stress, make you more confident, and even increase your creativity. But that’s not all. There is even better news.

A pioneering study I conducted beginning in 1986 demonstrates conclusively that swimming can profoundly improve your love life. Since I presented the study results at a scientific meeting in Atlanta in 1988, several other researchers have confirmed these findings.

We found that middle-aged and older men and women who exercise regularly have sex lives much more like those of people a great deal younger.

Lisa Browning, of Santa Monica, California, is typical of the people we studied who reported their sex lives reinvigorated after they began swimming. A vivacious, forty-six-year-old middle manager, Lisa began swimming at the local Y five years ago. “I was disgusted with the way I looked and felt,” she told me. “I was fast sinking into a middle-age morass—flabby, no muscle tone, tired all the time. I felt old.

“Love life? It was ancient history.” She laughed. “In twenty years of marriage, our love life had gone from exciting to routine to almost nonexistent. It was lifeless, tedious, dull.”

One morning she decided it was now or never. “I’m just too young to feel like this,” she told herself. That same afternoon she took the plunge.

“It was hard in the beginning, let me tell you,” she recalled. “Those first few days were tough. I was ready to give up. Swimming just two laps was exhausting.” But she stayed with it and gradually improved.

Today Lisa swims almost two miles four days a week, and last year her husband, Bob, joined her. She feels ten years younger and reports that her energy level has increased dramatically. “I’m not tired anymore. I feel good about myself. I even wear the same size clothes I wore in college. I have more energy—for work, the kids, my husband. The best part is that our love life is exciting again. It’s fantastic!”