7 Tips for Swimming a Faster 50 Freestyle

Looking to swim the 50 freestyle faster? Here are six proven strategies for uncorking more speed in the splash and dash.

The 50 freestyle is a race of pure power and white water, where every tenth of a second counts.

The race calls for explosive starts, thunderous underwaters, and blinding, maximal effort from start to finish.

And despite the short length and relative simplicity of the race—it’s over in 20-30 seconds and tasks swimmers with swimming just one or two lengths of the pool—it can be tough to master.

The short length is a bit of a mirage when it comes to improvement; because it is so short, it’s actually painstakingly difficult to drop time once you get to a certain level of performance.

Swimmers can improve 50 freestyle by training with resistance, increasing stroke tempo, building a more powerful and explosive start, taking fewer breaths, and developing a stronger kick.

In this guide to swimming a faster 50 freestyle, we’ll discuss some battle-tested ways to improve sprint freestyle performance. Some obvious, some not so obvious.

But combined, they will help you drop those precious tenths or even seconds in the fastest event on the swimming program.

Let’s begin.

How to Swim a Faster 50 Freestyle

Tips to improve 50 freestyle performance include:

• Resisted swimming
• Increase stroke rate
• Build an explosive start
• Use the right technique
• Breathe less
• Kick like a monster
• Improve core strength

Next, we will look at each tip in more detail, offering some training advice for implementation, and more.

Resisted swimming

Resisted swimming, using different types of gear and equipment like drag chutes, DragSox, resistance tubing, and power racks, is a way to improve your ability to generate power in the water.

Power (force x velocity) demonstrates how much force you can quickly create in the water, and to swim a fast 50 freestyle, you need to be able to create a lot of force and make it last for the duration of the race.

Resisted swimming is the perfect tool for this job.

The key is to go full power with this type of training, which means lots of rest (90-120s between repetitions), low repetitions (5-10 reps), and short bursts of effort (6-15s).

Sample maximum power set: 8×10 seconds all out freestyle swimming against maximum resistance tubing on 2:00

Increase stroke rate

Sprinters use a faster stroke rate compared to other distances. For example, at the Paris Olympics, the average stroke rate of the finalists in the men’s 50m freestyle was 62.21. Compare that to the finalists in the 100m freestyle (51.4) and the 200m freestyle (42.3).

It’s almost a 40% difference between the 50 and 200!

A faster stroke rate is an obvious way to increase speed; the more often you complete a stroke cycle, the more distance you are going to cover, the faster you are going to swim.

The challenge is building the power and endurance to maintain that elevated stroke rate for the full 50m, which means hitting your target 50 freestyle tempo much more often in training.

Ways to do this include resisted swimming (e.g. sprints with a drag chute), freestyle with an ankle band, and drills like Tarzan drill and freestyle with butterfly kick.  

Build an explosive start

An explosive start is essential for a fast 50 freestyle. The start doesn’t just include the block phase, but the flight phase, entry, glide, and underwaters, until the moment you explode to the surface of the water and begin surface swimming.

If you surface at 10m, that means 20% of your race is just the start. If you surface at 15m, that’s a whopping 30% of the race.

That’s a huge opportunity to improve!

A more explosive start begins with proper technique and positioning on the block (front load the block, place your feet narrower than shoulder-width) and generating lots of horizontal power for maximum velocity and distance off the block.

To build the kind of explosive power for a booming start, the best strength training exercise you can do is broad jumps. One study with competitive swimmers found that a 9-week horizontal jump training program increased horizontal dive velocity by 16%.

The start sets the stage for everything that comes next, so give it the attention it deserves!

Use the right freestyle technique

Freestyle technique may look the same across the board, whether you are sprinting or banging out a distance workout in the Animal Lane. But the technique sprinters use compared sub-maximal freestyle swimming differs in some significant ways.

In particular, the stroke timing coordination is much different.

• When sprinting, there is much more symmetry, with the arms in a constant state of propulsion, with the arms even overlapping propulsive phases. This type of technique is really fast and powerful but also very taxing.
• When cruising, swimmers switch to a gallop or hitch freestyle that has gaps in propulsion between the strokes. This type of stroke is more uneven in terms of propulsion, but wildly more efficient and can be done for longer sets and workouts.

To use a stroke timing coordination that is more relevant to sprint freestyle technique, once again lean on adding resistance tools like a drag chute.

The added resistance behind you promotes a more balanced superimposed stroke cycle that mirrors the technique and stroke timing used when sprinting.

Breathe less

Elite sprint freestylers take as few breaths as possible when swimming the 50m freestyle.

By keeping the head stationary and breathing less, swimmers maintain a more streamlined body position, keep stroke rhythm bee-boppin’, and prevents the avalanche of technique errors that happens when swimmers have to surface the head over a huge bow wave to suck down a breath.

More importantly, fewer breaths mean increased swim velocity. For example, McCable et al., 2015, had experienced competitive swimmers do a series of sprint 25s without breathing and breathing to their preferred side. Speed decreased by 3% in the trials when they took a breath (over a 30s race, this loosely translates to 0.9s).

Breath training is something swimmers already do whether they realize it or not (timing breaths into turns, breathing patterns, holding the breath for breakouts, etcetera).

Take it to another level by building stronger pulmonary muscles with breathing exercises like longer breakouts, breathing patterns, and resisted respiratory training.

Kick like a monster

A fast 50 freestyle requires a white-water freestyle kick. Although the pull gets a lot of the attention, the kick is fundamental for fast sprinting, as it generates a significant amount of propulsion (representing ~30% of total tethered force with experienced competitive sprinters).

The kick keeps the hips stable, providing a base for the trunk to twist powerfully and the upper body to exert even more power. An unconditioned kick can also cause you technique issues like increased hip roll when the legs turn to jelly towards the end of your sprint events.

Building a stronger freestyle kick is fairly straightforward: do more kick!

Add resistance (DragSox are an excellent tool for this), tack on 25s of kick after sprints in training to promote a stronger, more conditioned kick, and increase ankle flexibility so that you can kick in a tight window and decrease drag from the legs.

Improve core strength

A strong and stable core is crucial for every aspect of a fast 50 freestyle, from maintaining balance on the block to positioning the arms and body while diving into the water to positioning the pelvis properly so that you can drop some massive dolphin kicks into the breakout.

Core strength minimizes drag by helping you maintain a more efficient body position and perhaps most importantly, provides a strong and stable foundation to exert power through limbs, generating a stronger kick and pull from start to finish.

Core training interventions with swimmers have frequently found significant improvement in sprint swimming speed (Karpinski et al., 2020; Khiyami et al., 2022) with relatively little time investment required (~1-2hrs per week).

The good news is that core strength and stability won’t just help you swim like a demon when it comes to the 50 but will also reduce injury risk and improve general movement patterns.

Win-win!

Wrapping Things Up

The 50 freestyle is one of the most exciting events on the program, and for good reason!

It’s the purest expression of speed and power in the pool. Mastering the event looks easy for the novice or uninitiated to the demands and challenges of sprint training, but it offers a long list of ways to improve.

Choose one or two of the tips above and incorporate them into your sprint preparation this week and propel yourself to a faster 50 freestyle on race day!