Swim in a small pool. What we can do when the dimensions are reduced.

 Sports pools usually have Olympic size (50 meters long) or half Olympic size, also called short pool or winter pool (25 meters long) and sometimes you can even find pools in gyms or sports facilities of 20 or 33.3 meters, although the latter was more common a few decades ago ( link ). However, we are not always going to find pools that meet the standard of each certain number of lengths adding 100 exact meters, which is very useful when we want to train and count the volume of our session or the swimming rhythms.. Sometimes we have to train in pools of less than 20 meters or even less than 10 meters when we are traveling in hotels or simply because the gym closes in summer. In today's article we are going to see what you can do in these cases so as not to lose your training rhythm with lifeguard course

Apnea work and lung capacity in a small pool:

• If we have a small pool, we can take advantage of it to work on an important aspect of swimming and aerobic sports, such as lung capacity. 

• In this case we have two options, front crawl exercises without breathing or breathing every certain number of strokes, for example every 6 or 8 or diving exercises. 

• The good thing about the short pool in these cases is that in a few strokes we will be on the opposite wall and we will be able to do several lengths or pools with a single breath, which is quite motivating

Foot job in small pool:

Who doesn't find footwork hard and heavy with or without a board? Sometimes it is more a psychological issue than a physical one because with our feet we go too slow and the distance of the normal pool seems too long for us. 

In the short pool, the opposite happens, so we can take advantage of that mental factor to be able to put more emphasis and work both the front crawl feet and those of other styles , which will increase our swimming efficiency when we do the complete style. 

Improved turns in small pool:

If there is something that I am proud of in terms of my swimming technique (achieved 80% self-taught) it is in the way of making turns. I can assure you that I have done series with people much faster than me in open water but that in the pool they have not been able to leave me behind and this has been partly thanks to this point, which, by the way, improved enormously when I practiced it until satiety in a pool of only 6 meters. 

The exercise was simple, series of 1 minute at a medium-high rhythm making short turns with about two strokes between them, that is, turning on one side, 2 strokes, turning on the other. At first it can make you dizzy but once you get the hang of it and move on to a normal pool believe me the turns will never be your problem again with lifeguard course

I swim with a swimming harness in a small pool:

It is the last option and perhaps the least recommended unless the pool is very small, only 2 to 4 meters long. I have personally tried it and I have to say that it is not very pleasant to do long sessions with it because the feeling of not advancing together with the change in swimming technique makes it certainly uncomfortable. 

In the event that you have no alternative, I recommend using it with series of 1 to 5 minutes without exceeding 20 to 30 minutes of total work

Also read about:  Swimming pool at home, everything you need to know