Coach Rob wrote an article on this for our newsletter recently:

"The first thing athletes and parents should do, is have two different sets of personal best times (25m and 50m). I swam competitively for nearly 20 years, and always had two different books with my best times for all my events (25m and 50m times). It is safe to say that the faster a swimmer gets, the more recognisable the difference between short and long course becomes. For example, the fastest man can swim 25 seconds for 50m Breaststroke in a 25m pool, yet he can only swim 27 seconds for the same event in a 50m pool. Grant Hackett held the world record for 1500m Freestyle in times of 14.09 (25m) compared to 14.34 in a 50m pool.

The reasons for such a huge difference in times are due to several factors. Swimmers can swim faster underwater than above and there is more opportunity to swim underwater in a 25m pool. In addition, the extra turns in a 25m pool gives the swimmer more chances to produce higher speeds coming into and off the walls. Swimmers will also swim less amount of strokes in 25m pool events, which again allows the swimmer to maintain top speed and not fatigue as compared to swimming more strokes continually in a 50m pool race.

Psychologically, swimmers tend to be more aggressive when standing on the blocks looking down the lane of a 25m pool compared to a 50m pool. This one factor alone gives them an advantage to their own performance. Mentally strong swimmers will stand on a block of a 50m pool and generate the same sort of adrenalin that he/she may generate whilst standing on the block of a 25m pool. Swimmers tend to think that swimming short course is easier than swimming in a 50m pool. This is a direct correlation to the above reasons, and feeling that there is extra swimming in a 50m pool, or a feeling of not swimming as fast. The fact is, that in today’s swimming world, you swim faster times in a 25m pool compared to a 50m pool.

In an ideal world, it would be nice to train in both a 25m and 50m pool (which occurs at the Australian Institute of Sport). I personally think that training in a 25m pool gives an athlete and coach many more opportunities to improve on a variety of different aspects. I trained in a 25m pool from the age of 10 to 20 years old and the only reason I went to a long course pool was because my coach changed clubs. During this ten year period, I started my international career competing in Commonwealth Games and World Championships (one day I might write a thesis on why I would prefer to do the majority of my training/ coaching in a 25m pool)."