Comparing swimming to jogging as a calorie burning exercise

I was pretty alarmed at how much the swimming was burning from a calories point of view and started to dig into the numbers a bit. I don't think my fitness watch is biased towards any particular sport because why would it be, but when I finish what I consider to be a rather relaxed 30 minutes session in the pool, I am kind of surprised at how many calories it was claiming I had burned.

Since we are coming up on the summer months here where it becomes oppressively hot and humid, this could be exactly what I need in my life.

I don't really know what to make of those statistics outside of the basic ones but the thing that gets me is the 561 calories in 30 minutes. This is higher than I burn in anything else that I do and I am wondering how can this be? I am far more fatigued after a session of cycling and certainly jogging than I am after 30 minutes of going back and forth in the pool. So the only thing I can come up with is that it must be burning so much more efficiently because swimming is a full body exercise?

I don't really know but since the watch company stands to gain nothing by fudging these numbers we'll just presume that they are somewhat accurate guesses based on my height, weight, and age.

Now here is a 45 minute session of jogging at a reasonable and sustainable pace. This is not a tough run for me and, well other than the heat, and I can maintain this pace for a very long time. I only stopped at 45 minutes because I am a bit worried about this problem I've been having with my right knee and I don't want to aggravate it and make problems for myself that could last a while.

Let's do a bit of math here and look at the calories burned per minute

Jogging is burning 13.93 calories per minute

Swimming is burning 17.89 per minute

To me this is just crazy. I spent my whole life not knowing that swimming burns this much. For me, especially in summer, I would much rather be swimming than jogging and another good aspect of the pool is that you book a lane, and there are only a certain number of people that are allowed in the pool at once. When I am jogging there are days that it feels like the entire damn city has decided to use the same footpath as me and it can be really annoying.

I will say one thing though: From a cardiovascular point of view I think that the jogging is actually better for me because I don't really feel like my heart rate is very elevated when I am swimming. I don't know why the watch doesn't calculate my heart rate while I am swimming. Perhaps it isn't capable of doing it underwater. I have no idea on that one.

Anyway, this has been a great discovery for me because although I had to pay nearly $100 for the monthly membership this is a sort of exercise that I don't mind doing at all and to me, that has been the normie fitness way from the start. If you don't hate the exercise, you are a lot more likely to do it. The only beef I have with swimming is that 30 minutes is about all I can endure because it isn't very exciting staring at the bottom of a pool for half an hour.