How can swimming technique, swimming workouts can help kids and adults with ADHD?
Our main goal is bringing more oxygen from the lungs to the brain, and by that we can be more concentrated and for longer periods of time. So how do we do it? A good example is the casino, where people gamble, some of the casinos add 100% oxygen into the rooms so that people will be happy, play more, be energetic and won’t feel the need to sleep for many hours. But we don’t want you to run off to start gambling, so we have a better solution.
So what happens is we try in swimming to do 3 things in order to concentrate more:
- Expanding the lungs – this is a very hard task, as we have the rib cage and it’s not possible to make the lungs bigger. But, swimmers and especially long distance swimmers, due to the shoulders that go up and the ribs go out to the sides, it’s possible for the lungs to grow something like 10 or maximum 20 percent of their capacity.
But what happens if we’re not professional swimmers and we want to use our lungs to get more oxygen. In the air we breathe there is about 20% oxygen so we try to inhale more oxygen in every breath we take. So swimmers, even not professional, that swim 2-4 times a week, can receive more oxygen and be more effective sometimes even by 50%, which means we don’t need to let the lungs grow, we can just improve and swim to let the lungs work better and improve their capacity.
I’d like to share a story, a friend of mine had cancer and she lost one of her lungs. In the lung capacity tester both lungs had 40% of use, and after 2 years of training even easy, with a lot of aerobic pace, she improved her lung capacity by 80% and after 5 years 97%. Which means, even though she had only 1 lung, with the right swimming technique and stretching and opening all the pressure spots in the body, she worked with this 1 lung, better than most people work with both lungs.
So when the lungs can function properly and get more oxygen we can focus for longer periods and work better and longer.
- Another thing that happens if we swim and swim lose, we loosen the shoulders and the neck, we release tension and stress and when the pressure is released, nothing closes our body and then the head can work better. Many researches show that people that swim can concentrate more than people practicing different sports and another thing that happens is when the hydro static pressure of the water on the lungs, make them work 60% more than we are used to when standing in the open air.
The static hydro pressure of the water on our head is like when we are in the shower and the water pressure is pointed to our heads – it relaxes us, when we are relaxed, we are more focused, when we are more focused we can concentrate.
- The flips we do at the end of each length, create imbalance between the brain and the body, but we need to get the balance back, so this flip helps you regain the balance and later – focus better outside of the water. it is recommended to do the flip or the freestyle turn in swim WEST technique in order to loosen the body.
So, if you have something important to do, and you know you have to be concentrated go swim and you will discover how you will manage to focus. You will discover how it will change your life.
And if you don’t know how to swim or you wan’t to improve your lung capacity in order to concentrate for a longer period?
Fill in the questionnaire and an swim WEST, learn to swim online program will be send to you (according to your flexibility and swimming level) https://swim-west.com/diagnosis/
The writer of this article is Ori Sela founder of swim WEST technique and the owner of Water World Israel – one of the biggest and most professional clubs for Hydrotherapy in the world
