Swimming styles and their benefits

They are fun and an active outdoor sport to enjoy

A fun and an excellent skill to learn in life is being able to swim. Not only is it a fabulous sport but a wonderful fun energetic activity to do. Swimming is an all-round activity as it helps maintain strong body muscles and bones giving a healthy body. Here is a list of a few swimming styles or strokes and their various benefits.

Freestyle Stroke Performing stroke the body will be on your stomach and face towards the water. While both your arms and legs will pull the body through the water, keeping the torso stable. Here the arms will move alternately with one arm making an arc up out of the water while the other is close to the torso in the water. With your legs constantly keep moving them in a tight, scissor-like movement beneath the water.

Benefits: Just half an hour of swimming freestyle and you can burn hundreds of calories. Freestyle gives a full-body workout working up the arms, legs, core, and back muscles.

Butterfly Stroke It is the finest stroke in swimming. Performed facing down in the water, with arms arch up and out of the water together, looking like a pair of wings in front of you. Keeping the thumbs facing down toward the water, sweep your arms down and out with your elbows slightly bent. At the same time your legs remain together stretched out in one line and it moves up and down together, pushing you forward in the water.

Benefits: Well, with the technicality involved this stroke burns approximately 450 calories for every 30 minutes of swimming. This stroke is also excellent for core and upper body training.

Breaststroke Popular among beginners, as it is the slowest of all the strokes. This swimming stroke requires solid kicks involving the hip, knee, and foot adaptability. There are phases of the arm movements with this stroke like recovery forward, outweep and insweep wherein the hand's touch below the chest. While arm and leg movements occur below or at the water surface.

Benefits: One of the advantages of this stroke is that the head always stays above water. Secondly, both arms and legs execute in the same motion synchronously making this stroke easier to learn.

Backstroke It is a stroke swum on the back. It is more like a flutter looking kick, meaning the legs alternatively kick up and down while the arms execute kind of an alternate windmill-like motion. As for the arms, it remains straight recovering above the water in a circular motion from the hip to the front position.

Benefits: Since swimming on the back, there are no breathing issues. Importantly, it gives the back an excellent workout.