If you like water skiing, surfing or snowboarding, wakeboarding is a great summer sport that offers many different health and fitness benefits. And the best part is, you’re having so much fun out on the water that you won’t even realize that you are exercising!
Here are the Top 10 Health Benefits of Wakeboarding:
-
Great exercise: Not only is wakeboarding fun to do, but it also requires a lot of strength as you use your hands to hold the rope to perform air tricks. Essentially, it’s a highly efficient full body exercise. Wakeboarding is a great way of keeping the body and mind healthy and fit.
- Strengthens arm and leg muscles: When you wakeboard you have to flex, resist and hold positions for periods at a time. Often you also have to build on these held positions and then explode or move from these static flexed positions to execute tricks and techniques.
- Improves flexibility in the hands and feet: All the jump and turns performed while wakeboarding require hand and foot flexibility to avoid injury. Being agile and nimble on your feet will carry over to everyday activities.
- Improves reaction times and versatility: With sudden changes of direction and position required, especially based on the boat’s direction and the shift in waves, regular practice improves reaction time and ability to adapt to difference in the water, direction, etc.
- Develops hand-eye coordination and balance: Stability and balance are the foundation for wakeboarding, so core strength is a key component to this sport. Also, many of the tricks require fast hand switches, rotations, and jumps — all of which require hand-eye coordination and balance.
- Improves your swimming skills: Without a doubt, you’ll end up falling into the water more than once, which means you’ll need to be a strong swimmer.
- Improves mental concentration and refreshes the mind: The adrenaline alone is enough to distract a wakeboarder from daily stressors. Add the feel-good endorphins from the physical activity while on the water, and it leads to a happy person!
- It’s a great outdoor workout on the water: A 2008 Scottish Health Survey and found that outdoor physical activity had a 50 percent greater positive effect on mental health than going to the gym. A 2011 study found that outdoor exercise was associated with greater decreases in tension, confusion, anger and depression when compared to indoor activity.
- Be more social: You can wakeboard together with family and friends and have a good time. Wakeboarding offers a healthy opportunity for a family to strengthen its bond. Moreover, it’s a great way of making friends and meeting some new people.
- It’s great fun!: Aside from wakeboarding, you can also use time at the beach to surf and do other activities in the sun, so you get some vitamin D while enjoying the outdoors on the water!
