By Olivier Poirier-Leroy on SwimSwam
Sprint speed can be tough to nail because it’s often approached purely as a strength problem.
Just max out strength at every opportunity:
In the weight room With chutes/power towers/resistance tubing More load, more force, more gym grunting, more better.But sprint swim speed is more than just eye-popping 1RMs and clanging lots of iron.
It’s being able to generate a lot of force while moving at extremely high velocity.
Which sounds obvious.
But there’s a big difference between generating a ton of force versus turning that force into usable speed.
Maximum Force vs Usable Force in the Water
A very fresh study (Keating et al., 2026) with a group of high-performance swimmers, all sprint specialists, shows us how this plays out. By high-performance, I mean just that—half the participants swam at the Paris Olympics.
Swimmers did a 50m time trial along with two types of resisted sprint testing:
Fully tethered – Swimmers sprinted in place for 20s. Semi-tethered – Swimmers sprinted 10m against progressively increasing resistance.Which was more closely related to sprint speed?
The semi-tethered condition.
Perhaps a little surprisingly, the fully tethered condition didn’t significantly predict sprint swimming speed, even though it looks like a more “force-specific” test.
Sprint swimming speed was better reflected by the combination of force and velocity.
Turning Force into Sprint Swimming Speed
There are some important if not subtle differences between the two types of resisted sprinting.
When swimmers are fully tethered, they aren’t going anywhere. Forward motion disappears. The usual drag conditions change. The way the water moves around us changes.
When semi-tethered, swimmers have to overcome the load while also moving forward through the pool. This preserves more of the mechanics of actual sprint swimming.
Being able to make a tether creak and groan is satisfying.
But how well can you demonstrate that strength while actually moving through the water at speed?
This difference also gives us some ideas for how to better approach the kind of resistance we use in the water.
For swimmers who:
Can swim hard against lots of resistance but struggle with higher end velocity: add some lighter-load resisted sprinting, assisted sprint work. Have lots of velocity but comparatively low force capacity: sprinkle in more higher-load resisted swimming and strength work.Understanding which end of the force spectrum you lean toward can be a really helpful way to more smartly approach your sprint training.
Even if you don’t have access to fancy-pants load-velocity testing equipment.
Wrapping Things Up
Sprint swimmers are always on the hunt for ways to get stronger and more powerful in the water. And strength obviously still matters big-time.
The big lifts in the gym. Cranking out max resistance on a tether, drag chute, power tower, etcetera.
But at the base of all of those efforts should be a simple question:
Is this helping me build more usable force?
Happy sprinting!
ABOUT OLIVIER POIRIER-LEROY
Olivier Poirier-Leroy is a former national level swimmer, 2x Olympic Trials qualifier, and author of several books for swimmers, including YourSwimBook, Conquer the Pool, The Dolphin Kick Manual, and most recently, The 50 Freestyle Blueprint.
The book is a beastly 220+ pages of evidence-based insights and practical tips for improving freestyle sprint speed.
It details everything from how to master stroke rate, technique, build a thundering freestyle kick, improve your start and underwaters, and much more.
The 50 Freestyle Blueprint also includes 20 sprint sets to get you started and a bonus guide on how to master the 100 freestyle to complete your sprint preparation.
Learn more about The 50 Freestyle Blueprint here.
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