My daughter is a swimmer. I am pretty sure she was born to be a swimmer. She has been a swimmer since she was old enough to dart off into any water that was puddle sized or larger. We put her in swimming lessons when she was just two years old because she tried to get into any water, whenever possible. Her love for and attraction to water was a bit scary. We decided to try to turn it into a positive thing and turn her love of water into something good. Her love of swimming took her through many summers of lessons, to join a community swim team and now she swims on to the high school swim team.

When she is home and I am blogging she will ask me what I am writing about that day. I tell her the topic I picked for the day and she always responds by telling me that I should write about swimming and the reasons kids should be swimmers. Today she is at an overnight swim meet but when she heard I was getting ready to blog she still suggested I write about swimming. This blog is just for her and uses her reasons to have kids become swimmers. (Because I think moms can do things like that sometimes.)

There are actually so many great reasons to have your kids become swimmers. Some are obvious and some are funny but still really great. My daughter’s love of swimming transferred to her brother, who is also now a swimmer. He swims on one of the local community teams and plans to swim for the high school when he is old enough. He swims year round, only taking a couple months off to play football. He loves it too. My younger boys want to swim too. I am pretty sure we have a family of swimmers.

Having a family of swimmers is ok with me because there are some really positive things to swimming. Here are just a few of the reasons I like having my kids be swimmers.

Great exercise
Swimming is great exercise. My kids swim five days a week for between an hour and two hours a day. In the summer my daughter swam twice a day some days for a total of about four hours. That amount of time combined with the fact that there is little down time at practice builds great endurance. My kids are fit and able to outlast others on other physical activities, like hiking and playing other sports, because of the endurance they build by swimming.

Individual Progress
Swimming is viewed as a team sport but it is still very much an individual sport as well. Swimmers are continually trying to better their times and are often racing to beat their personal best, not the swimmer in the next lane. Some kids who struggle to compete in a traditional team sport do so much better with swimming.

Lifetime sport
Swimming is a sport that most people can continue to do for their entire life. Low impact, noncontact and not a lot of equipment all make for a life-long ability to swim. This can’t be said for most other sports.

Clean sport
This is one of those funny reasons I told you about earlier. I love swimming season; the gear is clean which makes things easier for me. During football season I am cleaning mud, grass, sweat and whatever else up from all the gear, my van and my house. During swim season, everything is clean. I make sure we hang things up to dry and that’s about it. In fact, my mud room smells like chlorine, so having a swimmer even smells clean. (I can’t say that about football no matter how much I love it!)

Clean kids
My kids come home from practice clean and showered. Not something you can say about many other sports. They post pool showers mean they usually come home cleaner than when they left. How many of you can say that about your teenage athletes? Not many. The swimmers do tend to smell a bit like chlorine occasionally but I can live with that.

These are just of few of the reasons that swimming is a great choice for a child’s sport or exercise. Want to let us know of another reason to encourage your child to be a swimmer? Share away, we love to hear from you.