In many areas of the country, pool season is winding down to a close. Kids are heading back to school, bikinis are being packed away, and folks are returning home from vacations. Let’s send off summer with some fun and exciting facts about pools to lighten up the mood and provide some great talking points for those that are still lingering poolside.
- The Titanic was the first ship to have a heated swimming pool.
- Swimming became an amateur sport in the late part of the nineteenth century.
- Ancient drawings and paintings found in Egypt depicting people swimming date back to 2500 AD.
- Elephants can swim as many as 20 miles a day — they use their trunks as natural snorkels!
- Swimming exercises all of the body’s major muscles
- President Franklin D. Roosevelt had the first indoor swimming pool put in the West Wing at the White House.
- 65% of people in the U.S. don’t know how to swim.
- An hour of vigorous swimming will burn up to 650 calories. It burns off more calories than walking or biking.
- President Gerald Ford had an in ground pool installed near the tennis courts on the White House grounds in 1975.
- Swimming became a part of the Olympic Games in 1896.
- Most swimmers at the highest levels of competition train from four to five hours per day and five to seven days per week. They will typically swim about six to twelve miles per day along with weight training and flexibility training.
- Water’s buoyancy make swimming the ideal exercise for physical therapy and rehabilitation or for anyone seeking a low-impact exercise.
- The slowest Olympic swim stroke is the breaststroke.
- The two-piece bathing suit known as a bikini got its name from Bikini Atoll, a US nuclear test site in the South Pacific.
- Swimming strengthens the heart and lungs
- The first man to cross the English Channel swimming from England to France is Englishman Captain Matthew Webb in 1875.
- An Olympic size pool depending on its size (50 meters X 25 yards or meters) can hold from 700,000 to 850,000 gallons of water.
- Swimming helps reduce stress
- The average person produces 25,000 quarts of saliva in his or her lifetime — that’s enough spit to fill TWO swimming pools!
- Swim fins were invented by Benjamin Franklin.
- Michael Phelps has won a total of 14 gold medals and 2 bronze medals in a pool.
How many of these did you know? How many were news to you? Share with us any pool facts we missed!
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