EZ Swimmer - The Strangest Looking Barbell Ever - Interval Circuit Training in the Swimming Pool

Water Workout Interval Circuit Training with the EZ Swimmer

As a certified personal trainer and the inventor of the EZ Swimmer^®, I love combining resistance training with aerobics - whether on land or better yet in the swimming pool. Perhaps best described as circuit training. An exercise circuit is the completion of one prescribed exercise such as a push-up or sit-up or squat. Building muscle and elevating the heart at the same time offers a very efficient and effective exercise program. Imagine combining the best of both worlds - high-intensity aerobics with target toning!

Full Body Workout

The mark of a great circuit training program is not just variety, it is a full body workout. Working both the upper body and the lower body from the abdominal muscles to arms to shoulders to legs and don't forget the ankles!

No Favorite Children

Often I provide instruction with one of my life's mantras - no favorite children, no favorite sides, we need a complete balance. This permeates our exercise program from designing a workout that includes both the upper body and the lower body to making sure we address both the left and right muscles.

360 Degrees of Resistance

The water offers the unique advantage of 360 degrees of resistance. On land, gravity often provides an unbalance workout. More often than not, we are working to compensate and make the land workout fully balance. The water, however, is naturally balance - there is literally and equal amount of resistance for most movements. You push down and both the push down and the return are contracting your muscles.

Favorite Lower Body Water Aerobics Exercise

OK, I know the rule - no favorites but I love the rocking horse for water aerobics. If we study the human anatomy we find that both the longest and largest muscles in the body are in the legs. The rocking horse is a great lower body exercise because IF done correctly you are using your ENTIRE body (and yes, I meant to shout this!) and target the thigh muscle. The rocking horse is a great circuit, a single exercise that also elevates our heart muscle.

Cuddle Core™ - More Lower Body

The Cuddle Core™ movement with the EZ Swimmer^® or simply with a kick board is a great way to work our legs to complete exhaustion. Simply add a flutter kick and hug the EZ Swimmer or hold the kick board in front of you and there we go - a fun, low impact impact.

Swimming laps with a fitness tool such as the EZ Swimmer^® or a kick board is a great way to target tone your legs. Targeting the largest and longest muscles in the body is a great way to change your metabolism and lose weight.

Most Difficult Circuit - Made Easy

The one circuit most people hate (sorry for the four letter word but it is appropriate here) is the sit-up. On land, sit-ups and crunches and planks are a royal pain. In the water, the results are still wonderful but the stress and strain are much less. The train your abs crunch is loved by water aerobics clients who want to feel their abdominals engaged and also much loved by triathletes. A standing abdominal crunch on land or in the water is a great way to begin. Often I will start first time clients with the standing abdominal crunch in order to get the proper form and to properly engage the abdominal muscles.

Another Royal Pain Made Easy

Ankle exercises and wall push-ups I feel should be a regular part of any hospital stay. Afterall the purpose of the hospital stay is health - what could be better for us than using the muscles we need for daily living. Ah, but alas people do not like push-ups - even wall push-ups are a hard sell. Try a water version of push-ups - a push-down with the EZ Swimmer. Works the upper body very effectively with the least amount of strain upon the body.

Strangest Looking Barbell Ever

As the instructors that I have trained know, the EZ Swimmer is my baby. Yes, most parents have beautiful children - not for me - I have the strangest looking invention ever! Why? Because the ugly and very complicated curves work - they are for the user's comfort. No right angles for carpel tunnel from push ups, just the right amount of buoyancy (the only part of the human body that doesn't float is the human head - perfectly sized for all adult under 6'2") and a wonderful combination of movements for my most troublesome exercise - abdominals.

Balance Ball in the Water

The balance ball in the water was not my idea. I was ready to go into production when I attended an international aquatics conference. While the request was for therapy, my take was to design the single most mult-functional fitness tool for the swimming pool. Adding in the ability to challenge our stability took another mold and substantial delays - but well worth it. I often preface that the Seated Balance the exercise circuit that the EZ Swimmer mimcs for the balance ball is an advanced movement. Quite frankly if you have limited abdominal muscles, initially the Seated Balance will be impossible for you. I have had clients who were physically fit and were very challenged by the Seated Balance. Interestingly, my clients who have years of dedication to water aerobics more often than not found the Seated Balance a minor challenge. It is a delight to me as the inventor (or perhaps because the EZ Swimmer is my baby) to see a group of clients all excel at the Seated Balance - that really brightens my heart.

Strangest Looking Barbell - Made in America

I love traveling and have a very high appreciation of foreign lands. One of the items I shout with joy about is the many different nationalities that I meet here on Hub Pages. Yet, when I went to production I struggled long and hard to balance the cost of American made with delivering a product at lower cost. Quality was very important to me - both for my personal pride but also for safety. The overriding item, however, was jobs. My father was an engineer who travelled the world to fix American made machines. I was raised in a blue collar town where the city was once one of the greatest industrial cities in America. Sadly, manufacturing here in America is a rarity. Even sader yet are the stories I hear today from my clients whose son-in-laws are jobless, struggling to raise a family on nominal wages with no hope completely gone for a good paying manufacturing job.

Manufacturing in America is expensive, unemployment of my neighbors and my client's children is even more expensive. The choice is clear - proudly made in America. American technology, American molds and American workers.

Many of my family members are employees of the US Post Office and sadly the US postal rates do not allow me to send the fitness tool via that carrier. There is balance and choices in everything we do - we all try our very best. The EZ Swimmer is made in the US and typically shipped via UPS.

Secret Sauce - Flotation Material

My engineers strongly disagree that the secret sauce is the flotation material. They feel the complicated curves are a miracle and they may be right but yet the fact remains the material is very durable. What makes it different? It is self skinning - one solid piece all the way through - it is not dipped. This is very important to the lifetime quality of this tool. The manufacturer sometimes is dismayed at the quality because it limits their sales. For me, remember, this is my baby and I need to be proud of it. It will easly makr and take on color and marks from anything left next to it but while its smooth surface may be easily marred, the function remain stable and safe the for water and high sun exposure. Even extreme temperatures will not affect this unique and high quality flotation material.

The Real Secret Revealed

The EZ Swimmer team included myself, the plastics engineer, the biomedical engineer who handled the complicated curves, the manufacturer in the Carolinas and the company in NY who provided the mold. Yet throughout all of this the product is nothing without instruction. It is the instructors who understand the human anatomy and know the engagement of the muscles that are the real secret to this great product. It is the fitness instructor who guides you, it is the personal trainer who designs and refines your workout routine. For me, it is many instructors who kindly took the time and applied their knowledge to help add the various circuits that make this fitness tool functional. It is the instructors who developed the stretches, the choreography, and the statima to keep trying and motivating both themselves and their clients. Kudos to Diane and Janet who created the push-ups, refined the training program by adding in the standing abdominal crunches and Sara who is an inspiration to all of us in Diane's EZ Swimmer class. Kudos to Barbara for naming the cuddle core and the head fitness director who named the Seated Balance. The real secret is the dedicated professionals who helped and assisted in bringing a full body workout to this simple and strange looking fitness tool.

A Multi-Purpose Fitness Tool for the Swimming Pool! EZ Swimmer^®

I love to start off with the cuddle core and several laps simple of hugging the EZ Swimmer and a voracious flutter kick. More comfortable to me than a kick board with more buoyancy and greater resistance. My goal for circuit training is two complete sets of the 3 abdominal exercises resulting in over 50 sit-ups. One of my clients prefers 150 sit-ups which is very doable. It is all a matter of goals.

Best Circuit Program - Change - Rotate - Mix it Up

Mix it up. Change your routine. Every month or so I rotate different circuits. From stretching of the legs to concentrating upon the core. For days where I simply need relaxation - it may only be the cuddle core fluter kick and the Seated Balance and nothing more. When struggling with my frozen shoulders, I intensified my shoulder workout with added repetitions and sets of push-downs and the Seated Balance stationary propel (similar to the pectorial fly exercise-photo of the land exercise machine provided below).

Pectoral Fly - Take it to the Water with Hummingbird Movement

If you want to just simply feel the power of the water with your hands, take the land exercise movement from the pectoral fly machine and mimic that movement in the water with your hands cupped.  What you will find is the water offers a tremendous amount of resistance.  You will experience first hand, without any equipment - no swim fitness tools whatsoever that you can really take your workout to the water!

Now add in a fitness tool that provides more variety and more resistance and you have a full body workout right in the water.   Simple, low impact, and fun.  A great way to maintain our muscle tone - for young and old alike.

Aerobics - Upper Body and Lower Body

Take the time to develop a workout program that balances endurance training (intense cardio workout) with both upper body and lower body resistance.

Stretching for many of my classes is completed throught with only 2 minutes for the ending in order to maintain the body temperature in cooler swimming pools. Remember to stretch only after the muscles are warm and do intersperce great cardio between circuits to keep the heart rate up!

My invention, my "baby" - the EZ Swimmer is the strangest looking barbell ever and yet it proudly works!

After several different prototypes, several different international conferences, consultations by countless fitness experts - countless hours of testing and trail and error - this innovative swim fitness tool works! True to my dream it is multifunctional. True to my dream it is 100% made in the USA.

The EZ Swimmer is "true blue" in many ways and perhaps very ugly to others but very beautiful to its inventor because it works. Each strange curve of the EZ Swimmer has been carefully designed for both its function and its comfort. It is a swim fitness tool that is truly ergonomic - fitting comfortably for your hands and yet effective for the balance ball in the water . Each curve is soft and helpful to the user. The instability of the Seated Balance has been perfected by a medical engineer to a point where your core muscles are truly tested. Those who need to work on their core are literally bucked in the water! For this reason, the Seated Balance has been labeled an "advanced exercise" so to showcase the importance of properly targeting your core muscles.