10 Fun Facts You Probably Didn’t Know about Swimming Pools

Everybody enjoys a day of fun and the sun around the backyard swimming pool.

Here are ten fun and interesting facts most people don’t know about swimming and swimming pools for you to mention during your next backyard pool party:

• Niagara Falls — which straddles the border between Canada and the US near Buffalo, New York — has enough water going over to fill up all the US in less than three days.
• Swimming is actually one of the best forms of exercise because it burns an estimated 650 calories per hour — more than walking or biking. It also strengthens the heart and lungs.
• The resistance of water is ten times that of air. That creates a buoyancy that makes swimming ideal for physical therapy, rehabilitation or anyone seeking a low-impact form of exercise.
• Olympic class swimmers train an estimated four to five hours daily, every day of the week. Typically, competitive swimmers will swim between 6 and 12 miles per day, as well as do stretching and weight training.
• Top-tier swimmers prefer pools with high-quality gutter systems on their sides. These gutters allow water to flow out of the pool easily so that there aren’t as many waves that bounce back into the middle of the pool, which can slow swimmers down. This is known as a “fast pool”.
• An Olympic size swimming pool — which measures 25 meters wide by 50 meters long — holds between 700,000 and 850,000 gallons of water.
• Florida is the only state in the US that requires swimming instructors and lifeguards to be licensed and certified.
• As with any type of exercise, staying hydrated while swimming is important. While you swim, your body temperature increases, producing just as much perspiration as you would if you were running or cycling. But because you are already in the water, you don’t notice it.
• Early cave paintings and drawings found in Egypt indicate that the first known swimming pool dates back to about 2500 BC.
• The oldest concrete swimming pool in the US is the Deep Eddy Pool, which was built in 1915 in Austin, Texas.