Can swimming make you strengthy?

Hai friends,

I am a person who always wants to have a healthy body. I used to go to the gym but now due to lack of time I am not able to go. One of my friends suggested that swimming is a very good exercise. When I browsed I came across an interesting article that speaks about the health benefits of swimming. It says that swimming can make your body stronger and flexible. Is it really true? I am a novice in that. So can someone help me by sharing your views on that? Thanks in advance.

Hi Paul,

Swimming is a good form of exercise for sure. However, if your goals are to get stronger and more flexible, I suggest GST over swimming  Swimming would complement your GymnasticBodies workouts nicely. It wouldn't specifically target increasing your strength, mobility, and flexibility like GB would though. 

Hi Paul, 

I am a swimmer and I would agree with Everett 100%. If it wasn't for all the GB shoulder strength and mobility I could see issues happening with my shoulders due to the resistance in the water. Making GST your main point of fitness you can take on just about any other sport outside of GST.

Hi Paul, 

I watched a video on Michael Phelps the greatest swimmer of all time. And even he does strength and conditioning workouts. In fact, as part of his core workouts, he was doing some hanging leg raises a progression that is part of our Foundation series. 

Definitely can get you in shape and if you're not particularly strong, then doing specifically butterfly and breastroke will develop some dynamic strength to a point. But swimming alone won't make you strong. It will however make you leaner and is great conditioning. Swimming is more for fun and staying lean than anything else. If you want to get strong, then you'll want to do strength training.

After starting GB two years ago I've realized that it must have been a god damn miracle how I didn't get serious shoulder injuries with the severe mobility deficits I swam thousands of hours with as a professional swimmer with the norwegian national team. A lot of my team members were not that lucky. Back when I was doing it everything was about grinding and dunking out serious amounts of meters per week. My mobility sucked and probably ate away at my potential because I had to excert much more force to perform the same movements as more flexible swimmers did effortlessly.

Professional swimming crafts a nice physique, but I think many sports that you train 25+ hours a week will do that in the long run. But that "V-Shape Michael Phelps-bod" you see in the olympics every four years is of course also helped by a whole hell of a lot of alternative physical training.

The most noticable gain a normal person will get from doing structured swim work is probably on the cardio side. Even though my running technique was beyond bad, the other guys in my navy squad couldn't touch me when we did the physical stamina tests when I joined the navy after high school.

That being said, half a decade later the checks my stiff and specialized swimmers body had written started to get cashed in in form of injuries and aches. Discovering GST and the work of Coach Sommer has really changed my path towards more flexibility, more strength, more functionality of movement, and surprisingly enough it's the opposite of the path most people choose to take as we age.

So to answer your question Paul, I don't think swimming can even get close to GST when it comes to strength and flexibility. A nice addition to build endurance, and a good way of making sure you don't die if you fall off a boat, but it should not be foundation for physical movement.

Well said Christian.