3 Sets for More Explosive Breakouts ...Middle East

By Olivier Poirier-Leroy on SwimSwam

A lot goes into fast swimming on race day.

A clean, explosive start. Fast underwaters. The power and conditioning to swim start-to- finish like you mean business. And during all of those sets and practices where we build this performance, there is the oft-neglected breakout.

Also known as: The brief and blurry moments between the end of your dolphin kicking and your first handful of strokes at the surface.

For a lot of swimmers, this little slice of their performance holds some serious room for improvement.

By working on your breakouts, you’ll carry more speed to the surface, see increased surface swimming velocity, and best of all—you can cash in this improved skill every time you dive in or push-off the wall.

Here are three of my favorite sets for carrying more speed through your breakouts.

Resisted breakouts

This is my favorite way to go about cleaning up a splotchy breakout because of the immediate feedback you get from adding resistance.

One of the biggest challenges with improving breakouts is that swimmers don’t always feel where they are losing speed. Sprinkling a little resistance on your breakout highlights those dips and makes them much more obvious.

Here’s how to do it:

That tension will show you where you are losing speed. The first stroke will also be extra aggressive to counter the resistance—another great habit to incorporate into your regular breakouts.

This is an important little habit to add to your swimming as the first few strokes you take at the surface can be faster than mid-pool swimming velocities (Veiga et al., 2017).

Do a couple of resisted breakouts and pair with regular breakouts to carry over that increased awareness and more aggressive breakout.

2-3 rounds

Hook and Speed

Breakouts are an interesting challenge because on the one hand you are trying to establish a strong catch and create propulsion with the hands. But you’re also trying to hold onto the speed you generated underwater.

Those are slightly different tasks.

To work on both, I like the 1-2 punch of dead-start sprints with overspeed push-offs.

Dead-start sprints are exactly what they sound like. Get into a dead man’s float, belly down, arms extended, and explode into a sprint.

With no wall to push-off from, your catch and acceleration skills have to be on point.

This is working the hook—that first quality catch for propulsion.

Then we target the other end. Overspeed push-offs start with an explosive push-off but no underwaters—you launch immediately into the stroke, riding the max velocity from the push-off for a few strokes.

Here, we are trying to establish the catch while moving through the water faster than we normally would. Useful to work coordination and timing.

Finally, we put the two together with regular breakout sprints.

We’re developing the ability to establish propulsion under two different conditions—starting from zero speed and starting with lots of speed—before putting both skills together in a race-style breakout.

2-3 rounds:

Take plenty of rest between reps and rounds to keep quality higher than the championship banners at your local pool.

Dolphin kick breakouts

For freestylers and backstrokers, shifting too early to flutter kick during your underwaters can have a significant impact on how fast you surface.

For example.

A study by Yamakawa et al. (2025) compared dolphin kicking vs freestyle kicking with a group of elite swimmers while in a streamline and underwater. The difference was no joke:

That’s a speed advantage of about 16% for the dolphin kick.

A way for freestylers—and to an extent, backstrokers—to speed up their breakout is the dolphin kick breakout, which Michael Phelps and Caeleb Dressel were big fans of (helps being a butterflyer, obviously—the timing comes more naturally).

As they surfaced, they continued dolphin kicking into the first freestyle arm stroke before very quickly switching to freestyle kick.

To practice this, we start with a simple drill to set the timing: freestyle arms with butterfly legs. This forces swimmers to use dolphin kick all the way through the breakout and get a sense of how the timing works.

We then pair it with regular freestyle to plug it into our breakout.

3 rounds (round 1 with fins, round 2 and 3 without)

Wrapping Things Up

Faster breakouts are a small detail that can have some surprisingly big returns, especially once we start stacking them up over multi-lap races.

After all, you can have an explosive start, the tightest streamline there ever was, and a booming underwater dolphin kick, but if you are pulling the emergency brake on your way to the surface, you’re letting speed slip between your chlorinated fingies.

The three sets above set you up for faster breakouts by attacking it from a few different directions:

You don’t need to do a full practice of these, either.

Drop a couple of them into your weekly training program and take that increased focus to boomin’ breakouts for all of the other breakouts you do at practice.

Happy kicking!

Level Up Your Underwater Dolphin Kick

Olivier Poirier-Leroy is a former national-level swimmer, 2x Olympic Trials qualifier, and author of several books for swimmers, including The Dolphin Kick Manual: The Swimmer’s Ultimate Guide to a Fast Underwater Dolphin Kick.

The book is a beastly 240+ pages of actionable insights and research into elite dolphin kicking technique and performance. It details everything from mastering undulation to vortex recapturing to structuring a dryland program for dolphin kicking success.

The Dolphin Kick Manual combines evidence-based insights with a collection of 20 ready-to-go sets and a 6-week Action Plan to help swimmers set a course for dolphin kicking success.

Train smarter and kick faster.

Learn more about The Dolphin Kick Manual

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