Struggling with pre-race nerves? Here is what swimmers need to know about using pre-race nerves for faster swimming when it counts.
The big meet is an exhilarating time. You’ve worked hard all season long, braved the early morning swim workouts, two-a-days, the training camps, and shown up to the pool ready to swim fast and crush some best times.
But then that familiar feeling of pre-race nerves and anxiety begins to creep up the back of your neck as you lay in bed, in your hotel room, bedsheets sliding across freshly shaved legs.
That nerve-wracking feeling, which can result in an overpowering adrenaline rush as you step up behind the blocks, the overwhelming pressure of the moment, or the performance-crashing fear of making a mistake, happens to many swimmers.
Some use pre-race nerves to perform at a higher level, others allow pre-race nerves to crater performance and “choke” when it matters most.
In this guide to how to deal with pre-race nerves and jitters on race day, you’ll learn why pre-race nerves happen, why fighting them leads to counterproductive results, and how to use this natural response for faster swimming under pressure.
Let’s dive in.
In This Article
What Are Pre-Race Nerves?
Pre-race nerves are your body’s response to a high-stakes situation—a big race, the Big Meet, even a soul-crushing main set at practice—and they show up whether you want them to or not.
In the hours leading up to swimming, your brain registers the event as something that matters (sure does!) and responds by triggering the flight-or-flight response. This floods your system with adrenaline and cortisol, priming you for battle.
The physical symptoms are hard to miss:
- Heart rate hammering
- Butterflies doing barrel rolls in your tummy
- Dry mouth
- Clammy hands
- Relentless urge to find a bathroom every five minutes.
Mentally, your focus tightens—but so does self-doubt. Suddenly, you’re thinking about that one bad practice you had three weeks ago. The swimmer in the next lane. The expectations of others. How things might go wrong.
But here’s where the well-meaning swimmer trips up: they treat this as a sign that something is wrong. That they aren’t mentally tough. That they aren’t ready.
Pre-race nerves, when framed properly, maximize the increased blood flow to your muscles, the primed cardiovascular system, the increased focus and response—to boost every part of your swim.
The goal isn’t to get rid of pre-race nerves, but to learn to use them.
“Only dead people don’t get nervous.” — Alex Popov, 9-time Olympic medalist
Why Fighting Pre-Race Nerves Doesn’t Work
The most common advice swimmers get before a big race is some version of “just relax.”
You know, “just chill.”
While perhaps well-intentioned, it’s about as useful as telling someone who can’t sleep to just stop being awake, or water to stop being wet.
The harder you try to suppress anxiety, the more your brain prioritizes it.
The mental side of swimming goes deeper than managing nerves on race day. If you want to build the kind of mindset that holds up when the pressure is highest, check out our complete guide to mental training for swimmers.
There are things you can do to soothe the physical symptoms—relaxation and breathing exercises to slow heart rate, for example—but because anxiety is an automatic reaction, attempts at putting out the fires are usually met with frustration.
A study (Hofmann et al., 2009) tested this with collegiate students. Participants who were instructed to suppress their anxiety before a stressful task ended up with measurably higher heart rates than those who didn’t fight it at all.
When suppression fails, swimmers start to spiral:
- Rushing through warm-up just to get it over with
- Fixating on what the competition is doing
- Abandoning their pre-race routine because nothing feels right
- Spinning off into worst-case-scenario thinking
The sweaty palms, the racing heart, the tunnel vision—these are the same physical responses, interpreted two different ways.
Your nervous system doesn’t know the difference between anxiety and excitement.
Elite Swimmers Interpret Nerves Differently
Olympic champions and the swimmers slicing up the pool from lane four may look calm, but under the surface, they are experiencing the same nerves as the rest of us.
A study by Jones, Hanton & Swain (1994) measured anxiety levels in elite and non-elite competitive swimmers in the minutes before an important race.
Both groups reported the same physical and mental symptoms—the hammering heart, the knotted stomach, the creeping self-doubt. Anxiety was identical across the board.
The only difference was what they did with it.
Elite swimmers consistently interpreted their anxiety as helpful. They saw it as a sign that their body was primed and ready to perform. Non-elite swimmers interpreted the same symptoms as a threat, something to overcome before they could race well.
Same nerves. Different relationship.
Which means swimmers need to learn to use them for more explosive swimming on race day instead of wasting energy and frustrating themselves by fighting them.
How to Use Pre-Race Nerves to Swim Faster
Here are some proven ways to take those pre-race nerves and use them as fuel to smash personal best times and swim fast under the bright lights:
Reframe stress as excitement
One of the most effective—and simplest—ways to manage pre-race nerves and make them work for you is to reframe them as excitement instead of anxiety.
Most swimmers will feel the concentrated symptoms of pre-race nerves, including increased heart rate, stomach knots, constant urge to pee, jumpiness and adrenaline, as something to be quieted or suppressed.
These physical symptoms are actually performance boosters.
The increased heart rate is preparing you for battle. The increased blood flow to target muscles gets you ready to unleash more power and energy. And the increased sensitivity to stimulus helps you react.
By framing these symptoms as excitement and not as something to be conquered or squashed allows you to use your body’s natural response to high-pressure moments to excel.
This is as simple as reframing what you are experiencing:
| Instead of… | Try… |
| “I’m so nervous for this race!” | “I’m excited to see what I can do!” |
| “I feel like I am going to throw up.” | “My body is charging up to swim fast!” |
| “I hate feeling this way.” | “This feeling means I care. That’s a good thing.” |
| “Racing is scary and makes me uncomfortable.” | “Competing is fun and the reward for my hard work!” |
This subtle word play may seem trivial, but it works.
Researchers from Harvard (Brooks, 2013) found that students performed better during stressful situations like math exams, public speaking, and karaoke singing when they took a moment to frame stress and nerves as excitement.
“Nerves made me run to the toilet every five minutes. Nerves made my heart bang against my chest. Nerves made me shake from head to toe. But I learned, from feeling them over and over before countless competitions, that nerves are not a sign of anything until you give them meaning.” – Summer Sanders, 2x Olympic gold medalist
Racing is a challenge, not a threat
How you frame the upcoming swim is also vital. When swimmers view upcoming races and hard sets as a challenge, those nerves turn into fuel and performance shoots up.
Athletes typically view high-pressure competition in three different ways:
- Challenge mindset (best) – You see the race as an opportunity. The nerves feel like energy, confidence rises, and you attack the race.
- Threat mindset – The nerves feel overwhelming. You focus on pressure, expectations, and what others are doing, which can lead to tentative swimming.
- Overly calm – Not enough butterflies. Without that edge of excitement, focus and intensity can drop.
Research with elite athletes (Dixon et al., 2020) shows the challenge mindset produces the best performances, while athletes who were overly calm actually performed the worst.
They missed out on the benefits of the added energy and oomph of pre-competition nerves.
Journal it out
Most swimmers try to manage pre-race nerves by pushing them away. A better approach is to get clear about what you’re feeling.
A study by Strack et al. (2017) showed that clarity of feelings—accurately identifying your emotions before competition, helps determine whether athletes thrive or struggle under pressure.
Athletes who could clearly identify their emotions were better at turning anxiety into motivation and improved performance.
Instead of trying to talk yourself out of being nervous, take a moment before your race to check in:
- What exactly are you feeling?
- Fear of blowing the race?
- Pressure to perform?
- Excitement to see what you can do?
A short pre-race journal entry—even just two or three sentences—can help you name those emotions and use them to your advantage.
Use a pre-race routine
Athletes, and swimmers are no different, love their routines, habits, rituals, and superstitions.
A lucky set of swim goggles, a favorite cap, or even a favorite pool to race at (we’ve all got at least a couple pools where we always seem to swim fast!).
It’s no different with pre-race routines.
A pre-race routine is a series of steps or actions before competing that provide a predictable way to ground you and keep pre-race nerves from spiraling in those tense moments as you step on the blocks.
Your pre-race routine should include some obvious stuff, like cramming into your racing suit and meet warm-up, but it can also involve going through a mental rehearsal of your race, going down to the blocks at a set time before your race, timing a snack and drink, and even listening to a specific playlist.
Pre-race routines are essentially a series of “little wins” that you control and provide comfort and confidence that ease anxiety and help you swim fast.
As you successfully complete each part of it, a wind of confidence builds at your back.
An elite pre-race routine is simple, fully controllable, and adaptable to any pool or race, allowing you to perform under pressure anytime, anywhere.
Train for pressure
One of the reasons that pre-race nerves flatten swimmers is that they are unaccustomed to the physical symptoms of stress and excitement.
Although we swim countless meters or yards over the course of a season, very rarely do we feel the same churning stomach, racing thoughts, sweaty palms, dry mouth, and shallow breathing of competition.
As a result, when it happens, it feels particularly foreign and scary, knocking us off our mental game.
For a complete look at how to deal with pressure, read our detailed guide on how swimmers can perform under pressure.
Habituating yourself to the fight-or-flight response helps to normalize these symptoms, freeing yourself from obsessing/panicking on overcoming them.
To get used to pre-race nerves, crank up the pressure in training by doing things like:
- Racing your teammates frequently to remove some of the fear of failure when competing. Doing this will hone your competitive instincts, too.
- Do regular time trials and test sets to ratchet up the pressure. Exposing yourself to more high-pressure situations helps you acclimatize.
- Lots of race pace swimming. Incorporating more race pace swimming into your training not only conditions you to swim at race pace (helpful!) but also removes some of the mystery and wonder around swimming fast on race day, reducing pressure.
Generally, if there are things that you tend to avoid in training because you are fearful of failing, attack them!
Practice isn’t a place to get good at training; it’s a place to prepare you for competition, and developing a habit of training for pressure will help you channel pre-race nerves at your next swim meet.
“In the months leading up to a race, practice feeling pressure. In order to be good at anything, people need reps. I want to be great at dealing with pressure, so I find time to rehearse those feelings.” – Ryan Murphy, Olympic gold medalist, NCAA champion
Mental imagery
Mental imagery, also known as mental rehearsals or visualization, is a mental tool that helps swimmers prepare for competition by visualizing desired performances.
In the months, weeks, days, and hours leading up to competition, picture yourself swimming the ideal race.
Focus on the sensations (water temperature, humidity in the air, texture of the starting block under your feet), emotions (the nervousness, excitement), and let the race unfold in your imagination.
“It’s weird because I didn’t really get that nervous during the Olympics. I’d swum that race a thousand times in my head.” – Adam Peaty, Olympic champion, 100m breaststroke world record holder
One of the biggest benefits of visualization is helping swimmers navigate pre-race nerves by rehearsing those tense moments before a race.
With practice, you will be able to close your eyes, and within moments experience many of the same physical symptoms as the real thing.
The sweaty palms. Butterflies in the stomach. Relentless urge to pee. Muscle tension. Increased respiration.
Mental imagery gives you the opportunity to stack reps of experiencing pre-race nerves, so that when the real thing does happen, it will simply be another day at the office.
Performance cues for race strategy
Performance cues, short, to-the-point action words, are a powerful way to help swimmers stay focused on executing an awesome performance and less time obsessing over pre-race nerves and what they might mean.
They are short reminders, things like “easy speed” as you race down the first 25, “Go!” when you dive off the blocks, or “Hulk smash!” as you barrel towards the finish.
By using relevant performance cues during your race, they keep your mind from wandering into negative thoughts or overthinking the outcome.
Pre-race nerves tend to get the best of us when we start thinking about imagined outcomes (“What if I swim really bad?”), and performance cues bring your attention back to the present so that you can max out on your training and preparation on race day.
As the Big Meet creeps up, assign yourself 3-4 performance cues for your race to help you stay dialed in and keep pre-race nerves at bay.
Have fun and smile
Amid all the expectations and pressure on race day, it’s easy to forget that this sport is supposed to be fun. Yes, I know you’ve worked hard. Yes, I know you’ve got lots on the line. And yes, I know that this means a lot to you.
But enjoying the moment and going through the process with a smile on your face and recognition that this is something we get to do can remove some of the unhelpful pressure swimmers put on themselves.
Use a gratitude journal when you feel yourself getting too caught in the pressure. Cheer on your teammates so that they excel, too. And when you find yourself getting tense and the nerves are veering too far into anxiety-land, break a smile and remember that we get to do this awesome sport.
It doesn’t mean you don’t care; quite the opposite, it means you care enough to value and enjoy every moment of this amazing journey.
Wrapping Things Up
Pre-race nerves aren’t the enemy. They never were.
The butterflies, the hammering heart, the restless energy that shows up on race morning—that’s your body doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.
The swimmers who figure this out—really internalize it, and not just nod along to it, stop fighting themselves on race day. They stop spending energy trying to feel calm and using that energy to shoot off the starting block.
You’ve put in the meters and yards.
You’ve done the work.
When you walk down behind the blocks to compete, and your body starts revving up, recognize it for what it is–the signal you’ve been waiting for to perform.
This guide to pre-race nerves for swimmers is part of our series on mental training for swimmers. You can read the main guide, and other articles below.
