In addition to toning muscles and being tons of fun, swimming helps to improve our most important muscle in our bodies, our HEART! You could say that performing the butterfly stroke, we give our hearts the ultimate healthy butterflies! All joking aside, a study by the University of New York showed that in comparison to non-swimmers, those who swim have lower heart rates, better blood pressure, improved circulation, and improved breathing. In addition, to all of these benefits, Barron Swim School adds custom touches to our exclusive curriculum that cater to the special hearts of all of our students. Let us share with you four ways that swimming at our school improves a child’s heart health!
1. Swimming Lowers Your Heart Rate
Swimming is an aerobic exercise that is low impact. This means that while learning, kids can have fun while putting less pressure on their joints. The heart is a muscle, like every other muscle in your body. By swimming, we can train to make it stronger. The average human has a resting heart rate of approximately 60 – 70 beats per minute. Most swimmers, however, have a resting heart rate as low as 40 – 60 beats per minute.
Each time that our swimmers take a class or practice at our pool, they are training their heart to pump more blood with each beat, making it more efficient supplying blood to the body. The health benefit of a lower resting heart rate is that you are at less risk of heart disease.
2. Swimming Lowers Your Blood Pressure & Increases Circulation
As you swim, your heart rate increases. This increases the supply of blood to your arms, legs, and other parts of your body. The increased circulation helps all of your muscles to perform more efficiently and become stronger.
Swimming strengthens your heart by helping it to become larger; making it pump more efficiently. This leads to better blood flow throughout your body. Research shows that 30 minutes of swimming a day can reduce coronary heart disease and improve the overall health of your heart.
At Barron Swim School, we have created classes and lesson plans that are 30 minutes long. This approach was researched and designed to create the perfect learning environment for your child, while improving improving their fitness and health. 30 minutes is the perfect amount of time for retention of skills, socializing with other students, awareness, respect for the water, and improving physical health. Overall, these key factors make a child safer in and around water.
3. Swimming Improves Your Breathing
Have you ever watched swimmers compete on the world’s greatest stage, the Olympic Games? Did you notice how long swimmers spend underwater on a single breath? The reason why these athletes are able to accomplish such a physical feat is because swimming strengthens your large muscle groups and elevates the heart rate, making one’s lungs work more efficiently. The more that our students take classes at Barron Swim School, the more that their heart rate and blood pressure will improve.
4. Laughter is the Heart’s Best Medicine
At Barron, we find ways to add memorable teaching moments that produce laughter and smiles from our children throughout our classes. Due to extensive research, our leaders at Barron Swim School recognized that adding humor to our classes leads to better learning retention as well as increasing our students’ physical health.
Dr. Lee Berk, an associate professor at Loma Linda University in California, has spent nearly three decades studying the ways the aftershocks of a good laugh ripples through your brain and body. He has found that it can even compare to a proper diet or exercise when it comes to keeping you healthy and disease free.
In addition, laughter leads to a reduction in stress hormones. Stress causes our blood vessels to constrict, so having a good giggle is great for blood flow to and from the heart. “The benefits of laughter cannot be understated,” says cardiologist Benico Barzilai, MD. “Laughter leads to an immediate reduction in the body’s negative response to stress and causes the blood vessels of the body — including the heart — to increase blood flow as needed.” Experts concluded that laughing on a regular basis reduces your risk for a heart attack.
By making humor a regular part of our swim classes, we are confident that we can have a big impact on our students’ heart health.
Signing your child up at Barron Swim School is one of the greatest gifts of love that you could give them!
