Water or Aqua Aerobics is a fun and easy way to fitness, suitable even for the elderly and those suffering from joints trouble. It can improve your ability to live comfortably with your condition.
What is Aqua Aerobics
Aqua or Water Aerobics refers to aerobic exercise performed in shallow water or deep water, such as a swimming pool. It uses water as resistance for exercises that are normally done on land.
Water’s buoyancy greatly reduces the pressure on your joints, making it easier to perform the required range of motion for exercise. The water buoyancy allows people to do movements that they might find difficult to do on land. At the same time, water also has greater resistance than air, which means walking in water requires more effort and its more challenging for your muscles. That is why aqua aerobics helps you to reduce flab and burn calories. You may lose some inches within the first 3-4 classes.
The exercise focuses on aerobic endurance, resistance training, and creating an enjoyable atmosphere with music.
Pump it up!
Usually, beginners start out with a simple workout for the whole body. As you progress, advanced and intense moves are introduced like the jumping jacks, skies, bunny tucks, etc., adding some training techniques to raise aerobic intensity.
Pilates movements are added to build core strength, along with kick-boxing methods like kicks and punches to improve the strength of the upper and lower body muscles. Ballistic dance movements can also be done, which are aimed at improving your balance.
Some floating tools or equipment are also used like aqua noodles, dumbbells, aqua belt, upper arm cuffs, gloves, etc. These tools increase the resistance and make your exercise more intense. This in turn helps to enhance your total physical fitness, increase your flexibility, muscular strength, and endurance too.
The specifics
Aqua aerobics works for everyone from the ages of 8 to 80. Most water exercises are in chest-deep or waist-deep water. Beginners should start out with chest-deep water, which is ideal for more cushioning and buoyancy. In advanced classes, deep water workout is very effective. More water volume means more resistance and more efforts, which translates into burning more calories.
Water is very supporting and it is very cooling as well. There is minimal impact on the joints and it’s completely shock-free, which makes exercise very interesting.
Aqua aerobics is one of the best cardiovascular activity. You pump more blood for each beat, so you don’t need as many heartbeats, because the pressure of the water on your legs and lower body makes the blood return more effectively to the heart.
How to do?
An aqua workout is a 45-60 minute session that includes:
- 3-5 minutes of warmup.
- 3-5 minutes of stretches.
- 15-30 minutes of aerobic exercise (level depends on strength of class).
- 5-10 minutes of muscle training and toning workout.
- 5 minutes for cool down stretches.
Benefits of aqua aerobics
- Burns calories faster than exercise on land.
- Increases functional capacity of your cardiorespiratory system and muscle endurance. Strengthens the heart.
- Good for mental as well as emotional well-being as water invigorates you. So it’s good for stress reduction and improving your mood.
- Builds physical strength and flexibility.
- Lowers risk of overheating. It has a very cooling effect.
- Improves your fitness and energy levels.
The buoyancy also makes you feel like your body weight is just 10 percent of your actual weight. Mostly in all cases, one can get benefit from moderate intensity, weight-bearing activity. It’s a good combination of muscle strengthening and aerobic exercise.
Water is very friendly. Share the same spirit as water, keep flowing and it will help you move.
Nirupama Dhobale
Aqua exercise instructor International certified – Singapore
