I saw an Oprah lose weight special (or something) and she had her
trainer evaluate how good a number of different exercises were for
losing weight. Anyway, of the ten exercises, swimming came in at number
ten because "the water keeps your body cool and therefore it doesn't
burn as much fat". This seemed like a strange statement to make as I
thought the amount of fat you would burn would be proportional to the
amount of energy you used, not your body temperature. Anyway, I was
wondering if anyone could confirm or debunk this statement.

Cheers,

Brendan.
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-Mark

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Mark J. Bobak
Truck Operations
Ford Motor Company

: I saw an Oprah lose weight special (or something) and she had her
: trainer evaluate how good a number of different exercises were for
: losing weight. Anyway, of the ten exercises, swimming came in at number
: ten because "the water keeps your body cool and therefore it doesn't
: burn as much fat". This seemed like a strange statement to make as I
: thought the amount of fat you would burn would be proportional to the
: amount of energy you used, not your body temperature. Anyway, I was
: wondering if anyone could confirm or debunk this statement.

Sounds weird to me too, as a good deal of energy is expended to keep the
body warm.  One would think this increased need for warming while in cold
water would be a benefit.  But what the hell do I know, *she's* the
millionare...

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                              arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding
                              greater restrictions than were permissible
                              under English law at that time."
                              - Garrison Keillor
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Well of course.  Isn't it like frying bacon?  The more heat you apply,
the more fat melts away to grease in the bottom of the pan.  If they warm
up the pool too much, people will start to melt and leave a grease trail behind.

Just joking.

The real reason why swimming is considered to burn less calories is that it is
done in a horizantal position. Therefore the heart doesn't have to work as hard
to pump {*filter*} to the arms which are doing a fair amount of work.

This is the old theory of aerobics where the feeling was that to exercise
aerobically, you need to raise the heart rate. Thus the flailing arms.

The new theory is that you want to exercise the muscles so that they will run out
of stored energy and require energy at a rate just fast enough to burn your stored
fat (not too fast). Burning stored fat requires oxygen (thus aerobic).

The larger the muscle you work aerobically, the more fat your body uses, the more
oxygen required.  Because the range of motion of the legs in swimming is fairly
small (compared to low impact aerobics, or walking) the amount of fat burned would
be smaller. The legs contain the largest muscles in our bodies.  The arms work
very hard in swimming with a very large range of motion.  However, because the
arms have relatively small muscles, less fat is burned.

                        Casey

Even though this workout keeps your body in cool water, you
should expect not just aerobic benefits but a good fat-burning workout
because your large leg muscles are doing a lot of work. Right?

Regards,
Mary.

          I did about four months of work on fat metabolism in Calgary
about a year ago and it seems to me that both excersize and diet are
required for substantial (healthy) weight loss. I seem to recall that
this had to do with the regulation of LPL expression in response to
excersize and dieting, among other things.

I have an UNinformed hypothesis on this one.

Consider the vast spectrum of exercises out there.  Remember also that we are
talking about people who need to lose weight, so they are not compulsive
exercisers and in fact they are strangers to the land of vigorous physical
activity.

If i decide to run and i decide to "dog it" i slow down and my gait soon
changes and before my energy output level declines too much it becomes
impossible for me to convince myself that i am exercising vigorously.  Besides,
i probably choose my workout based on distance rather than time so if i run
slower at least i run longer.  Also, if i run 10% slower the mechanics are
probably that i use maybe 15% less power; some of the power goes to air
resistance but much of it goes to balance, etc.  So my modest workout is almost
as good as the supercharged one my doctor or researcher thinks i am doing, and
he records "running is an excellent way of losing weight".

If i decide to swim and i decide to "dog it" i will.  Since swimming is less
familiar than running i won't notice as easily that my stroke isn't what it
could be until i'm essentially dead in the water.  

Furthermore, even a modest slowdows has a severe effect.  Essentially all the
power a swimmer expends is devoted to fluid resistance which is proportional to
the _cube_ of the speed, so so a 10% slowdown corresponds to a 27% reduction in
power output, and a 20% slowdown, relatively easy to drift into if you're not
used to pushing yourself, drops your power output to about half of its previous
value.

I understand as well that another component of swimming's bad reputation is
that weight loss is initially swift but tapers off rapidly.  Consider the
possibility that most people who are not used to vigorous physical activity do
not swim with good, clean form.  Therefore, they burn a lot of energy but don't
really get very far, and they calibrate their expectations as to how many laps
they must swim for a good, hard, huffing-and-puffing workout based on the
distance they can cover in a given amount of time, in poor form, only with
tremendous effort.

These people are not fit but they're not [usually] stupid or clumsy.  Like any
other activity that they practice several times per week for a half hour at a
time, they become good at it.  Only in this case "good" is bad because they
complete their planned number of laps without actually having burned a lot of
fat.

-dk

I have always felt that swimming is an excellent aerobic exercise for
fat burning, conditioning, etc, etc,  This is because for me it really
was.  One summer when I chipped some bones, I started swimming for
exercise.  I have never, ever had such success with any other program.
Based on the look in the mirror bodyfat % test, I was the leanest that I
had ever been or been since.  I wasn't eating low fat either.

I went from swimming to a water polo class that was filled with "real"
swimmers.  It was coed.  We did a lot of endurance swimming.  At first
when we did laps, I was the slowest at every stroke except when we
kicked only.  When we kicked only, I was the fastest.  (By the end of
the class I was 3rd slowest - I counted that as a major improvement).

My point is that when I swim, I use my lower body.  That is where my
strength is.  When the "real" swimmers in the class swam, they used
their upper bodies.  My method of swimming will never win a race, but as
far as burning fat is concerned, my method will probably work better for
most people.  If you emphasize the lower body, you will utilize the
larger muscles and you won't fatigue the littler muscles in your arms as
fast.  

--

 If you were wondering, I am not the official voice of Sandia National
 Laboratory, the US Department of Energy, the US Government, my parents,
 my siblings, my friends, my cousins, or my pets.

Your topic is a frequent source of flames at misc.fitness, and I
believe it is also addressed in the FAQ for the swimming newsgroup.

If losing body fat is your motive for exercise, then you are likely to
see better results from land exercise than water exercise. The body
temperatures of swimmers actually do get quite elevated, and it was
recently shown that a swimmer can lose a pound of sweat in the water,
just like a person will with intense land exercise.

However, when the swimmer gets out of the water, their wet body begins
to shiver, and body temperature rapidly returns to normal. They lose the
benefit of having an elevated body temperature for four hours immediately
thereafter, which is observed in persons engaged in land exercise, so
swimmers are without an elevated metabolism, which is helpful for losing
body fat.

I am unable to cite data. However, the sports-medicine physician who
I listen to on the radio, who is also the author of a book or two on
weight loss, makes the same assertion... and he does cite data.
--
George B. Clark

Daniel

As I remember it, to get the equivalent workout of a 45 min jog:

        Bicycling: 1.00 hours
        Swimming:  2.00 hours!

What he says you have to look at is which muscle groups you are
exercising. Leg lifts only exercise a muscle that is as big as your
pinky finger. Not real good. Bicycling comes real close to exercising
lots of muscle groups especially if you cycle in some hills. Its non
abusive to your body and allows you to learn proper breathing tech-
niques much faster than with running. It also increases your sense of
balance. He also reminds us that we need sugars in order to burn our
fats properly.

His book and hypothesis towards metabolism are quite good I strongly
suggest that if you are overwieght and want to deal with your weight
and are fed up with diets and plans that dont work to get his book.
He is also on PBS channels in your area. Watch for them as he also
is quite entertaining to see.

Good luck.
CP

Hmm... you wouldn't happen to be a big cycling fan now, would you? :-)
I have to quibble about saying that a 45 min jog = 1 hr bike = 1 hr
swim.  Don't you think that this would depend tremendously on the
effort level for each exercise, and also from person to person?
Bicycling at 19 mph average is going to be much more difficult than
jogging at 6 mph, for instance.  In addition, the ability to get a good
workout from different exersizes will depend on how much skill a person
has in doing that particular exercise. A person who has been swimming
competitively for years,
for instance, would have an efficient stroke and would have well-developed
arm, shoulder, chest, and back muscles, all of which are important
in swimming.  I would think they could get a lot better workout swimming
than they could doing anything else.

I think that there is a huge difference between what should be recommended
to sedentary people embarking on a remedial fitness program, and what
holds for people who are very fit already.  If you don't know how to
swim, it is going to take a very long time for you to learn how to do
it efficiently and develop the muscles it uses to the point where you
can get a great workout from it.  So for people whose only goal was
to lose weight, walking or
jogging would work much better. I also think that the musculature
and skill needed to get a great workout riding a bike would take a while
to develop, too.  In these cases Covert Bailey's comments are excellent.

However, I don't think what Bailey says can be used to select a superior
form of aerobic activity - that would be much too simple.

David Considine

--
David B. Considine                             Voice: (301) 286-4299
Code 916, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center     Fax:   (301) 286-1754

deletions...

Regards,
CP

[deletions]

Yes.  You should have.  Recovering from removal of chondrosarcoma from R.
distal femur, I experienced accelerated recovery of range of motion in my knee
using exercise in the water.  I could handle leg lifts in the water before I
had enough muscle return to handle leg lifts on land.  You can vary how hard
you push the leg in water to vary the resistance you experience.  On land,
you're fighting gravity, which doesn't vary to suit your need.

I could also get away from those darn crutches for an hour or two!!!

I didn't expect to lose weight from the exercise, but I was more toned than I'd
been in 6 or 7 years.

-- Ann McGrath

|>
|> As according to the book Fit or Fat in the 90's, Covert Bailey, he
|> states, (this is from memory), Swimming is the worst way to lose wieght.
                                                                    ^^^^^^^
                                                                   fat.

Parag