Cardiovascular exercises like running and swimming pack in a host of health benefits, from weight loss to decreasing your risk of cardiovascular disease, and boosting your mood, your immune system and your ability to handle stress. Swimming is an excellent, low-impact exercise for burning calories and getting fit. This means muscle uses more energy than fat does. Your question has undertones of "What is a better way to give myself a muscular physique" which is decidedly different than building muscle as you stated. Focusing the majority of your energy on making improvements in the weight room will result in better strength gains.

Is that true? "Water makes up approximately 65 to 90 percent of a person's weight, and variation in water content of the human body can move the scale by ten pounds or more from day to day," says Jeffrey A. Dolgan, a clinical exercise physiologist at Canyon Ranch in Miami Beach, Florida.

However, according to Sportsdoctor.com, muscle has a faster metabolism than fat, nearly 10 to 20 times faster. The question: I've heard that swimming can make you gain weight.

So, as muscle increases, fat decreases. Longer strokes with greater power result in faster swimming times. In the water, swimmers rely on streamlined suits and proper form to shave another few hundredths of a second from their times. The scale doesn't explain this physiologic fact. There are a host of benefits you may gain from swimming laps regularly. Read on to learn about the benefits of swimming and how to incorporate swimming …

Muscle weighs more than fat, so it follows that you will gain weight on the scale. However, weight gain affects your buoyancy, your stamina and your profile as you move through the water, so it can affect your swim speed in unpredictable ways. Its energy expenditure comes from the fat stores it burns.

After all the glycogen is depleted in the gym, swimming will result in a much higher percentage of fat burn.