Is Exercising in Water is Good for Your Entire Body?

Water aerobics and other water based workouts are becoming more popular all the time and everyone from individuals recovering from injuries to advanced athletes in peak condition are benefiting from this form of exercise. With so many different people benefiting from exercising in the water, it is being considered a great form of exercise for everyone and some people are even saying it is the best form of exercise. However, the issue remains whether or not this is an ideal workout that truly benefits your entire body.

In truth, water based exercise is close to being a good for your entire body, but it does have a couple issues that prevent it from providing a truly complete workout. Working out in the water is really known for being easy on your joints and helping your body recuperate from injuries, hard workouts, and other physical ailments. However, the component of the exercise that allows it to be so easy on your body is the same thing that prevents it from being a complete workout.

The missing element is actually the physical stress on your body that results from gravity. Exercising in water nullifies the majority of gravity's impact, so you are exercising in a semi-weightless environment. This allows your joints to perform exercises with much less stress than when you are doing resistance training workouts on land, but it means there is less stress on your bones as well.

Having decreased stress on your bones may not sound like a bad thing, but the stress or stimulus on your bones is critical for building stronger bones. It is common knowledge that exercising can help increase your bone density (build stronger bones), but only certain types of exercise are really effective in this task. Doing activities like riding a bike may result in small improvements in a few areas of your body, but it will have relatively little impact on bone improvement throughout your body.

The most effective way to improve bone density is to lift challenging weights. However, the improvements are still specific to the areas you exercise, so if you only perform exercises for your arms and abs, you will not improve bone density much throughout the rest of your body. This is one of the many reasons why it is important to regularly perform exercises for all the major muscle groups in your body.

Since exercising in water lowers the amount of stress on your bones, it is not very useful for improving bone density. To go one step further, if you only perform light workouts in the water, which are good for your joints, you could actually end up losing bone density due to a lack of stimulus on your bones. Therefore, if you do a lot of water based exercise, it is important to also include land based activities that put a significant amount of stress on your bones.

The lack of bone stimulus from water based exercise is the most significant issue with this form of exercise, but there is another issue with it that has more to do with the implementation than the actual benefits of the exercise. Simply put, it is more difficult to create workouts of a specific intensity or keep track of the actual work you perform in the water than it is with most other types of exercise.

When exercising, there are usually ways to independently monitor and change different aspects of your training. For example, when lifting weights you can track the weight, used, number of reps, speed of movement, etc., all of which affect the difficulty.

With water based exercise, when you change your speed of movement, you change the difficulty of the exercise, so the difficulty can change throughout the workout and you will generally not be able to quantify the difficulty or amount of work performed during your workout.

There are some things you can do to overcome this problem, such as using a metronome to maintain a consistent speed of movement. Then you can increase the speed of the metronome to create a more challenging workout if it is too easy. Incorporating these types of monitoring elements are critical, because gradual increases in difficulty are required to stimulate improvement.

Unfortunately, many people don't actually monitor the difficulty of their water workouts, so they often end up just going through the motions and not challenging themselves enough to improve their body. In other situations, the intensity keeps changing throughout the workout and some exercises or muscles may get worked really well, while others get very little positive stimulus.

Even with these issues, water based activity is still a great form of exercise for practically everyone, just in certain situations. Since the primary value of water workouts come from enhancing recovery or minimizing joint stress, knowing exactly how hard you are working is not always essential.

On the other hand, if you want to perform a higher intensity workout for maximal strength, maximal power, etc., it's probably better to perform a different type of exercise where you can closely monitor workout intensity to ensure you achieve the proper training stimulus.

Water based training can definitely have a place in your overall routine, but as with any form of exercise, you should avoid doing only water based activities. Some people also run into problems, because they may not have much (or any) equipment, so they can end up doing the same exercises during every workout.

It is always important to keep a good level of variety with your workouts, because the more often you perform the same exercises, the less effective they are when it comes to physical improvements, calorie burning, and fat loss.

Source:

14 years of experience and education in health and fitness