How to Swim a Faster 50m Freestyle
What makes a 50m freestyle fast: the start, stroke rate, and race-pace speed work — with two complete sprint freestyle workouts you can swim this week.
Cam McEvoy, the reigning Olympic 50m freestyle champion, turned up to the Australian Dolphins’ pre-Games camp in Darmstadt, Germany and — four days off a flight from Brisbane — posted a training personal best on his way to a world-record attack at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow (swimming, 24–29 July), per Swimming World . His splits live on another planet.
But the reason a 50 is fast comes down to one thing you can train too: raw top-end speed. Most swimmers spend years building endurance and never once train it. Here is how to fix that.
Why the 50 free is a different sport
The 50m freestyle — one length of a long-course pool, or two of a 25m — is over in the time it takes to read this sentence. That changes everything about how you train for it. A 1500m is roughly 90% aerobic; a 50 is the opposite, powered almost entirely by the anaerobic energy your muscles can produce in a single furious burst. All the easy mileage that makes you a strong distance swimmer does very little for your 50, which is why so many fit swimmers are surprised to find their sprint has not budged in years.
Speed is a separate quality, and it has to be trained on its own terms.
Training speed means short efforts at full tilt with generous rest — the exact opposite of the tight-turnaround interval sets that build endurance. The goal is to fire your fast-twitch muscle fibres at maximum output while you are fresh, then recover fully before doing it again. Do that repeatedly, over weeks, and your body gets better at recruiting those fibres quickly and holding a fast stroke together under pressure.
Try to sprint while fatigued and you simply rehearse swimming slowly.
Where the 50 is actually won — the walls
Before you swim a single fast stroke, there is free time waiting off the blocks and off the wall. The start, the streamline, and the underwater dolphin kicks that carry you to the breakout are the fastest you will move in the whole race — you are more streamlined and moving quicker underwater than you ever are on the surface. A swimmer with sharp underwaters can carry that speed 10 to 15 metres before the first stroke; a swimmer who pops up early throws it away.
In a race this short, that is the difference between lanes.
This is why the workouts below open every fast rep with a proper push and 3–4 dolphin kicks into a clean breakout, and why your first job is to make that pattern automatic. Then comes the surface stroke itself: speed is stroke rate multiplied by how far each stroke moves you. The trap is turning the arms over faster by making the stroke short and slappy, which kills the distance-per-stroke and cancels the gain.
Our guide to freestyle swimming technique covers the catch and body position that let you raise your tempo without losing your length.
Speed set one — raw top-end speed with full recovery
This is the foundation session: short, all-out reps with enough rest that every single one is fresh and fast. It is a short workout by design — quality over volume. If you find yourself sneaking in extra reps or cutting the rest, you have turned a speed session into a fatigue session, and the two build opposite things.
Notice how much of this set is rest. That is not softness — it is the mechanism. To add power to those pushes and pull-throughs, dry-land and in-water resistance work pays off fast for sprinters; our guide to resisted sprint training for swimmers covers how to add it without wrecking your stroke.
Speed set two — hold the speed when it burns
Raw speed gets you off the wall fast; lactate tolerance is what stops you falling apart in the back half. Around the 35-metre mark of an all-out 50, your arms fill with lactate and your stroke wants to shorten and slow. This session trains you to keep turning the arms over anyway, by swimming race-pace 50s with just enough rest to hold quality while the fatigue accumulates.
The race-pace 50s sit in the VO2max zone and the finish 25s in the sprint zone on purpose — if you are unsure how these efforts differ from your easy and threshold swimming, our guide to swim training zones maps the whole ladder from recovery to sprint. This is also the session most likely to expose a plateau; if your 50 has been stuck for months, the deeper causes are covered in why am I not getting faster at swimming .
The 4-week sprint sharpening block, at a glance
Here is how the two sessions above slot into a short, focused block. Two speed sessions a week, plenty of easy swimming around them, and a hard taper into the day you want to be fast. Keep the volume low and the intent high.
To build these sets around your own paces — and send the fast 25s and 50s to your watch as a structured session — the AquaPlan swim workout generator produces speed and race-pace sets you can export, and the workout builder lets you assemble your own block by block. To pin down what “race pace” actually means for you, drop your times into the swim pace calculator .
And if you want the other end of the freestyle spectrum, our guide to training for a fast 1500m freestyle shows how differently the distance events are built.
Build your sprint sessions
Generate short, high-quality speed and race-pace sets built around your own times, then export them straight to your watch — so every fast rep in the pool has a plan behind it.
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Written and maintained by AquaPlan Team, Swim Training & Product.
The AquaPlan team builds swim-training software for structured pool workouts, Garmin-compatible FIT export, printable workout PDFs, and progress tracking.
Focus areas: Structured swim workout design, Garmin-compatible FIT file export, Pool training plans and workout-library systems, Swim training tools for web, iOS, and Android.
Editorial standard: AquaPlan is built by lifelong swimmers — 20+ years in the water, competitive racing, and countless hours on deck. Our training guides come from that experience, not a content mill.