Scuba diving is not good cardio on its own, but it requires a good cardio regime for healthy and positive experiences. While scuba diving your heart and lungs need to accommodate higher concentrations of blood while dealing with higher pressure and a different form of breathing, and you need good cardiovascular health to do all of this.
Keep reading as we explore how scuba diving performs as a form of exercise and the best cardio exercises to use to prepare for your dive. We’ll also look into what muscles scuba diving works the most and how many calories you should expect to burn during a dive.
Is Scuba Good Exercise?
Scuba diving proves to be a good exercise overall. It involves a full-body workout that tests all your muscles and automatic functions.
When you’re underwater, your body needs to act completely differently, forcing your muscles to respond and strengthen differently than they would with on-land use.
Strength Training on Land
Before you even get in the water, you’re getting a workout in. A full set of diving equipment weighs about 25 kg (55 lbs) on average, and getting everything ready takes a toll on the muscles you use to carry it.
This means you’re already exercising muscles in your:
- Shoulders
- Back
- Legs
- Arms
- Core
This happens before you even get in the water.
The Effects of Water Resistance and Water Temperature
Taking on the underwater environment, even at minimal depths and warmer water, forces your body to perform differently, thus exercising muscles in different ways.
Water is denser than air, and the resistance doubles when you dive 10 meters. These effects compound every 10 meters, forcing your limbs to work harder the further you dive.
You move continuously while diving, and the water resistance multiplies the effects of these movements.
Even warm water forces your body to work harder to maintain your core temperature. Water conducts heat away from your body 20 times faster than air, causing your metabolism to work harder.
This increase in energy usage burns fat, builds lean muscles, and can even lead to weight loss.
Best Cardio Exercises for Scuba Diving
While scuba diving proves itself as good exercise, you should find other avenues to prepare your cardiovascular system for the demands of the dive.
Some of the best cardio exercises for scuba diving include:
- Power walking
- Cycling
- Swimming
- HIIT
You can also incorporate jogging or running, but you want to minimize exercises that heavily impact your joints or extended exercises. Working with a short interval-based routine will provide greater benefits while reducing your chances of decompression illness after the dive.
Power Walking
Power walking emphasizes speed and arm motion while reducing impact on your leg joints. While it offers plenty of benefits for your overall health, you need to focus on a certain posture while power walking. This includes:
- Keeping your eyes forward, shoulders back, and head upright
- Relieving any tension in your shoulders and neck
- Holding arms at a 90-degree angle
- Swinging arms gently
- Landing on your heel and rolling forward to your toe
Aim for short strides and a brisk pace for optimal cardiovascular benefit.
Cycling
Cycling either on a machine or on a bike can get your heart pumping without compromising function in other areas.
While it is not a complete transfer, the pedaling motions from cycling can also help build the muscles used while finning. This can offset any imbalances you may have in leg strength and help you get the hang on finning, all while improving cardio health.
Swimming
Swimming is another exercise to benefit both general scuba diving procedures and cardiovascular health.
Being in water while you work out gets you one step closer to the diving environment, and your body learns to efficiently handle oxygen while underwater.
HIIT
High-intensity interval training exercises focus on maximal results in minimal time. They fit well in crammed schedules, and they’re easy to adjust to your current state of fitness.
Because you’re moving so quickly in such a short period, you teach your body to handle oxygen efficiently. The short recovery periods are especially helpful in improving your cardiovascular system.
The Divers Alert Network has a list of HIIT exercises you can try for cardiovascular benefit.
What Muscles Does Scuba Diving Work?
Because your entire body is under water, you can argue that scuba diving works every muscle in your body. But there are some muscles that get more attention from underwater activities.
Your back, shoulders, and core literally bear the weight of all your equipment. Whether you are on land or in the water, you need to accommodate your tank, diving weights, and other gear.
Walking around with everything can put your legs to work, but the hard part is using them to move around in the water. Because finning is dissimilar to methods of movement on land, expect to feel the difference when you get out.
How Many Calories Do You Burn Scuba Diving?
You burn about 600 calories in one hour of shore diving, similar to an hour of jogging. Warm water dives burn an estimated 300 calories per hour, but you can get a more accurate calculation for your body using some specific figures.
The American College of Sports Medicine rated physical activities in the 2011 Compendium of Physical Activity in units of Metabolic Equivalents of Task (METS). Some examples of these ratings include:
- Rest: 1 MET (1 kcal/kg/hour)
- Average diving: 7 METS
- Moderate diving: 11.8 METS
- Fast diving: 15.8 METS
- Jogging: 9.9 to 11.2 METS
To use this to calculate the number of calories burned, you multiply subject weight in kg by the MET figure of the activity. Using the example of a woman weighing 78 kg and an average diving figure of 7 METS, you can estimate a total of 546 calories burned per hour.
The actual number varies depending on experience level and the activities performed during the dive, but this offers a general idea. While scuba diving burns calories at a rate similar to jogging, you might prefer perusing an underwater neighborhood to running around your own.
References
https://dan.org/alert-diver/article/high-intensity-interval-training/
https://cdn-links.lww.com/permalink/mss/a/mss_43_8_2011_06_13_ainsworth_202093_sdc1.pdf
https://rushkult.com/eng/scubamagazine/6-reasons-why-scuba-divers-or-more-fit/
https://www.healthline.com/health/exercise-fitness/power-walking#good-technique