Some of the most rewarding hours I spend at the poolside are with people in their sixties, seventies and eighties. They often arrive slightly apologetic, as though wanting to learn to swim at seventy-four required some sort of excuse. It does not. Of all the ways of staying active as we get older, swimming may be the one that asks the least of the body and gives back the most.
The difficulty with ageing is rarely that we stop wanting to move. It is that moving begins to cost more. Knees object. A hip aches after a walk that used to be nothing at all. A stumble on the stairs, or simply the fear of one, quietly shrinks the map of where a person is willing to go. So they do a little less, which weakens them further, which makes the next thing harder still. It is a slow spiral, and it is why so much good advice about later life comes back to a single question: how do we keep you moving?
Water answers that question rather elegantly. Stand in chest-deep water and a large share of your body weight is simply taken from you. The load on your joints falls away while the effort remains, so you can work genuinely hard without being punished for it afterwards. A hip that protests at a mile of pavement will often manage half an hour in a pool quite contentedly. And because water resists movement in every direction, the muscles that hold you upright are working the whole time, even when it does not much feel like exercise.
The research is more striking than most people expect. A study of 80,306 British adults, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, found that swimmers had a 28 per cent lower risk of death from any cause, and a 41 per cent lower risk of death from heart disease and stroke, than people who did not swim. Those are the kind of numbers that would make headlines if swimming came in a bottle.
The finding I return to most often with older clients, though, concerns falling. Researchers following a large group of older men in Sydney over several years found that the swimmers among them fell around a third less often than men who took part in no sport at all, even after accounting for their general activity levels and the usual risk factors. When tested, those swimmers also swayed less when standing still: their balance was measurably better. That matters enormously. A fall is not merely a fall at eighty; a fractured hip is very often the beginning of a much steeper decline. Anything that keeps you upright deserves to be taken seriously.
For those already in pain, there is good news too. A Cochrane review, the most rigorous kind of evidence summary we have, pooled thirteen trials of aquatic exercise involving nearly 1,200 people with osteoarthritis of the knee or hip. It found modest but real improvements in pain, in day-to-day function and in quality of life, with no serious side effects reported. Modest is not nothing, particularly for a condition that has no cure and a long list of treatments that carry a cost of their own.
Then there is how it makes you feel, which is harder to measure but no less real. Swim England’s research found that regular swimmers rated themselves 6.4 per cent healthier than non-swimmers, a difference the researchers likened to feeling around twelve years younger, and calculated that swimming saves the health and social care system more than £357 million a year. I would add something the figures cannot capture: the pool is one of the very few places where an older body is not on display, not being compared with anyone else’s, and not being hurried.
It would be wrong, though, to suggest that swimming does everything. Because the water carries you, it is not weight-bearing, and weight-bearing is what builds and preserves bone. If bone density is a concern — and after the menopause in particular it should be for most of us — then swimming needs a companion: walking, gardening, stairs, or some simple resistance work at home. The NHS recommendation for over-65s is 150 minutes of moderate activity a week, plus something for strength and balance on at least two days. Swimming covers the first part beautifully. It does not cover all of the second, and any coach who tells you otherwise is selling something.
If you are starting out, or coming back after many years, a few practical things make far more difference than people expect. Temperature is the first. A cold pool tightens precisely the muscles you are trying to loosen, and older bodies lose heat more quickly; look for a warmer pool — a teaching, hydrotherapy or private pool is often several degrees warmer than a public lane pool — and go at a quiet hour. Begin with fifteen or twenty minutes twice a week, and resist the urge to count lengths. Counting encourages you to push through discomfort, which is exactly the wrong instinct at this stage.
The second thing is technique, and here I would gently challenge something almost universal. Most British adults over sixty learned breaststroke at school and have swum it ever since with the head held permanently above the water. It looks comfortable. It is not. Holding the head up in that way hyperextends the neck and compresses the lower back, length after length, and the ache that follows is then blamed on age, or on arthritis, rather than on the stroke that caused it. The remedy is small: a well-fitting pair of goggles, and letting the face drop into the water on each stroke, lifting only to breathe. I have watched that single change take years off how someone feels climbing out of the pool.
Nor do you have to swim at all to begin with. Walking in chest-deep water, forwards and then backwards, is a genuine workout and an excellent way to rebuild balance and confidence if a fall has knocked them out of you. A good number of my clients spend their first few sessions doing very little else, and are all the better for it.
One sensible caution. If you have a heart condition, blood pressure that is not well controlled, epilepsy, or you are recovering from surgery, have a word with your GP before you start, and do not swim alone if you are at all unsure. Rone of that is a reason to stay out of the water. It is a reason to go in properly.
The question I am asked most often by people in later life is whether they have left it too late. In thirty years of teaching I have not yet met anyone who had. The water is entirely indifferent to your age, your shape and how long it has been. It will hold you up just the same. Most people find that the hardest length is the walk from the changing room, and that once that is behind them, something they had assumed was gone comes quietly back.
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Main – Photo by Johnny Cohen on Unsplash
About the Author: Brian FitzGerald
