Water aerobics are fun, beginner-friendly, and low-impact activities you can perform to improve your health and fitness.
Unlike other forms of exercise you do on dry land, water aerobics require access to water, which reduces the stress on your joints and increases the tension on your muscles. As a result, you can train safely, promote physical improvements, and have a lot of fun.
With that in mind, let’s go over five of the most prominent water aerobics benefits:
- Excellent Caloric Burn
A fantastic benefit of water activities is the impressive caloric burn you can experience. The effect is possible because of two things:
First, water provides a lot of resistance, making each movement more challenging. As a result, even simple tasks like walking forward require your muscles to work harder, which leads to more significant caloric expenditure. Second, water activities recruit more muscles in the body.
Plus, water aerobics are incredibly engaging, and people often don’t realize how much time they’ve spent in the water.
- Muscle and Strength Gain
As discussed in the previous point, water aerobics are more demanding than people imagine. Even simpler activities take more effort and burn extra calories. As such, moving your body against the water resistance forces your muscles to work extra hard, which leads to adaptation in the form of hypertrophy and strength gain.
Of course, water aerobics is not the same as traditional strength training, but these activities are a fun and less impactful way to tone your body, become more functional, and improve your athletic abilities.
- Improved Endurance and Cardiovascular Health
Any activity that pushes you to work hard and overcome resistance for an extended period will improve endurance. All of this is thanks to the SAID principle: specific adaptations to imposed demand. It refers to the human body’s unique ability to adapt to specific stressors so that it can handle them better in the future.
In the case of water aerobics, your cardiovascular system works hard to pump oxygen-rich blood to all muscles in your body. The more you practice such activities, the more efficient your heart and lungs become, resulting in resilience, a lower resting heart rate, and improved cardiovascular health.
- No Stress On Your Joints And Connective Tissues
The fourth massive benefit of water aerobics is that these activities are low-impact and don’t stress your joints and connective tissues. As a result, you can push yourself hard, burn calories, and improve your fitness without having to experience any nagging pains or injuries.
- You Get to Have a Ton of Fun
An overlooked but valuable advantage of water aerobics is the fun you have, which might not seem all that important, but it is. Having fun with your fitness is vital for staying consistent in the long run, pushing yourself more, and looking forward to each upcoming workout.
Too many people don’t enjoy their training but do it because someone has told them that it is the best way to get fit. The problem is that you can only be consistent for so long before you give up out of boredom or frustration.