Eric McGinnis is the Rollins College Strength & Conditioning Coach and Sports Performance Specialist, a former Kentucky All-American and World University Games gold medalist, and the brother of former Virginia Tech All-American Zach McGinnis. He also is a trainer at Spectrum Sports Performance. Follow him on Twitter here and on Facebook here.
Everybody wants to be a sprinter, but any experienced swimmer knows that swimming fast can be harder than it looks. Here are five tips, in no particular order, that can help you with your speed problems.
1. Know The Details
Sprinters rarely have to endure the boredom of swimming endless laps on a day-to-day basis. The trade-off is, as a sprinter, you need to be extra dialed in to the “boring” details that make up perfecting your race. These include, but are not limited to, tempo, stroke cycles, number of dolphin kicks off the start and turns, and timing of the breakouts. One of the beautiful things about swimming is that, for the most part, you ALWAYS know what to expect on race day. It’s not unpredictable like team sports, which means you should know exactly what to prepare for and what works best for you.
2. Don’t Get Carried Away With Lactate Sets
Let me be clear, I’m not against preparing the body for lactate threshold. However, lactate sets have become overly trendy and are often marketed as both “sprinter workouts” and “mental toughness workouts”. When you do overly aggressive sets like 20x50s all-out, the best you’re going to do is swim fast once or twice and then hopefully not throw up. Lactate threshold is difficult to recover from and can kill your speed. Don’t do it too often, and keep the volume of efforts at a reasonable number.
3. Embrace Rest
You are an athlete. This means you train, you don’t workout. You’re goal is to create a very specific adaptation, which in this case is swimming VERY fast. In order to get fast you have to train fast, which requires adequate rest and recovery. I’m not just talking about tapering; I’m talking about recovery within the workout, recovery within the week, and recovery within the program as a whole. If you ever get a chance to watch track sprinters or weightlifters train, pay attention to how much they recover between max efforts. Also pay attention to how AGGRESSIVE they are when they perform an effort. I realize that swimming is not track and certainly not weightlifting, but the bottom line is speed and power need rest.
4. Practice Breathing At Full Speed
This is a very underutilized training piece in my opinion. As a swimmer, you breathe hundreds of times per practice. How many of those breaths are practiced at race pace? When you’re swimming all-out the tempo is higher and the execution needs to be cleaner. This becomes most important if you take a breath somewhere in your 50 freestyle. Many of you might take 1 or 2 breaths in a long course 50. Know exactly when you will take your breaths and then practice them at an all-out pace in short increments. You can perform 12.5 meter sprints where you practice that breath at full speed while visualizing it being on the same stroke cycle you will take during the full 50.
5. Train Speed Year Round
I’m strongly against putting off speed work until the end of a season. Building an aerobic base is not necessary for speed development; it only helps you recover faster from the high intensity work. If you want to be fast you have to train fast. Just a reminder, we’re trying to create an adaptation for speed. It wouldn’t be wise to spend a great deal of time training slow.
“If you want to be fast, you have to train fast”…..MOST DEFINITELY AGREE!!
“If you want to be fast, you have to train fast”
Yeah, but is this really true!? The other school of thoughts is super slow swimming training, the way Alex Popov did. He did pretty well that way, I think. People are throwing around “suggestions” without any proven scientific backing to it. I **believe** in training slow most of the time, and only fast to “train the brain” for racing.
The super slow stuff is mainly dealing with improving from the technical side of things and there is nothing wrong with that. I prefer training for sprinters to be mostly really slow or really fast, not too much in between. It’s easier for the nervous system to make technical adjustments at slower speed. Outside of working on technical improvements, you need to train at max speed to improve max speed. The point of number 4 is that your body will adapt to the stress you constantly put on it. You have to hit max speed in your training in order to get good at it.
Right. You call it “rehearsal” I called it “train the brain.” My point was only that it should not be “train (only) fast to swim fast.”
i’m going to go ahead and say, ya the slow stuff is great for working on technique but you HAVE to train those fast twitch muscles.
I sat in on a seminar hosted by Vlad Pyshneko, a teammate of Popov’s, earlier this year and he commented on the super slow training that they did back in the USSR/Russia. One thing he mentioned was that while it’s super slow, it was also incredibly high yardage with an average day hitting over 30k with triple workouts in the pool.
Vlad also said that while he trained with 30k a day, he’s made the decision that the club team he runs in the US won’t do more than 5k per day on average, rarely doubles if any, and there is a bigger push for speed and quality race swimming.
There’s a time and place for everything, and different groups respond well to different training methods.
That first line reminded me of Ronnie Coleman and that is always a good thing.
I’m very glad it did. LIGHT WEIGHT!!!!
That was incredible. I couldn’t tear my eyes from the screen.
“YEEEEAH BUDDY”
HAHAHA “everybody wanna be a bodybuilder but nobody wanna lift heavy-@$$ weight!” I can’t believe someone else on swimswam follows Ronnie Coleman too!
Psychodad:
Perhaps more than any other swimmer of his day, Popov believed in race pace efforts. You are overly fixated on his recovery and drill work. I have a hard time understanding your post and your issue with the article.
Agreed here. Swimming at slower speeds to recover is part of swimming at race pace effort for sprinters. Active recovery as many like to call it. I’m not sure how Popov trained, but I don’t think this article is saying you should never swim slow. It’s more discouraging brainless lap swimming at aerobic pace for sprinters. Maybe I’m wrong and Mr. McGinnis is advocating only swimming at race pace speed and sitting around on the deck to recover, but I doubt it.
Nathan – Agreed on the “probably not talking about recovering on the deck” part!
I’ve read numerous articles but Touretski, Popov’s coach. A key element was rehearsal swims. Within a year of a major competition the goal was 100 rehearsal swims mimicking all racing conditions. He felt that at that number, no element would be left to chance. Also, about three weeks out of a championship meet he would do a full on race rehearsal over the course of several days. All recovery was done to supplement the all out swims.
exactly , he is often in another realm than just the point the article talks about !
rehearsel swims must be very effective to feel what’s like on ” J ” day of the final .
No love for eldest brother, Matt?
The Manimal
Psychodad… read a physiology book. Its 2014, not 1992
“Building an aerobic base is not necessary for speed development; it only helps you recover faster from the high intensity work.”
Very interesting article, thank you for posting! I have a question about the above statement. Numerous swim coaches today will tell us that it is impossible for a sprinter to reach his/her full potential without a significant aerobic base, swum at relatively slow paces in childhood. Do you agree with this? I confess I have never understood precisely how an aerobic base contributes specifically sprint speed later in life, but I am not especially knowledgeable in physiology.thank you in advance for any thoughts. God bless.
I think swimming is unique in that it’s not a natural movement for humans. We walk and run to get around, not swim. Therefore, I think it’s important to accumulate a certain amount of volume/repetitions at a young age (I’ll leave the specifics up to you). During this developmental period you are essentially teaching kids how to crawl, then walk, before they can run. An advantageous side effect of this is the development of strong longs and aerobic capacity. This is part of the “base” I think you’re referring to.
Getting away from this childhood base, an aerobic base actually comes and goes relatively quickly. You can get out of shape aerobically, and back into shape aerobically somewhat quickly (depending on certain variables). And no, an aerobic base is NOT necessary for developing speed, but if aerobic capacity is incredibly low you’re not going to be able to handle much work load. So, aerobic work for a sprinter, in my opinion, needs to be cycled and maintained in a necessary amount. I do not believe in building a “base” early in the season and then trying to ride off that base at the end of the season.
Thank you very much for your explanation Eric! God bless.
I just want to jump on regarding the “aerobic base” here as a fellow CSCS as Coach McGinnis. One reason why it is good for any athlete to have a so called “base” is for recovery. Never forget that the sprinter most usually develop their ATP-PC energy systems. With this type of training, the capillary density doesn’t increase, in some cases actually decreases with only strength and sprint training. Why is capillary density (CD) important even for sprinters? Well, that’s where the oxygen/waste products are being exchanged. Distance people have (at least should have) excellent CD. And with good CD, you recover much better. I don’t think we need to argue that recovery is a very crucial segment in sports.
Also as a fellow sprinter, I know that sprinting sometimes seems like the only important thing, but don’t forget to build your interiors in order to recover properly.
Well said, thank you!
MikeH, aerobic base has a hard cap (based on the same physiology that hard caps speed). Pre-puberty aerobic levels are best developed to a high level, if the swimmer wants a long-term run, because post-puberty only a limited amount of aerobic capacity can be added. But as we really don’t know who will be a “real” sprinter and not a swimmer who can go “really fast” until late puberty, if we wait until then to lay the foundation it is far too late.
As Dr. Salo likes to ask: what exactly is “aerobic base?” People throw the term around without defining what that is. It means different things to different people and therefore is largely meaningless.
Very goid point, Canukian, thank you.
People thrash dr. Rushall but read his stuff. Its interesting that more people aren’t more attune to the doctors’ of physiology (salo too) opinions and more are worried about fulfilling an imaginary yard quota perpetuated by people with bachelor degrees in communications.
So true. Dr. Rushall is one of the few sources I have found that actually backs his proposed training methods with scientific data and studies. That is what I trust. I don’t trust all these coaches that say the best training is what they have been doing for the past 40 years and slightly altering it then claiming its evolved training. Science is the path to speed!!!
very interesting article.
I wonder how much of this do the Top 50 sprinters in the world incorporate into their own schedules and programs?
I like this idea…it’s how I like to train my swimmers. And as a current PhD student working for the Counsilman Center at IU I have looked in to the physiology of HIIT. My one concern is that posting this article, whether of value or not, will make swimmers who currently train under different styles of training question their coaches.
Like Psychodad somewhat eluded to, there have been fast sprinters who used a distance based model. This is because there are a thousand ways to skin a cat. What’s most important is that the kids buy in to whatever program and coaching they are given.
We may also want to quantify what a “sprinter” really is. I know there are plenty of kids out there who think they are “sprinters” but really just like the 50 more than the other events so they do better at that.
The true sprinters who are in distance programs either pick and choose their sets/workouts, washout/quit, or resign themselves to the 200s+.
I believe that the reason we have so few truly great sprinters in the US is due to the pervasive distance-based mentality here. As Mr. McGinnis points out, sprint training requires a different approach, and we have too few sprint programs/coaches.
We need more Salos and Hawkes.
Not sure what the author and commenters mean by swimming ‘slow’ and ‘fast.’ (I find it helpful to use terms from the energy systems model). It seems some consider endurance training to be synonomous with ‘swimming slow.’ To the contrary, distance training can be done faster than threshold. Popov was known to do more endurance training than many sprinters might do today. His training was not limited to this, of course.
I don’t disagree with you. In fact I’ve been thinking about writing a blog on “What does endurance mean?”. However, the reason I kept in general is because I wanted it to be simple. The “fast” point, was simply to say that there isn’t any reason to spend great lengths of time training slower than you want to be in a meet. If I started saying things like, a 50 freestyler should be targeting ATP-CP for X amount of volume in cycle A and Y amount in cycle B, then I’m opening a whole new can of worms. I’m not trying to right a text book right now, just make a few generalizations. Hope that clarifies.
Mr. McGinnis: thank you for the reply. That would be a great topic to write about. True, you do get some “endurance” by doing race pace training and there isn’t always a clear line as to what category different types of training fall into (sprint or distance can be overly-simplistic). Re: the above article: I see what you mean now, in your opinion it’s mostly RP training or recovery. Don’t agree with that myself; I’m more of the “everyone should do some of everything” school of thought. But your philosophy is certainly embraced by many. And it’s a debate that has been going on for some time -and not likely to get resolved any time soon, if ever. Anyway, enjoyed it, looking forward to more writings in the future.
Great discussion! Couple of points, Look at martial arts and how slowly and relaxed they train to go very fast when they need to. Also, swimming at max DPS at slow speeds is not easy, but very taxing, and much can be learned here. Both in the force production side, and the streamlining side of technique. We know from research that the best swimmers in the world give up approx 46% of max DPS to go their fastest, so it makes sense to develop,
max DPS at all stroke rates along the Stroke rate/ velocity curve including very slow tempos of 3 seconds per cycle, all the way up to slightly above race tempo.
Mr. McGinnis,
What are your thoughts on incorporating burpees into a training program to simultaneously build both explosive power and aerobic base?
Thanks in advance!
Eric, I would be very interested in reading your thoughts on what endurance is.
This is the basic premise of specific training. When it’s time to go fast, you need to GO FAST.
When it’s time to go drill, drill perfectly
When it’s time to recover, make sure you are actively recovering at the proper pace.
I was a sprinter in the late 70s and early 80s and O…M…G… the yardage I had to do.
I train my sprinter group much differently than I was trained. Some race pace or race pace+ work, followed by lots of active recovery. Drill work, resistance kicking, race pace turns (having a movable bulkhead here is a blessing).
My favorite set is as follows:
10×50 on 5:00
50 is from a dive at race pace.
300 active recovery about :30 sec race prep for next sprint.
Only do this set about once every 2-3 weeks during pre-season then once every 2 weeks during the season.
@MikeH – For me, it’s Strength/Power/Endurance
Strength is the ability to apply force
Power is the ability to apply that strength over a short period of time
Endurance is the ability generate power over longer periods of time
Thank you PaulW!