Luxury Housing Trends & Home Improvement Ideas

When was the last time you went swimming? Speaking as someone who was on a swim team all through school, lap swimming can be a great workout. Unlike running and many other forms of exercise, there’s no impact, so it’s often recommended for people with joint issues or who are recovering from injuries. Of course, healthy people can get a lot out of swimming too. It’s a nice alternative to land-based workouts. If you know all the strokes and can switch things around, lap swimming offers a little more variety than simply running in place on an elliptical trainer or other cardio machine.

But what does all this fitness talk have to do with home improvement?

I’m glad you asked. Thanks to today’s technology, it’s possible to install something called a swim spa or Endless Pool swimming machine in your home. (Think of it as treadmill for swimmers; an adjustable current pushes against you, allowing you to swim in place for exercise)

Sure, you’ve always been able to install a backyard swimming pool, but unless you’ve got a very large yard, it’s hard to build a genuine 25-yard lap pool (and any experienced swimmer will tell you it’s a pain using something shorter, where half your workout is spent doing flip-turns). And having a pool in the backyard can have a major downside: winter. Unless you live in a climate that is warm year around, you probably don’t want to trot through the snow to swim laps outside in December.

So, back to this swimming machine. An Endless Pool can be installed indoors or outdoors, so you can swim all year around. The units look a bit like extra long hot tubs (and you can actually crank up the temperature and use the pool as a hot tub). You can get a model as small as 8 feet by 15 feet, so you don’t need a huge yard to install one (and if you want to install it indoors, you might have an existing room that would work, without building an addition onto the house).

You can swim laps, walk against the current (think water aerobics), do therapeutic exercises, or just sit and soak. If you already swim regularly, it could definitely be a time saver–no more trips to the local pool (and no more having to share a lane with others, hah).

Endless Pools

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