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    Water Workout
    Water Workout
    Water Workout
    Ebook285 pages1 hour

    Water Workout

    By Bill Reed

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    About this ebook

    WATER EXERCISES FOR EVERYONE: NON-SWIMMERS AND SWIMMERS
    As current as the day it was first floated as one of the very first, if not the first, international book of water-fitness regimes!
    Experience the pleasure of exercising in water.
    Use the pool as a general-age gym for:
    general day-by-day fitness
    beauty
    body building
    sports training and injury recovery
    pregnancy help
    aches and pains relief
    the sheer enjoyment of it
    You don’t have to be a swimmer to use the best fitness gym available – the pool. Use it to get fit; to enhance your shape and form; to develop your muscles (even equivalent to regular weight lifting); to exercise while you enjoy yourself splashing around, even while pregnant; to help with muscle aches and pains, to free you from general immobility and minor disability under little ‘ground-pull’ conditions, or just to help get away from things.
    Water exercise to music.
    Do it in pairs.
    Help others to do it. (No ducking!)
    Get strong or get slim.
    (No sweat either!)

    About the authors:
    Bill Reed was the Australian general publisher of Macmillan Australia when he conceived and wrote Water Workout, which was simultaneously published in the Australian, US and British markets under the respective Macmillan, Crown and David & Charles imprints. He was a South Australian representative surf lifesaver and water polo player.
    Originally a well-known and widely-performed and award-winning playwright, Bill Reed began writing fiction in his late thirties. Water Workout remains his only nonfiction work. To date he has written fourteen novels, including ‘1001 Lankan Nights, books 1 and 2’, and has won Australian national awards in all three genre areas of drama, longform fiction and short stories. He now mostly resides in Sri Lanka.
    Murray Rose was voted The Greatest Australian Male Olympian of All Time in 1984. He won four Olympic gold medals, along with one silver and one bronze, and broke 15 world records during his swimming career. At one stage he held the 400 m, 800 m and 1500 m world records at the one time. He became the youngest triple medal winner in Olympic history after competing at the age of 17 in the Melbourne Olympics and then at the age of 21 in the Rome Olympics. He came to live mostly in the United States, augmenting his involvement in swimming with being an actor, a sports commentator, and a marketing executive before returning to Australia to settle in Sydney with his wife.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBill Reed
    Release dateSep 1, 2015
    ISBN9780994322715
    Water Workout

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      Book preview

      Water Workout - Bill Reed

      At the time that this book was published, there hasn't been all that many publications which have specialised in water exercising for both swimmers and non swimmers.

      That has been very surprising. Water has not been just the element that human beings have gone back to through some supposed evolutionary instinct. Nor has it just been the element that human beings have gone back to on a hot day, in order to sit placidly in it with a cool drink in one hand and a book in the other. When you think about it, water has been the element that human beings have gone back to in order to enjoy themselves vigorously - to jump around in, to splash and romp, to play around like children. We've all seen it; we've all done it.

      Many of us have pools in our very own homes - or, if not, there are the public swimming pools or the beaches or the lakes and rivers we use. By simply enjoying ourselves in them, we are exercising in them to a great and unrealised benefit. Just treading water requires a degree of effort and stamina that you'd be surprised about. You've sensed it does, especially if you're not a great hand at swimming, yet you've probably previously thought, 'Oh well, the pool's for the kids or those guys thundering up and down those lanes'.

      Not anymore. The water exercise realisation is growing throughout the world, And it's about time. Many things make water the ideal fitness medium - and, if you've absorbed the routines in this book and got enough of them tucked away under your belt, so to speak, then you'll soon learn why water exercises are about the best all¬round exercising you could ever do.

      And if you've already got a pool, you've already got an ideal fitness medium!

      The Gym You Already Have

      In home pools alone, there are just as many 'gyms' around the country as there are home dryland gyms, I have called these pools gyms, and I hope you're going to be pleasantly surprised at the great variety of uses you can put it to and so help the fitness and well-being of yourself and your family. There's nothing magical in the concepts of pool gyms and water exercising, either.

      It is really only a matter of looking at your pool as having another use than a place just for your children's or your suntan's or your neighbors' use. Think of your pool gym as the gym you've already paid for. When there's no children splashing around in the pool and when the partying around it is over, it can be used in its 'downtime'.

      Furthermore, your pool gym can give you fitness without the sweaty pain and strain of land-locked gyms because that's what water does. It's where your limbs and muscles and joints can relax and be soothed for once, before beginning to recover that suppleness that you thought time had robbed you of once and for all.

      That pool gym that you've got sitting somewhere out the back is probably the best gym you could ever want to buy for love or money, anyway.

      Quite apart from water being arguably the best element for exercising in for any of us - young, old, super-fit or ill - your water gym doesn't demand joining fees or going public in the latest expensive outfits, or getting involved in an all-in, all-eyes club atmosphere. If you're away from offendable eyes, you can even water exercise in the nude if it's your own pool gym. You can water exercise together (see Chapter 12). You can do it to music. You can do it gently and soothingly or you can do it for body building.

      Buy an inexpensive lightweight wetsuit and you can even do it all winter. And, if you get more than slightly embarrassed by the public show of running or jogging in public, why don't you try running up and down or on the spot in your own private no-sweat-but-rigorous, convenient pool? There's no divine necessity to throw your body around public places at all.

      So, one of the major messages of this book is to get you to think of your pool as something that can also work for you, not just play for you.

      It’s a Gym

      Many of us don't have home pools, of course. We use public swimming pools or private club pools. Well, that's okay, too.

      Exercise in them. You don't have to just float or swim around in them. If you're a swimmer, swim and also water exercise. Float and also water exercise. Even train and water exercise.

      If you think about it, it's curious how many of us already mostly use those public facilities for exercising in anyway. We don't even know we are. The next time you're down there, just take a look around. Only a small minority is actually swimming; a few others are floating or standing around cooling off. But most are in there whoopeeing it up with a display of carefreeness that we wouldn't be seen dead doing in, say, a public park. Those people are enjoying themselves, sure, but what they're really doing is exercising in a nice, chaotic way. They're responding to the water and burning up energy, It mightn't be exercising to any set routine that any of us know, but it's exercising (that is, moving their bodies around in energy-ridding ways) nonetheless.

      That's why water exercising in pool gyms is only building on the what-comes-naturally, anyway.

      Also, being able to swim laps has nothing to do with it. Swimming and water exercising are not the same thing. You can do the great majority of the exercises in this book even if you can't swim; and with a little commonsense you can do almost all of them.

      Water exercising, if you're only a reasonable swimmer or not a swimmer at all, allows you to come into your own in your own or your local pool.

      You won't be alone. Your public pool will already be being used extensively for synchronised swimming exercises and routines, for additional nonswimming exercises to aid swim training, and for your local beefy sports team as a variety to their daily training schedules. You mightn't see them; they're probably done in a different time of the day. But they do water exercising, and they're there being just as sensible as you.

      Even down at your local fitness gym or country club, think about that pool facility you've got there and which takes up a considerable amount of those expensive subscriptions each year. Instead of using it as somewhere you cool off in or taper off after your massage, use it properly. Exercise in it. You're paying for using supplied fitness media, so use the pool gym too.

      Modern Water Exercising

      Water exercising has graduated from the image of the hospital physiotherapist's pool. Competitive swimmers, water polo players, synchronised swimmers, people with injuries . .. these are nowhere near the only ones doing water exercises these days. Non-swimmers are using exercise classes down at the local pool to get as much fitness, strength and toning as swimmers. Contact sports people like footballers, boxers etc are taking some part of their training in the pools. Pregnant women are taking to water with great relief and pleasure for reasons that are obvious to anyone who watches them move with sudden, relieved freedom.

      The elderly are banding together to experience the pleasure of once again being able to exercise in ways they thought were long behind them.

      The wiser of the competitive swim coaches are bringing water exercises more and more into regular training sessions.

      Even on the more recreational/fitness/razzamatazz side, there is the mushrooming of water disco music sessions; they're good and fun and therapeutic and come under various trade-mark names. They're for all ages and sizes and physical standards and physiques - and they're great to watch.

      Some months ago, I did watch one of these music-led water exercise classes. The music was as hot a disco sound as you would ever hear downtown on a Saturday night. The people in the class were hardly a potential substitute cast for the latest Rap movie, I can assure you, yet they looked really good jumping, hopping, gyrating around with punchy arms and legs going this way and that.

      They did a whole nonstop 40-minute session, and they were still smiling with delight at themselves and each other when they'd finished. They were tired but they weren't exhausted; no way.

      It was I who got the shock when they came out of the pool. It had actually been a class for physical rehabilitation. Some of them were really old; some really over¬fat; some really physically disabled; and some really looked like they'd just gone through a

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