Paddleboarding v/s fencing: Which keeps you fitter?
What's the story
Paddleboarding and fencing are two completely different activities that provide unique full-body workout benefits. While paddleboarding requires balancing on a board and propelling through water, fencing is a combat sport that demands agility and precision. Both the activities work on multiple muscle groups, improve cardiovascular health, and enhance mental focus. Here's a look at the specific benefits of each activity to help you understand how they contribute to overall fitness.
Core focus
Core strength in paddleboarding
Paddleboarding also makes for an excellent way to build core strength. Balancing on the board while you paddle, continuously engages your abdominal muscles. This continuous engagement strengthens your core over time, leading to improved posture and stability in your daily activities. Plus, balancing on water challenges your core muscles more than traditional land-based exercises.
Agility enhancement
Agility boost from fencing
Fencing has always been known for improving agility, given its fast-paced nature. The sport involves quick footwork, rapid change in directions, and precise sword or foil movements. All these moves require coordination between different groups of muscles, which improves agility and reflexes as a whole. With regular practice, you would have better balance and quicker response times to various physical activities.
Heart health
Cardiovascular health benefits
Both paddleboarding and fencing serve as great cardio workouts since they raise your heart rate while doing them. Paddleboarding ensures a constant aerobic workout as you paddle on water bodies for hours on end. Whereas, fencing features short, intense bursts of activity, followed by short rest breaks, similar to interval training. Both ways improve your cardiovascular endurance when done regularly.
Mind engagement
Mental focus improvement
Whether it is paddleboarding or fencing, both can improve your mental focus tremendously. Paddleboarding involves focusing on balancing while moving through currents or waves of water. This element of mindfulness can lower stress levels in the long run. Meanwhile, fencing involves a fair amount of strategic thinking, as players predict opponents' moves while making their own attacks at the same time. It hones cognitive skills with physical fitness.