25 meter pool vs 50 meter pool

Do you do flip turns and push off the wall?  If so, then yes, a 50m pool will be longer than a 25m pool swimming the same distance.  Your pushing off twice as much and if you can get a good glide, you can rest a bit for 3 or 4 worth of strokes.  You really are short changing yourself in distance with a good push off.  When training for OWS, I dont push off the wall at all.  theres no wall in the lake so I dont want to get used to that 'rest' period every 25m

I was surprised at the difference too.  I liked to think I was doing pretty good just "touching" the wall and coming back without pushing off too much, but it seems those few seconds of rest on each end helps!

I had signed up for a tri in a 50m pool and we were seeded by time. I was a nearly a minute slower in the 50m pool vs. the 25m! 

After that, I continued to train at a local 50m pool.  What a difference it made! 

Donna

yeah, shorter pools are faster. A short course 200 is really a contest to see how fast you can do 7 turns, swimming is secondary (the shorter the race, the more that's true; you should watch an elite-level 50, dead heat going into the wall, whoever comes off first wins).

Also, most short course pools in the US are 25 yards, not meters (for whatever reason, many/most triathletes I know don't seem to understand this). Long course pools are usually 50m, that easily explains a 10% or so longer time.

I normally push off the wall.  Not coordinated enough yet to do flip turns...lol   I try not to push to far though since there aren't walls in a lake so its more of a touch the wall, turn around and start swimming with a little push.  So I end up getting a little break there too..

When I started pool training I didn't push off because I wanted to be sure I could do the full distance.  I now push off because I like to feel that glide in the water.  I can tell if I don't have good body position by the glide.  I have learned how to do flip turns but I don't like them.  I tend to get water up my nose when I do them and I don't like the disoriented feeling in the water.  I see the "T" at the end of the marking and know when to change my stroke to position a feet first hit to the wall so I can redirect quickly. 

I see an advantage to pushing and not pushing.  For sprints, I want practice in pushing and gliding.  For OWS, a pool wasn't a great resource but to build endurance little to no push seems to make sense.  Like most say, OWS is a whole other animal due to sighting, no breaks at the end of the pool, swimming straight, etc.

X2

I would guess you are probably swimming in a 25 yard pool and just didn't realize it.  The jump from 25m to 50m also adds a second or two, but the real difference is yards to meters.  Also, there are such things as slow pools and fast pools.  You may swim in a faster pool but raced in a slower pool.

I'm in Canada so am sure the pool in our town is 25 meters and not yards (we're on the metric system up here).  But I'm sure the difference comes with the two or three second rest every 25 meters when I turn around in the pool at home but miss when swimming in a 50 meter one. 

I love 50m pools because it feels like an ows in the 'am I done yet?' Kinda feel. I do think people are hurting themselves by doing an open turn. You have lots of time in an open turn to breathe where as if you do a flipturn you learn to use your lungs better. Sure I push off the wall after my flip but I normally surface at the flags. For me the flags are only 3 strokes away from the wall so I will just extend my workout. I'm 19 strokes per 25yds so you do the math, extend the distance and that will give you a better long course or OWS time.

I certainly agree and I found this out the hard way. switching from a 15 meter neighborhood pool to a standard 25 yard pool. I do open turns and noticed in my swim I was far more out of breathe in the 25 yard pool. I never pushed off much in the 15 meter pool but I surely do in the 25 yard pool, 1 step at a time i guess. I also gained roughly 7-10 seconds per 100 in the longer pool, each time I've regained some of my speed.

I'm a little late to this conversation, but thought I'd add my two cents in case people continue to read. I swam competitively for most of my life, and with 6k+ yd practices every day after school, I often used to try doing open turns, much to the dismay of my coach, in order to "rest." Although it sucks at first, it is definitely worth your while to begin incorporating as many flip turns into your workout as possible - add a few each workout until you can go the whole workout doing flip turns. Not only do they improve your lung endurance as someone mentioned above, but it also adds a great core strengthening element to your swim workout. This will not only help improve your swimming body position in the long run, but will also strengthen your posture on the run and the bike.

And although the walls in a 25yd pool can make the swims seem faster with more push-offs, the additional walls also prevent you from falling into a really nice stroke rhythm that builds momentum over distance. That's why 50m pools and OWS are great; once you get a nice rhythmic glide going, you feel like you're flying through the water.

I'm in Canada too, it is a toss up, whether pools here are 25 m or 25 yards.  I would ask the lifegaurds what the distance is, they will know as they will also be teaching kids that have to do endurance swims.  I used to teach at a 25 m pool, then went to university in waterloo and both the university pool and city pool were 25 yards (actually, city of waterloo was 50 m but divided into two pools.  Now I'm in woodstock and we have a 25 m pool.  It is too little of a difference to be able to tell immediately unless you spend a lot of time around pools of different sizes (like at swim meets), but you will definitely know the difference in your times.

Apparantly I am backwards. I'm faster in a 50 meter pool than in a 25 yard pool.

For me, the "50m pool effect" is between 5 and 10% slower times (missing half the flip turns)

The answer is yes, 50m will always be the slowest.
When you look at USASwimming time standards and qualification tables, 25yds is the fastest, then 25m and finally 50m being the slowest. If you can swim in a 50m pool, use it, as it is the closest to open water swimming. Most 50m pools have it set up during the summer season, and back to short course (25yds or 25m depending the pool for the winter season.)

I just learned something. Thanks for that guys..

as an ex collegiate swimmer i have trained in both 25yd and 50m pools. personaly in races (as a swimmer) i did better in time conversion calculators in the 50 m pools but as a breaststroke i could extend and get a better rhythm over the extra distance.  but training in a 50m pool can get you in shape much quicker.  personally i love swimming in the short 25 yd pool especially after swimming the 50m pool it feels so short.  wall are a big part of swimming in general.  a few years back they inserted a rule requiring that a swimmer must break the surface after a maximum of 15 yards from a wall because there were a few swimmers who could do crazy fast times using just walls and underwater kicks.
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The very first time I learned to really swim (for triathlon purposes) was in a university 50m pool.  That was freaking scary because it was 8-10ft deep plus crystal clear too.  Not to mention I did a very difficult 15mile mountain bike ride an hour before.  I had no clue how hard swimming really was until that day.  Luckily this fat boy can float!