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What Are the Health Benefits of Recreational Ice Skating?

Recreational Ice Skating

While some sports and recreational activities are strictly summer or winter activities, the beautiful thing about ice skating is that it’s available all year round. There are, of course, outdoor ice skating rinks like the famous Wollman Rink in New Yorkโ€™s Central Park thatโ€™s been featured in many movies, but there are also plenty of indoor ice skating rinks scattered around the country.

Whether youโ€™re wanting to improve your fitness, drop a few pounds, or just โ€œsee if youโ€™ve still got it,โ€ ice skating is a great way to get some health benefits while enjoying skating around the rink with friends, or loved ones. If youโ€™ve mastered skating around the rink and want to step it up a notch, you can get CCM hockey gear here and try out playing ice hockey.

Letโ€™s look more closely at how ice skating is good for your health.

Balance

Recreational Ice Skating

One of the first challenges for new ice skaters is to learn how to balance on the ice. Wearing a pair of Riedell Ice Skates or the inferior ones that the ice rink may loan to you, trying to balance on a sharp pair of blades is difficult at first. With practice, itโ€™s possible to improve your ability to stand with your weight on the center of each foot to balance better. Women probably have an easier time learning this because of their fancy footwork while wearing high heels, so the men have some catching up to do.

Stronger Legs

With uncertain balance, youโ€™ll find that you rely more on your lower body to hold you up. This puts more pressure on your calf muscles and thigh muscles. Skating for even 30 minutes gives your legs an excellent workout without needing to sit in a gym pushingweights up with your legs. With practice, your legs will get stronger and respond faster to body movements, which is why ice skating is fun.

Better Joints

The joints in your legs, your knees, and ankles, improve with the faster movements required to keep your balance when ice skating. If you find that your knees crack when standing up, you could enjoy some relief from this because the joints are being used more than they were before.

Endurance

Recreational Ice Skating

You might not think about ice skating as an endurance sport, but skating around a rink for half an hour is as good as running and is far less impactful on the knees too. Anyone who is worried about future knee replacement surgery (a more common occurrence happening to regular runners these days) will find the glide and slide approach to skating far less jolting to their joints.

Losing Weight

Ice skating burns through between 250 to 650 calories every hour. Walking is around 200-250 calories per hour while running is closer to 500-600 calories (calories burned depends on your current weight and the speed you move). If you want to find new and interesting ways to work-out that donโ€™t require you to get to the gym, then going ice skating is an excellent option to mix things up. Itโ€™s no less efficient at burning the fat and opens up a whole new world.There are even ice skating apps to explore!

Ice skating is its own little community. Plenty of people make it a regular evening or day out to get on the ice and see a different side of life. Itโ€™s also possible to meet new people when there, which is fun too.

Article Submitted By Community Writer

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