Swim your way to core strength

Many of us now know the importance of core strength training for dealing with abdominal flab and preventing back problems.

We hunt for the best free core exercises on the web without realizing that the solution may lie in a familiar activity that we haven’t even considered as core exercise - swimming fitness.

Swimming fitness in fact offers you something like a positive double whammy. For starters it’s an extremely good form of aerobic exercise - flooding your brain with oxygen and raising your pulse rate.

But did you also know how beneficial swimming can be for your core muscles? When you swim - whether you do breast stroke or overarm - you exercise the core muscle groups that are so important in fighting abdominal fat. Not only that because your weight is supported naturally in the water - you exercise those core muscles in a seemingly effortless way.

Swimming fitness offers you more subtle benefits too. Recent research conducted at Harvard University concluded that swimming improves your morale and self image.

The study carried out by the department of behavioral biology, looked at adults who swam for an average of an hour several days of the week. The swimmers were asked to rate themselves on attractiveness and 80% scored themselves as “attractive” or “very attractive” - way above the response rate for non-swimmers.

Its all down to endorphins - our natural feel good opiates - released during exercise. Regular aerobic exercise makes you feel happier. Combine core exercise like swimming with a high antioxidant low GI diet, regular intake of green tea and you’ll see the effects on that abdominal flab very quickly.

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• Free Core Exercises - tighten up the abdominal flab