Why Swimming Is a Challenging Sport

All sports can be challenging in their own ways, whether this be mentally and/or physically, and push people to strive for greatness. So what makes swimming a challenging sport? Let us tell you!

Swimming uses almost all the muscles in your body! It requires all the major muscles to move your arms, legs, core, and brain. Swimming can be both physically and mentally demanding. But even on top of this, you have to swim without breathing freely.

All swimming strokes, besides backstroke, require that your face is in the water for a fair amount of time, meaning you have less time to breathe unlike other sports. Swimmers breathe around 30 to 40 times per minute, which is a lot lower than that of a cyclist or runner. This can put a physical and mental demand as less oxygen flowing through your body can make your muscles harder to move, especially in exercise where your body requires more oxygen to build muscle.

Swimming is also one of the few sports that require you to be in a horizontal position. This position can cause many issues that swimmers have to deal with, such as not being able to see your arms or hands. Your heart rate also drops when laid horizontal, dropping an average of 20 beats per minute, and being horizontal can also cause proprioceptive difficulties. This is where your body has difficulty perceiving its own position in space and is one of the key reasons many swimmers cross-over in the front of the stroke in freestyle. Water also changes the feedback loop, making it difficult to feel what you are doing, even when actively doing it. It is not always possible to feel the water and how much pressure you are applying to your swimming strokes. This is why drill training is so important so you can get used to the feel in the water and to practise your technique.

Swimming also has the difficulty of the resistance of the water, which is almost 800 times as dense as air. Swimmers have to be able to move through this resistance, resulting in the need of a lot of strength. The real difficulty is keeping balance in the water, easily being able to move from side to side or up and down, but that’s not a swimmer’s aim. They need to be able to build a solid horizontal foundation on which they can apply a great deal of force to move through the water with great speed. This is all down to the swimmer’s technique.

And on top of all this, swimming is technical! As mentioned a couple of times, you cannot see yourself, you are unsteady, horizontal, and your face is in the water. The arms also have to be able to move independently of each other in freestyle and backstroke, adding co-ordination as another element to the sport! This requires a great amount of brain power as well as physical technique training to merge the two together.

Swimming is a great sport with technical complexity. A swimmer never stops learning, making swimming a fun sport for a good challenge.