How Swimming Improves Your Work Performance

There are plenty of good reasons to get your sweat on every day. Whether you prefer to walk, run, ski, rollerblade, mountain climb, bike, dance, or swim, any kind of physical activity is good for your overall health and well-being for a lengthy range of reasons that have traditionally focused on the physical. Exercise can improve cardiovascular health, brain health, joint health, and it can help you build strong muscles and bones that can help you age better and live longer.

These physical reasons should be plenty to get most people off the couch, but for the business-minded set, a new study adds compelling evidence that being more active could do more than just improve your physical health – it might actually improve your work life, too.

The study involved 200 employees from the UK and China. Participants were asked to self-report their physical activity and wear a fitness tracker for 10 days. They were asked to assess how they performed at work, and their supervisors were asked to weigh in on how study participants performed at work, too.

The results confirmed what many Masters swimmers already know: Those who engaged in daily physical activity did better at work. In the language of the study, the exercisers “generated a package of next-day resources called ‘resource caravans’ that contributed to work-related outcomes,” the study authors write in an article in the Harvard Business Review.

Those resource caravans included three primary mechanisms that supported employees in their work the next day, the authors write. The first among them is higher quality sleep. Exercise contributes to improved sleep, and many swimmers will tell you they sleep like the dead when they finally get to bed at night because they’ve worked so hard in the pool earlier in the day.

Another useful resource generated by physical activity is vigor – that’s the kind of energy and vitality you need to tackle challenging problems in the workplace. Exercise boosts your overall vigor by releasing feel-good chemicals called endorphins. These compounds in the brain can sharpen your focus and help you feel the “runner’s high” that many athletes experience during an intense physical output. For many people, that feeling of vigor sticks around for a good while after you’ve finished exercising.

Task focus is another resource that’s sharpened by physical activity. It’s difficult to get much done when you’re not focused, and swimming can help quell some of the brain noise that leads to an unfocused mind, again through the release of brain chemicals that help you narrow your focus on the task directly in front of you and by easing anxiety about other out-of-view concerns.

The study authors noted that their findings indicated that there can be a time delay in experiencing the benefits for exercise, which is why they were looking specifically at next-day task performance.

“Across two studies, we consistently found that employees’ daily physical activity throughout the day generates resource caravans consisting of physical (sleep), affective (vigor), and cognitive (task focus) resources, which further contribute to next-day job performance and health outcomes in different ways,” they write in HBR. “Physical and affective resources serve to reduce daily bodily pains; cognitive resources contribute more to daily task performance; and affective resources and cognitive resources are stronger predictors of self-rated creative performance.”

The study authors note that the benefits came from any kind of activity, not just lengthy or high intensity workouts, and that “even short periods of physical activity, 20 minutes each day, were sufficient to generate resources that contribute to employees’ next-day task performance and health.”

So if you have a big work deadline looming or an important presentation to make tomorrow, make the time to go for a swim, even if you can only spare 20 minutes. Your body and brain will thank you for it—and so will your boss.