Water Aerobics

I'm taking water aerobics and love it. My question is, is it considered weight resistant exercise?  Osteoporosis runs in my family so its recommended to do weight resistant exercises.

I LOVE water aerobics! I don't know the answer to your question but do know that there are many 70ish women in my classes. What about adding a few minutes of small hand weights to your daily routine? 

I hate to sweat. Hate it. I love water aerobics because I never feel sweaty even though I know I am. It's also a lot of fun, especially with a good instructor. My pool has a 4 week break before the next session. We do "pick-up water aerobics" during the break - always amusing since nobody can remember any kind of routine.

Good luck with it!

I'm with you on the hating to sweat. Plus I just love the water. I do have hand/leg weights that I use at home. I was just curious about the water aerobics.

Beats me. You live in my area. What pool do you attend?

 

I go to the local community college.

Ask your instructor about doing weights in the pool during the class. There should be water weights to use, or you can buy some. They just add some resistance to the moves.

No, you need to get out of the pool to prevent osteoporosis. I too use the pool often for my workouts, right after I do either a 30 minute walk or a 30 minute weights session.

It depends mostly on your strength and fitness level, really - a particular exercise using a particular resistance can be anything from too heavy to do, to maximal strength training, to strength endurance, to pure cardio - for the same individual.

 Any particular exercise you can repeat more than 12 times without rest has more of a strength endurance and less maximal strength training profile; the cutoff point is somewhere around 20 reps where you lose the maximal strenght component entirely.

  At some point you lose the strength endurance component as well and it turns into pure endurance, but where that cutoff point is I have no idea actually - and there's intensity/sports-specific conditioning to confuse the picture as well in the higher rep ranges; plus some weirdness involving lactate and human growth hormone that happens when you do strength endurance training in the 50-75 rep range that can make you stronger in all rep ranges due to growth hormone action.

 The simpler rule of thumb that's mostly valid and is useful as a starting point before you learn the specifics of how your body responds is 6 to 8 reps or 8 to 12 reps or 10 to 15 reps does it matter - keep in mind that this is only a starting point though. You do not have a 'generic body', your individual proportions of slow-twitch type I, fast-twitch IIx and IIb muscle fibre can move the rep ranges 1-3 reps in either direction which means that you need to experiment a bit and find out what works for you specifically. Now, most people do fall within those rep ranges, but you can't know if that's true for you without either a muscle biopsy or just trying it and see what happens. I prefer the 'try and see' method, it involves less poking with needles and more lifting stuff ;)

Okay, so I'm going to look at it as more cardio for me (although we do use the 'weights' in the pool). I just keep doing my arm/leg weight stuff at home (increasing the reps/weight as needed).

Thank you.

You can definitely make a water aerobics workout that is weight resistance... when I took it we wore webbed gloves and practiced some moves that used the resistance of the water against the webbed gloves to work our muscles.  I'm not sure about most water aerobics routines, but my suggestion is to find one where the instructor is focused on weight resistance, because it is definitely possible.