Making the most of your swimming workout

Swimming is one of the best exercises for health. It’s a total body workout, taxing arms and legs as well as your cardiovascular system, but it puts less stress on your joints than most other exercises.

And on a hot summer day, the cool water is a good place to get sweaty.

Hirofumi Tanaka, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Texas at Austin, says swimming provides similar cardiovascular benefits as running and other endurance sports. Research at his lab also suggests a regular swim program can lower blood pressure and soften stiff arteries.

“Swimming is really an underappreciated, sneaky good form of exercise,” Tanaka said.

Here are some tips from professional coaches on how to turn 30 minutes at the pool into an effective workout.

START SLOWLY

“You wouldn’t go right out and say, ‘I’m going to run 10 miles,’ ” said Cokie

Lepinski, a U.S. masters swimming coach in Surprise, Ariz. “Same thing with swimming.”

Buy a good pair of goggles (a swim cap and kickboard can be helpful but aren’t necessary), and start by trying to swim one lap — down and back the length of the pool — without stopping. Typically, people swim freestyle when they exercise because it’s the most efficient stroke, but you can switch it up.

Most American recreational pools are 25 yards long, so one lap is 50 yards, two laps makes 100 yards and so on. Olympic pools are twice as long, and home pools vary. Also, many swimmers count one lap as one length of the pool, so make sure to clarify if you’re working with a trainer.

If one lap feels easy, do two with a short break (10 to 20 seconds) in between. Gradually build up, increasing the number of laps and decreasing the frequency of breaks, but don’t overdo it on your first day — no more than 10 laps total.

Cullen Jones, a fourtime Olympic medalist who coaches youth swimming, says progress in swimming comes with consistency. “Make sure that what you’re doing is manageable. Have the mindset that you can do it again the next day or two days from now.”

FOCUS ON FORM

You want your body to be on top of the water as much as possible. The easiest way to do that is to keep your head down and look at the bottom of the pool.

“If you lift your head up and you look at the wall your legs are going to sink, and that’s going to create a lot of resistance,” said Fares Ksebati, a founder and CEO of the app MySwimPro.

Your kick helps you stay balanced on top of the water. Unless you’re sprinting, kicking is more important for body position than for propulsion. Kick just enough to keep your hips and legs on top of the water so they don’t drag you down. “The biggest mistake beginner swimmers make is they kick too much,” Ksebati said. “The legs use the most blood, so if you kick a lot, you’re going to fatigue a lot more quickly.”

Another beginner’s mistake is staying too flat in the water. Instead, you want to rock subtly from side to side. As your fingertips touch the surface, extend your arm as far as you can while rotating your hips and shoulders slightly. Try this on dry land: Stand on tiptoes with one arm stretched overhead. If you shift your hip and shoulder up and forward, you can probably reach a few inches higher. Now do that in the water.

GET INTO INTERVALS

Once you can do eight laps easily, try some interval training. For serious swimmers, workouts are structured like weight training, broken into sets rather than going for 30 minutes straight.

To do this, you need to understand an interval formula used in almost all swim workouts. Intervals are usually described by two numbers: the number of repetitions and the distance in yards of each rep as a multiple of 25 (the length of the pool). Short rests are built in after every rep. For example, a 2x50 means swimming 50 yards (down and back), taking a 10-second break, and then swimming another lap. For a 4x25, swim the same distance, but rest every time you touch a side. A 1x100 means swimming two laps continuously and resting after. All three intervals are 100 yards total, but they’re swum at different rates.

Tailor your intervals to your goals. If you want a higher-intensity workout, swim shorter intervals at a faster pace. If you want to work on endurance, swim longer distances at a slower pace with fewer breaks.

“If you swim the same pace every day,” Lepinski said, “you won’t get as much benefit.”

For many swimmers, the water isn’t only a place to work out. It’s also a sanctuary. “It’s hard to be thinking about the stresses of the world when you’re thinking about: ‘When’s my next breath? Where’s the end of the pool? What set am I on?’ ” Lepinski said. “When we slip under the water, the world goes away.”