Splashing around in the pool has never been more fun or educational than it is at Swimming Los Angeles Swim School. Science has proven that swimming isn’t just great for growing young healthy bodies; it’s also great for developing young minds.
Kids who participate in athletic activities like swimming classes from a young age tend to do better in school and have fewer behavioral and concentration problems. While the focus of most educational discourse is class sizes and test scores, the health of your physical body also strongly affects your mental capabilities.
Building a strong association between movement and fun is an essential part of nurturing well-rounded children who grow and thrive. In fact, according to cutting-edge scientists like Dr. Win Wenger, author of The Einstein Factor: A Proven New Method For Increasing Your Intelligence, regular swimming may actually increase your IQ by 10 points or more! His research shows that swimming underwater for just three weeks is enough to see a marked improvement in IQ, attention span, verbal ability, and cognitive reasoning.
With professional guidance and proper adult supervision, young children and babies can hold their breath and swim underwater for many seconds at a time. Fostering a love for the water and swimming starts as early as birth. Kids who are comfortable in the water at a young age are more likely to enjoy recreational swimming as adults, and more likely to reap all the social, physical and intellectual benefits that come with it!
So, how does it work? When people dive below the surface of the water and swim, they enact something called the marine diving response, or the mammalian diving response. Basically, when people force their bodies to stay underwater without breathing, the body responds and compensates by storing oxygen in different places than it normally would. For this reason, simply holding your breath while standing on solid ground will not have the same result as physically swimming underwater.
When oxygen is stored in the body during the mammalian diving response, it changes your body’s physiology so that you experience an increased blood volume and a minimized oxygen-use rate. These factors combine to produce the startling results of higher IQs and better concentration and focus that swimmers have been enjoying for years without even realizing it.
In fact, children as young as two months enjoy infant swim lessons at Swimming LA Swim School (accompanied by adults, of course)! By providing a fun and safe environment for infants and children to begin exploring the water, they hope to nurture a positive association towards swimming and physical activity.