By Olivier Poirier-Leroy on SwimSwam
Resisted sprint training is one of the main strategies swimmers use to get faster.
Chutes, power towers, buckets, cords, wearing nine XXXL swimsuits at the same time—add the resistance and get after it.
But the amount of resistance we use has a big impact on whether it lands on race day.
Like a good slice of pizza, more isn’t automatically better. Pulling a cable-creaking load across the pool can boost confidence, but if your stroke is falling apart and tempo crashes, the work becomes less likely to show up in the stroke we race with.
A recent case study following an elite 50 freestyler on his way to the Paris Olympics gives us a cool look at how high-level sprinters use resistance—and some simple lessons for using it more effectively.
Stop adding resistance when stroke rate crashes
One of the biggest mistakes swimmers make with resisted swimming is assuming heavier is always better.
In this case study (Keating et al., 2025), researchers did load profiling with the swimmer, monitoring stroke rate while steadily increasing resistance. His race tempo was 61-63 strokes per minute, so once he couldn’t hold that tempo, they stopped increasing load.
The reason for this is because resistance—like other tools including paddles, fins, pull buoys, etcetera—can change stroke mechanics.
See also: How Do Swim Fins and Paddles Change Swim Technique?The goal was to load the specific movement and tempo of his race stroke instead of training a different movement.
This gives us an individualized ceiling for applying load:
Take your race tempo Plug it into a Tempo Trainer Sprint out some efforts with increasing resistance. Once technique or tempo begin to crater, make a note.This gives you a guardrail to train against as well as some numbers to improve upon in training instead of blindly sprinting with random amounts of load and hoping you get better.
There are certainly times to use max resistance (or tethered swimming) to build force, but a majority of your resisted training should happen within the context of your race tempo and technique.
Match resistance to what you want to improve
The amount of resistance you use when swimming changes what you are training.
Lighter load helps you to swim more quickly and keeps stroke mechanics better aligned with load-free swimming. As resistance goes up, swimming velocity declines while the demand for force production increases.
The model used in the study broke it down into four zones based on how much slower the swimmer went compared to regular sprinting:
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