Category: Health

Look. If you are of a delicate disposition, best not take up swimming. Don’t venture down to your local pool, strip off your clothes, wade through a slightly wet and dirty changing room and immerse yourself into what is, effectively, a communal bath full of the hoi polloi and all their bodily fluids. Just don’t…

Every type of exercise has its selling points. But swimming is unlike any other aerobic workout in a few important ways. First, the fact that you’re submerged in water means your bones and muscles are somewhat unshackled from the constraints of gravity, says Hirofumi Tanaka, a professor of kinesiology and director of the Cardiovascular Aging…

Swimmers in an Olympic-sized pool could be surrounded by up to 50 gallons of urine, a new study has revealed. Scientists used an artificial sweetener found in urine to measure how much pee is in swimming pool water. They discovered the sweetener acesulfame potassium (ACE), is consistently present in urine, making it easy to monitor…

When Mike McQuay Jr., an 18-year-old with autism, was growing up, the place he felt most safe and calm was in his parents’ backyard pool. “We’d take him to the mall and he would get overloaded with sensory issues from all the fluorescent lights and crowds,” says his mom, Maria McQuay, 50. “But when he’d…

If you’re the parent of a child with asthma, you know it can be a challenge to find ways to help him or her exercise safely and comfortably. But experts say there is one activity that can help keep your child fit, and actually improve asthma symptoms. “When it comes to cardiovascular activities that are…

In a study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, European and Australian researchers find that not all types of physical activity are equal when it comes to longevity. They studied data collected from more than 80,000 people in England and Scotland who answered questions about their activity levels yearly between 1994 and 2008.…