How LCM and SCY Impacts Your Swimmer

Some of you (parents) have children with little or no long course swimming experience.  Others of you have children who have been doing long course meets and training for a couple of years.  In either case, it is important to be aware of the differences between long course meters (LCM) and short course yards (SCY) and how it affects your child's swimming performance.  

Aside from the absolute difference in length of the pools, a major difference between LCM and SCY is the number of turns one has to complete during a given race.  Turns are crucial to a swimmer's overall time because they add speed to a race and allow for a slight recovery of the legs.  When we cut the number of turns down in a race, you decrease the number of opportunities a swimmer has to gain momentum off of the walls.

Another major difference between LCM and SCY is that a swimmer in a short course yards event may be able to overcome technique deficiencies through size, strength, good kicking, and good turns.  However, in long course meters the amount of continuous swimming time is increased dramatically.  Swimmers are taking more strokes per lap and are not receiving the brief recovery from a turn after 25 yards.  As a result, long course swimming truly makes stroke deficiencies much more obvious and the need for sound technique is essential for peak performance.

These factors, including the extra distance, diminished number of turns, technique, and kicking ability are the keys to understanding the differences between LCM race times and SCY race times.  For the reasons just mentioned, times done in similar races in different courses (LCM and SCY) should not be compared.  There are numerous tools online that allow this to be done; however, these conversions are never completely accurate.  Each swimmer has his/her own strengths and weaknesses that a calculator cannot account for.  Therefore, I strongly encourage you and your child to only compare times swum in long course meters to other times/races done in long course meters.

Accordingly, this is why USA Swimming has developed time standards and motivational times for the various courses (LCM, SCY, and SCM) rather than using an equation or calculator to convert times into a uniform course.