Fast sprinting means your nervous system is ready to go. Here’s a simple protocol to light it up for faster freestyle sprinting.
Sprint swimming is a game of inches, stroke rates, and megawatt power.
We spend months (years, ahem) working on our start, developing booming underwaters, and stockpiling the force required to sprint fast up and down the pool.
While sprinting faster is usually tended to by trying to smash more effort, there’s a world where literally smashing stuff can improve performance, too.
And you don’t have to wait months to see the results in the pool.
Warming Up for Sprint Speed
A majority of the work you do on race day to physically prepare happens during your meet warm-up. The right set or series of sets gets you mentally and physically ready for peak performance.
But then there is the waiting. Your butt gets sore from sitting on the metal bleachers. Muscles get a little chilly. You get lost in that banger playlist rattling your eardrums.
Until finally, you dust off your sweats, slap your chest red, and get up on the block.
But what you do during that downtime has an important role to play in how fast you sprint in the pool.
For example.
A recent study (Hill et al., 2024) had a group of competitive swimmers try out a specific activation protocol designed to improve sprint freestyle speed.
Swimmers did their usual in-water warm-up, relaxed/rested for ten minutes, and then did a quick series of 3×5 med ball slams–every swimmer’s favorite core exercise.
Researchers then had them race a 50 free off the blocks after waiting 1, 4, or 8 minutes.
The goal was pretty simple—see which window produced the fastest swimming.
Four Minutes Was the Sweet Spot
If you guessed that four minutes was the winning time window—of course you did, you read the header—than you get a digital high five.
See also: Dryland Training for Sprint Freestyle — What to Do and How to Program It
Swimmers went fastest when there was a four minute gap between the med ball slams and the 50 free. They improved their 50 time by 1.6%, which was just under half-a-second.
This was the case among almost all the swimmers—nearly 80% had their fastest swim after the four-minute breakaroo.
Why This Timing Matters
Perhaps not too surprisingly, the one-minute window performed worst. Just 8% improved on their baseline time, and the rest swam slower.
The fatigue from the post-activation potentiation protocol hadn’t had a chance to dissolve yet.
At the other end, and perhaps this one is more surprising, the 8-minute window saw swimmers perform at baseline. While the fatigue was gone, so was the temporary boost in neuromuscular readiness. It had faded quietly into the deep end.
Four minutes worked best here—short enough that swimmers were still potentiated, long enough that they’d recovered enough from the slams to really get after it.
Here’s the full protocol for swimmers who want to give it a rip:
- Do your usual in-water warm-up
- Rest/relax for around 10 minutes.
- Grab a medicine ball and do 3×5 slams with max effort, resting 2 minutes between sets.
- Go into standby mode for ~4 minutes.
- Race.
Needless to say, please don’t do this for the first time at the Big Meet.
Test it out at practice (e.g. before a time trial or Get Out Swim, perhaps), on Suit-Up Saturdays, at a lower-priority in-season meet, or in heats.
Try it out, see how your body responds, and then deploy it when it matters most.
Wrapping Things Up
Race-day readiness doesn’t stop once the warm-up is over. That long, sometimes endless wait between warm-up and stepping up onto the block are part of your performance, too.
Use those final minutes with purpose. Wake up the muscles and nervous system that are going to carry the day.
And let’s be honest, the warm-up pool at swim meets are typically a bubbling gong show. Lanes are crowded, iron-handed butterflyers swimming up and down the middle of the lane, people flip turning on each other. And once the meet gets rolling, getting back into the pool isn’t always an option. Mayhem.
That’s one of the reasons activation protocols like this are so appealing. They can be done poolside, take only a few minutes, and don’t require fighting for space in the pool.
So add some activation into the mix, make high-grade sprinting more consistent, and swim fast!
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