Personal experience: Swimming in a hot pool drops more pounds but be careful!

A few months ago I broke my nose... Well, actually somebody broke it for me. One week after that I had to have it broken again to set it back in place. The bad news was I was out of the water for 7-weeks total and during at time I was told not to raise my blood pressure with sports or physical activity.

When my 7-week sentence was up I got the flu and was now out of water for another 5-weeks. This had been the longest period of time I had been out of the water last in 7-years. During this period I gained 12-pounds or a pound-a-week because I was medicating myself with hot chocolates, chocolate croissants, and lots of drawing.

Now I am healthy and back in the water again but I can't believe how out of shape I am. It amazes me how one can swim for 7-years regularly and then lose it all within weeks. I have been doing SCAQ  workouts about twice-a-week so far; (three this week), but in between SCAQ workouts I have been swimming on my own at L.A. Fitness.

The pools at L.A. Fitness are extraordinarily warm, low to middle 80s. Swimming 200s demands longer breaks to recover and swimming only a 1,000 meters feels like your have swam a metric mile. I also find that I am losing more weight with back-to-back "hot tub" swimming than I am swimming twice the yardage in a cooler pool. I am losing 1-to-2-pounds a week.

The upside to this is that when I get inside an 80-degree-pool, the first 1,500-yards is quite doable at a reasonable interval as well. After that I am suffering and paying close attention to my heart rate.