Gym and Swimming to Lose Weight

Combining gym workout and swimming training routine to lose weight is highly effective. These two fitness activities combined together with an healthy diet provide the calorie consumption and fun you need to train and lose weight.  In this article I will go trough the basics for making the most out of your weight loss effort and I will give you all the information needed for understanding why combing a gym workout with a swimming training can give you excellent results. If you are a regular reader to these blog  (and you should, of course) you know I strongly believe that following my articles all my readers should become capable of understanding the basic rules of physical training and water fitness. I strongly believe the best way to undertake anything in life is doing it with a solid understanding of what is the reason why you are acting in a certain way. Never give anything for granted, try it yourself and learn from your own experience.

Weight loss basics

Your body needs calories to function properly. How many calories does an average adult male needs, though? It is generally understood that the average adult male needs about 2500 kcal a day. As you might understand this is a just an average which is computed by taking under consideration a large variety of people with different height and weight, different fat percentage of body mass, different level of activities and different metabolism. By the way, women typically need something less, around 2000 kcal. All those variables will have an impact on your personal need for calories. To lose weight you need to reduce the amount of calories you take in and burn more.

So let's say you would like to reduce your dayly calories intake of about 300 kcal, if you do that consistently and do not change your life style, so you do not change the calories you need to function, you will gradually lose weight. So, what if you do change your lifestyle? Well, in the case if you get more active but you still eat the some amount of food you will have the same net effect of weight loss. Great, so be more active and intake the same amount of calories and you will lose weight. Yes, but you can get smarter than that. What if I was telling you you can burn more calories not only while training but also between training sessions? The only thing you need to do is increase your basal metabolism working out in the gym.
Increase Resting Metabolic Rate

Resting metabolic rate is the rate at which your body burns calories just to keep you alive, just to make your  body function. It tells you how much energy your body needs to run at its lower consumption rate. Measuring the basal metabolism is pretty complicated but you do not need to know how much it is for real. You just need to know you can increase it. Recent studies have shown that only anaerobic exercise (see our swimming interval training for more details) can increase your resting metabolic rate because it builds up fat free mass. In plain english, this means that if you build more muscle mass you do not only burn more energy while exercising to built the muscles but also when you are resting on your couch watching your favorite drama. Yes, you got it right, just the fact that you have more muscles in your body means you will burn more calories even if you do not use them. So combining gym workout and swimming interval training will boost your calories needs and you weight loss. You will have more muscles and therefore a higher basal metabolism and you will consume more energy since you will have a more active life training in the swimming pool.
Gym and Swimming combined training program

I will write down two training plans, one for the very ambitious person which has time and mental energy to train five days a week, and another for the common man or woman which might struggle to find time to train three times a week.

Standard gym and swimming combined training plan, three times a week:

Monday: Swimming 1
Tuesday: Rest
Wednesday: Gym weight circuit
Thursday: Rest
Friday: Swimming 1
Sunday: Rest
Saturday: Rest

Killer gym and swimming combined training plan, five times a week:

Monday: Swimming 1
Tuesday: Gym weight  circuit
Wednesday: Swimming 2
Thursday: Gym weight circuit
Friday: Swimming 1
Sunday: Rest
Saturday: Rest

In this post I will just point you into the right direction for the training schedule of your week. I will not give you detailed workout exercises. I will keep that for another post and link this to it. For now, you can work on the following general guidelines for the three training types. I called swimming 1 a swimming interval training of your choice, see the post on swimming interval training for reference, and swimming 2 a lower pace, long laps continuos swimming training. The gym workout routine is always the same and it is meant to cover the full body, working out the big muscle groups, chest, back, arms, abdominal and legs. What kind of machines you want to use and how much you want to isolate the muscles is up to you and the amount of time you have to train in the gym. I usually prefer to use free loads since it is easier to workout more muscles groups at the same time.

In the killer gym and swimming combined training plan I included swimming 2 since it provides a nice a soft way to stretch out the muscles you trained the day before in the gym getting them ready for the day to come. In the standard gym and swimming combined training plan you do not need to do that since you are resting more between gym workouts.

These are anyhow very intense training plan which will for sure increase both you basal metabolism and your needs for calories. The key is not to increase your calories intake to lose weight. So stick to your diet and see your fat burning down.

Right, I almost forgot, there is a side effect to all this, you get a great looking and overall well fit body out of this training plan. Sorry about that!

Keep healthy, Keep swimming