Go ahead, take a swim after a meal. It won’t kill you.

Every once in a while round here, we engage in the exercise of myth busting. I view swimming as the ultimate form of low impact training. Just as importantly, I have kids, and we live a few blocks or so from the Pacific Ocean. As such, we tend to jump in after eating. As a child, I had the nonsense drummed into my head that drowning was a possibility if I splashed about immediately after grubbing. I never believed it then, nor should I have. From medicine.net:

While it’s true that the digestive process does divert the circulation of the blood toward the gut and to a certain extent, away from the muscles, the fact is that an episode of drowning caused by swimming on a full stomach has never been documented. Neither the American Academy of Pediatrics nor the American Red Cross makes any specific recommendations about waiting any amount of time after eating before taking a swim.

As usual, this post isn’t really about swimming, nor is about exercising after a meal. Rather, it’s about challenging assumptions at every turn. Generally, absurd beliefs are rooted and based on some sort of singular incident, unrelated to the event, but deemed conclusive proof of concept. I picture a man in his 70s eating a sandwich, hopping in the water, having a heart attack and the witnesses developing the takeaway. “Hey, did you see that dude who got taken away in the ambulance? He was eating ham and cheese, then he went for a swim. You won’t see me swimming after eating any time soon.”

I think there is a way to respect information generationally passed down. First we decide if it’s  logical. If it’s not, perhaps we can question it a bit. That’s how we become better students in life. From utexas.edu:

Modeling “assumption hunting” (Brookfield, 1995) for students in one’s own thought and speech can help them learn that one must remain flexible in one’s thought and open to the reconsideration of ideas.  Furthermore, it can be helpful to make clear that we are all human and even scholars don’t always get it right the first time by assumptions they do not realize they are making.

That’s really the key. It makes sense to question ourselves at every turn, just to ensure continual awareness and to not become dogmatic.

Lifestyle, fitness, philosophy, they are all intertwined.

Strong mind,

Kap