Warming Up for an Aqua Fitness Workout

Series Summary

Aqua fitness, often called AquaFit or water aerobics, is a form of resistance training that uses the motions of many common aerobic exercises but adds the resistance of water weight by performing the actions in a pool. Exercising in a pool lowers the impact of the workout on your joints and helps build strength by increasing the resistance of movement. Aqua fitness is popular with the elderly, and classes are becoming widespread in recreation centers across the nation. However, professional and collegiate sports teams use pool workouts and water aerobics for recovering athletes and endurance training.

In this free video series, expert Jamie Smithers shows you the basics of aqua fitness. You learn the benefits of each exercise and get to see just how they are done! Jamie teaches you high knee kicks and kickbacks, great for toning sexy legs and glutes. She also adds arms to the workout, toning your shoulders and upper-arms. Adding crunches and around-the-worlds makes for a great workout that will strengthen your heart and major muscle groups with low impact on the joints!

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Jamie Smithers and I'm here on the behalf of Expert Village to show you how to do aqua water fitness. The great thing about aqua water fitness is you can basically do it anywhere there's a pool. Whether it's just a day out in the sun with the family or your own traveling around. Most hotels have pools where you can jump right in. Now most people have the idea that working on a pool you're not really getting a great fitness workout. But that's totally wrong, you can push yourself just as hard as you need to running on a treadmill, working with weights, no equipment needed to just hop in the pool. The water creates a resistance so that you're working your shoulders all the way down to your toes depending on which muscle groups you're going to focus on in the pool. It's so important to treat this just like you would any other workout. Warming up your muscles, getting your heart rate up, getting that blood flowing throughout all of the muscles. So the first thing you want to do is to hop into the pool, start running back and forth so that we can really get that cardio vascular system up and going."