How does swimming burn so many calories (close to higher intensity workouts) even if my heart stays in the warm up zone the whole time?
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Swimming is a decent full-body workout, but it also means you’re immersed in water that’s significantly below your body temperature. Water is far more thermally conductive than air, and it has a very high specific heat, so it rapidly cools you down. Your body then has to raise its metabolic rate to keep you warm, and that burns calories.
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Apart from feeding you body with nutrients the heart has to keep the blood pressure in good levels.
If you are standing up then your heart rate increases to compensate.
In water you are laying down. That allows the heart to beat slower because it needs less pressure.
Also, have you tried swimming butterfly? Your heart rate will go up really fast.
Are you in pretty good shape? If you’re 180lb, you’re doing the same amount of work to move 180lb through the water whether it’s easy, or hard. If it’s easy it may not make your heart work harder, but you’re still doing the same work/burning the same number of calories.
When I started lap swimming at the age of 45 it kicked my ass to swim a full hour of laps, but I’d burn 700ish calories doing so. After a year of consistent work I could swim a full hour without stopping, my lap times were faster, my distances were greater, but I never got winded and I was still burning 700ish calories in an hour.
Swimming is one of the best weight loss exercises you can do.
The cold of the water helps burn calories as your body works to regulate temperature
The intensity can be adjusted easily by changing the swim style or staying under water longer
It is much easier on the joints than running or walking since your body isn’t having rapid and repeated impact of your body weight.
If your heart-rate isn’t getting above the warm-up zone, you’re not getting all the efficiency from a swimming workout that you think you are. Increase the intensity. Get your heart-rate up.
It’s not “swimming’s fault” your heart rate is so low.. it’s yours. Push harder!
I suck at swimming and I’m not a high level athlete but even 2 or 3 laps gets my heart rate up real quick. There are not too many exercises that engage that many muscle groups at once.
If your heart rate is not going up you’re either not really swimming at any reasonable speed or you are elite level athlete.
Either you’re ignoring the time component, or you’re well-trained for swimming vs. whatever you’re comparing against, or then the calorie expenditure or your HR is off.
You are expending energy to move your weight. The same effort (work done per weight) will always require the same amount of energy. As someone pointed out, when you train something, your body will adapt to that exercise and you will be able to expend the energy with less strain (and less energy wasted on unnecessary movement) and ultimately your heart rate will be lower than doing the same work when you were less trained. You never spend less energy, though, except for avoiding the waste. Energy expenditure includes the time component, here, because generally the faster you move, the more energy you have to spend to overcome resistance.
That relationship holds in general. The more work you do, the higher your HR. There is an effect where being significantly less trained for one sport than another means that your HR will be higher than what you would assume for the energy spent — for example, if you have good fitness from running but you’re completely new to swimming, your HR will be higher for the same energy cost for moving forward (because it’s effectively the same as being less trained in running, you’re using new, less controlled muscles.)
That means that your heart rate should be roughly similar for any exercise in which you expend that same 800 kcal *in the same amount of time*, adjusted by how well-trained you are in that particular exercise.
It isn’t. If you’re measuring with a watch, it doesn’t really work in water.
A half hour swim is generally 200 calories which is lower than a 6mph run (300 per half hour). Swimming is a moderate intensity activity.
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