If you’ve always loved swimming and have wanted to get back into this form of exercise because it will be easier on your aging body than other forms of exercise, there are still certain safety rules and guidelines that you should follow so that you can stay safe when swimming in your senior living facility or the local pool in your area.
To help you learn just what these things are, here are three tips for safely swimming as an older athlete.
Take Care When Around The Pool
While everyone knows that it’s not safe to run around a pool area, this is something that older adults need to be even more vigilant. Because although anyone can slip and fall if they’re walking on a slick surface around a pool, if an elderly person falls near a pool, they could sustain far greater injuries now that they are older.
To keep these kinds of injuries from happening to you when you’re around a pool, you should always wear non-slip shoes when you’re walking around a pool. Along with this, you’ll want to go slow and take your time when coming both in and out of the pool, as those areas can be particularly slippery for you. And if there’s anything for you to hold onto as you’re walking around the pool or coming in and out of it, make sure you grab onto these things to help you keep your balance.
Perfect Your Swim Technique
Although swimming can be easier on all bodies as opposed to other, more high-impact forms of exercise, if you’re not using the proper technique when you’re swimming, you could still easily get injured from doing these repetitive movements. But if you do each of your strokes the right way, the chances of injury are reduced.
If you want to make sure that you’re doing all of your strokes correctly, you might want to have a swim coach take a look at how you’re swimming and give you suggestions on how to adjust your form so that you’re using each part of your body as you should.
Use Training Aids
If you’ve been injured in some way in the past but still want to get into the pool or exercise, there are training aids that you can use to help adjust for any parts of your body that may not be able to pull their weight at the moment.
Things like swim fins, paddles, kick boards, noodles, and more can be used to help make swimming easier and take some of the stress off of certain parts of your body. Just make sure that you’re using these training aids as they’re meant to be used to avoid further injuring yourself.
If you want to safely keep swimming as an older adult, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you in doing this.