I've been transitioning to swimming for my caloric burn and cardio maintenance while I wait for this issue I am having with my knee to sort itself out. The doctor recommended that I stop all fitness but I was straight with him and told him "that isn't going to happen." I feel as though I have let my body down any day that I don't exercise at least a bit.
So as a compromise I took up swimming, which is something that I have been doing at some level for as long as I can remember. I also know that old people use it as exercise so there definitely is something to it. According to both my Xiaomi fitness watch readouts as well as Strava, both of which use their own proprietary methods of determining caloric burn, come up with results as to how much burn is going on that has been really impressive and satisfying to me.
You can probably tell by looking at this that this pool is not an Olympic size pool. There just isn't enough real estate where I live for that to happen. It also is not winter now but when I get to the pool I am in a swimsuit and don't have my phone with me. The place also has a strict "no photos" rule there that I am very happy about and wish they would apply to their gym as well. We'll talk about that more later.
Anyway, this pool is 25 meters and that is just fine by me. I'm not going to be getting all competitive anytime soon. I'm just here for the calories.
Today, I decided before I began that I was going to take it really easy and not treat any of the laps as if they were a race. I was not going to stop moving at any point - even though I did because my shorts came untied - and just keep going at a slow clip to see what it would look like as far as calories are concerned at the end of 30 minutes. I only did 30 minutes BTW, the extra 1.5 minutes is me getting out of the pool and getting my other hand dry enough to deactivate the timer.
nearly 600 calories in 30 minutes from something that I don't even consider to be difficult still to me seems unbelievable. The average person my age, weight and height will burn around 80 calories an hour even when asleep but stil, this is a lot of calories for just maintaining a lazy pace back and forth in the pool for 30 minutes.
I'm a little disappointed in myself for taking so long to discover this amazing sport. There is very little chance of injury, it's temperature controlled, and you don't get dirty... well I suppose you get a bit dirty because of all the chemicals in there but still! This is an awesome thing to be doing and according to my watch, a borrowed watch that I also used, and also using both Strava and Xiaomi's systems these caloric burn outputs appear to be accurate.
This is incredible and I am just stoked that this is the case. Now the only problem I face is that I get bored. I am going to investigate whether or not underwater headphones exist. If they do I am going to try something really stupid like listening to music or an audio-book while I swim!