- Elephants can swim as many as 20 miles a day — they use their trunks as natural snorkels!
- The bikini swimsuit was named after a U.S. nuclear testing site in the South Pacific called Bikini Atoll.
- 65% of people in the U.S. don’t know how to swim.
- The average person produces 25,000 quarts of saliva in his or her lifetime — that’s enough spit to fill TWO swimming pools!
- In butterfly stroke and breaststroke, swimmers need to touch the pool with both hands simultaneously when they finish. Swimmers touch the pool with only one hand when they finish in freestyle and backstroke swimming events.
- The most popular freestyle stroke is the crawl, considered the fastest stroke.
- An hour of vigorous swimming will burn up to 650 calories. It burns off more calories than walking or biking.
- Swimming strengthens the heart and lungs.
- Swimming works out all of the body’s major muscles.
- Swimming helps reduce stress.
- Water’s buoyancy make swimming the ideal exercise for physical therapy and rehabilitation or for anyone seeking a low-impact exercise.
- Swimming is a great cardiovascular exercise because you are moving against the water’s resistance, which is over ten times that of the air.
- Over 50% of world-class swimmers suffer from shoulder pain.
- More than 50 years later, the home or residential swimming pool is ubiquitous and even the smallest world nations enjoy a thriving swimming pool industry (e.g. New Zealand pop. 4,116,900 [Source NZ Census 7 March 2006] - with 65,000 home swimming pools and 125,000 hot tub pools).
- The slowest Olympic swim stroke is the breaststroke.
- The fastest and most efficient swim stroke is the crawl/ freestyle.
- The turbopump on the Space Shuttle main engine is powerful enough to drain an average-sized swimming pool in 25 seconds.
- 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.
- The Olympics are swum in a 50 meter pool or long course pool. Pools used by the NCAA and high school swimming programs can be 25 yards to 25 meters. These pools are called short course pools.
- 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.
- Competitive swimmers use the term fast pool when they are describing a pool that has a good gutter system on the sides. This system allows the water to flow out easily and doesn't allow waves to bounce back to the middle of the pool. The lane lines can also help control the waves and the deeper the pool is, the fewer waves hit the bottom and bounce back up to the surface. The lack of these waves provides less drag/ resistance for the swimmers, which gives them a faster time.
- Florida is the only state with legislation on who can teach swimming. Life guards and swimming instructors must, by law, be certified.
- As with any other type of exercise you need to stay hydrated while swimming and you need to drink water. Your core body temperature can rise as the activity increases. Your body also produces sweat as it does with other physical activity, but it is not as apparent since you are already wet.
- Studies shown that the shark is fast in the water but not naturally hydrodynamic. The shark's quickness is attributed to V shaped ridges on its skin called dermal tentacles. These ridges decrease dray and turbulence around the shark's body, allowing more efficiency. The result of these studies has brought a brand new fabric to the market for competitive swim wear. Speedo has produced a fabric that emulates shark's skin. This fabric reduces drag and turbulence around the body, which helps a swimmer pass through the water more effectively. The suits made from the “Fast skin” fabric have only been on the market for a little while but are already changing the look of competitive swimming and its results.
So how many of these fact did you know?? Let me know!! :-)
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