Better health is only a few strokes away

With reporting by Chris La Pelusa

As people age and find their mobility limited, or perhaps are recovering from an injury or surgery, is there an activity that they can enjoy and reap health and fitness benefits from without risk of injury or discomfort?

Yes, says Jack Bolger, coach of the Stingrays, who has been in aquatics as a competitor, water polo player, life guard, and coach for more than 50 years, and the answer lies under the water, or at least in a pool.

“The first thing that I usually tell people about is that swimming is the only activity that is low or no impact, so you’re not dealing with the jarring and jumping around that’s there in aerobics in a gym or some of the fanatical fitness programs on late-night TV.”

Jack, himself, has experienced rotator cuff injuries in both shoulders that occurred in the 80s and 90s and persisted into the 00s. “If you have problems with limited movement or injuries, I never had any of the corrective surgeries [for the shoulders], yet I can swim,” he says.

The trick, Jack says, is finding a movement pattern in swimming that works for you. “The motions that you go through in order to ‘locomote’—to get from here to there—in swimming, you can find a movement pattern that will allow you to do this without aggravating your injury,” thus allowing you to be active while recovering.

In fact, Jack says that football players who rehabbed in the pool after the wear and tear of a game found that “They were back and active [on the field] in one day’s time, where before it would take three days.”

These benefits of aquatic activity extend to recovery after surgery or muscle injury, but your physician should always be consulted before beginning any new activity.

“Water is a bit more gentle [than other activities],” says Jack, “but the body is still being worked, and what happens is you increase your cardiovascular fitness.”

This is immensely important, Jack says, when you consider that an astounding “fourteen tons of blood is passed through your heart and into your body every day…. So what you want to do is to keep the ticker ticking…that and the circulation,” which swimming also benefits.

You can train to increase your tolerance to oxygen while swimming, Jack says, which means that over time you will find your endurance and stamina to other physical activity, even everyday things like climbing stairs and walking across a parking lot, increasing so that you’ll not be short of breath and will recover your breath faster.

“That’s the great thing about your body,” says Jack, “it adapts to your workload. If you say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t do that stuff anymore,’ that’s because you’re not doing that stuff anymore.”

Jack stresses that you want to keep your fitness level within your own natural boundaries and limits. “We’re asking people to keep themselves fit so that they can do something. We want to keep up our range of motion. Swimming is great for that. We’re not getting into crazy positions when we’re swimming; we’re not dealing with impact; we’re not dealing with taking that beating of running laps over hard ground.”

This low- to no-impact workout that swimming offers is particularly good for seniors.

“Swimming is the only place where you’re going to experience weightlessness in your activity without having to try NASA,” quips Jack. “You spend the first nine months before your life, before you’re born, as a water animal…. That’s why a lot of people like myself say that it’s [swimming] a good activity because all you’re doing is reaching back into the realm of your experience, and you’ve already experienced the movement and the comfort of a gravity-free, weightless experience [before you were born].”

Swimming is not going to give you everything, says Jack, “but it does activate every muscle in your body. It does a great deal to keep your posture up, which is very, very important, and to keep your body in alignment…. I think that swimming helps people to retain a lot of [these] things.”

And above all, “State of mind is very important,” Jack says. “If you’re active…if you keep a good, positive state of mind, there isn’t too much that’s going to knock you down, and there isn’t too much that’s going to keep you down. People at our age will tend to keep going [in work and activity]. Do what you can do, and enjoy what you do, and keep up with it.”

---