Welcome to the Get Fit Guys quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up. My name is Brock Armstrong, and I'm the Get Fit Guy. And this week we're going to talk about the benefits of swimming for health and fitness. A new study that shows the evidence of the health and well-being benefits of swimming was released earlier this summer, and I, for

one, am rubbing my flippers together with glee. Despite being born and raised in the cold,

landlocked prairies of Canada, you know, I've been a swimmer my entire life, and I've always

believed that there's more to the activity than simply splashing around in your skivies or being pitted up against your fellow pimply peers in a 100-meter sprint.

This new report was produced by the Swimming and Health Commission, and the Commission was established by an organization called Swim England, to identify evidence for health benefits of swimming

and to promote future research in the area.

It's a rather long, detailed, and extremely well-referenced document, and it's called

the health and well-being benefits of swimming.

And I encourage you all to go check it out, but right now I will attempt to highlight

what I found were the most interesting takeaways from the study. So let's dive in. Right off the

top, it is estimated in this study that those who swim for recreational or competitive purposes

are eight times more likely to meet general physical activity

guidelines, which include being active for at least 150 minutes per week. Long-term swim training can

also improve cardiorespiratory fitness or endurance in certain subsets of the population as well,

such as healthy pre-pubertal girls and adults,

women during pregnancy, children with asthma, and adults with osteoarthritis, which is a rather

common condition affecting joints and causing pain and stiffness. We'll get into each of those

a little later, but you can see how far into the deep end this research went.

The study states that it is clear from the evidence that being able to swim and swimming regularly can have considerable health and well-being benefits.

Research has identified that any amount of swimming participation compared to those who engaged

in none was associated with a 28% and a 41% reduction in all cause and cardiovascular disease

cause mortality respectively. The striking evidence of where swimming has afforded significantly improved health,

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