How To Do Aqua Aerobics At Home

How To Do Aqua Aerobics At Home

If you are fortunate enough to own your own swimming pool, then you have in your home the ideal way to get into great shape that's fun, low impact and highly effective. Presumably you got a swimming pool because you enjoy swimming, and thus you will be able to get into shape doing something that you enjoy doing – which is always the best case scenario.

But swimming is of course not the only way to get into shape with a pool – you can also tone muscle and burn calories by doing aqua aerobics which can provide a fun change of pace and at the same time be a little less highly energetic than frantically swimming laps.

Here we will look at how to create a great aqua-aerobics workout for your home, and at precisely how this can improve your fitness and muscle tone.

The Idea

To create a good aqua aerobics workout it's important to first understand how it works and what the objective is. Essentially then, the idea behind aqua-aerobics is to allow you to perform the kinds of energetic and repetitive tasks that you might normally associate with an aerobics class, but with the added difficulty and resistance of being under water which then creates added friction and pressure requiring more energy for you to push through.

This burns calories because rapid movements of course require energy (which your body gets partially from fat stores around your body), but it is also good for building muscle because you are essentially lifting the water every time you move. Swing your arm upwards for instance and you will be cutting through and lifting the water that's above your arm thus creating the workout. The more resistance you face when you push, the greater the micro-tears will be in your muscles and the more they will subsequently grow. The more out of breath you are at the end of it all, the more you will have exerted yourself and the more calories will have been burned.

The Exercises

Thus the aim is to string together a number of exercises all of which get you panting and require you to fight against the pressure of the water. These include many things, but examples include treading water, simply jumping up and down, twisting your body while creating resistance with your arms, flapping your arms up and down, punching through the water, kicking through the water, raising your legs out sideways and more.

It's also possible to use a range of additional items to get more from your workouts, but these are quite different from the kinds of things you might use in the gym normally. Significantly that's because the 'weights' will actually float rather than being heavy, meaning that your job will be to push them down rather than to lift them up – though of course this is usually much easier to do lending itself to high-intensity, low-impact exercises.

Creating Your Program

For these exercises to be effective you should do each of them for at least three-five minutes and should avoid stopping for long periods in between. Either you can create a long 'sequence' of exercises to go through, or you can use a circuit-style program that challenges you to move from one exercise to the next, possibly by swimming between stations to get in some swimming as well to add to your overall exertion. You can even mix your aerobics up with exercises outside the pool if it's warm enough such as skipping or jumping jacks – just make sure you are a good distance from the pool and don't jump around on a slippery, wet floor.

Tips

If you are lost for inspiration when first coming up with your routine, you can always head over to YouTube for ideas where you can find many videos on the subject. Another important tip is to make sure you include music – this acts as a great way to set the pace and will help to keep your energy and enthusiasm up throughout the workout.

Other than that, it's just a simple matter of working through your program. Good luck and happy splashing!

The author of this article, Karen Fernandes, is a part of the team at B-Rod Pools, a swimming pool service company in Greenwich, CT. She likes travelling and exploring new places in her leisure time.