Affect of Swimming on Body Muscles

Professional swimmers might just have the most athletic bodies in the world of sports because they are long, lean and muscular. Swimmers have the type of physique they do for a reason. Swimming offers you an excellent way to sculpt and strengthen your muscles because it impacts them in so many ways. You can build strong arms, legs and abs just from swimming alone.
Muscles Worked
Swimming offers a total body workout. It works all of your large muscle groups -- including the arms, legs, chest and back -- as well as the small muscles and tendons in your body. Swimmers even use their abs. Different strokes will have more impact on particular muscle groups. For example, the butterfly stroke will primarily work your deltoids, while the freestyle will primarily work your arms and legs.
Low-Impact Exercise
Swimming provides low-impact exercise. The water creates resistance, but it also makes you lighter, so you cannot compare it to other high-impact exercises such as running or weight lifting. However, that does not mean you can't build muscle from swimming. Even though swimming remains a low-impact exercise, you still challenge your muscles while you do it. You also have a lesser chance of injuring yourself while swimming than you do with high-impact exercises. Low-impact exercise will not strengthen your bones, a downside, so swimmers should also still do some form of high-impact exercise as part of their normal routine.
Anaerobic Endurance
Anaerobic endurance measures your muscles' resistance to fatigue. Swimming provides a great way to increase your anaerobic endurance. If you swim a little longer every time in the water, your resistance to fatigue will gradually increase. The anaerobic endurance you develop from swimming will translate well to other low-impact activities, such as bicycling and skiing.
Overtraining
You can still overtrain and injure yourself despite swimming's low-impact qualities. This can happen if you start off too fast without stretching or warming up or if you simply overdo it. Many swimmers train for three to five hours a day, up to six days a week. For the average person, this overexercise would actually lead to muscle deterioration. To avoid overtraining, keep your swimming workouts short and intense, and get plenty of sleep every night so your body can recover.