Swimming exercises your mind as well as your body. Here is how to get the best out of your swimming pool workout.

We all know the physical benefits of swimming.

Swimming vastly improves your cardiovascular fitness, core strength, muscle definition and posture, with relatively little strain or stress on the joints.

If there is a problem with swimming as a form of exercise, it is one shared by most cardio workouts and that is, keeping your mind occupied. You might even see it as fighting the boredom.

But with a bit of help and a few insights, this can be turned into an advantage.

You often swim in solitude.

When you are doing a cardio workout at home or in the gym, you’ll probably be sitting on a bike or rowing machine; perhaps a treadmill or cross-trainer.

Any of those machines can be facing a TV.

There might be music playing in the room or in your headphones.

Quite a lot of people read the papers or use their smartphone or tablet device when they are sitting on an exercise bike.

If you are swimming in your own pool for exercise, it’s very often alone and in silence.

The trick is to see that not just as potentially boring, but as a meditative time. It is a chance to de-stress from the rigours of life. It is a chance to relax and rest your mind just as you are exercising your body.

Many meditative techniques ask you to pay attention to your breathing, and that is certainly something that swimming makes you do.

To clear your thoughts, you might be asked to chant a mantra as you meditate. Counting your strokes and keeping a steady pace can soothe your mind in just the same way.

When you meditate, you need to do it without distraction from the outside world. Well, you definitely can’t answer the phone or check your e-mails from the middle of your pool.

Don’t swim in solitude. Swim in a calm and relaxed oasis away from the world.

Train the mind to train the body.

To get the most out of your swimming, there are a few top tips you should bear in mind:

• Always warm up at the beginning of a swimming training session, just as you would for the gym. Five minutes of gentle lengths should do it.

• Different strokes work different parts of the body – butterfly for core strength, backstroke for posture, crawl for cardio and breaststroke for legs. Use all the strokes in a session for a total workout.

• Interval training – 100 meter sprints with 30 seconds rest – will improve cardiovascular fitness, especially in the over 40’s.

• Distance training will tend to maintain cardio fitness levels.

• Keep a steady pace. Get a pace clock to help you with that.

• Use floats, paddles and ‘swim parachutes’ to vary your routine, increase drag or isolate particular areas of your body to exercise.

BADU Counter Current units.

Smaller pools can be turned into ‘endless’ exercise pools with the addition of a BADU Counter Current unit that provides a strong current of water to swim against.

The units can be specified into a new build pol or retrofitted to an existing pool. They come in a variety of sizes, the larger models featuring more powerful pumps to give a stronger current.

The pump draws water in through the many openings located around the back of the nozzle housing before jetting it back into the pool as a powerful stream of up to 85 m³/hr via a directional nozzle.

On built in models, the jet nozzle swivels 60° in each direction allowing the stream of water to be adjusted to suit individual swimmers requirements.

The jet housing is produced from high quality stainless steel to create an eye-catching feature within the pool. A pneumatic on/off switch is incorporated into the housing together with the regulator for the air-intake, which gives the sparkling bubble bath effect.

We hope this article has been of use to you. There are many more articles on this site that will give you information on almost every aspect of your pool.

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