What is a good time for a 50m freestyle?

For a fit adult recreational swimmer, a 50m freestyle in a long-course pool under about 35 seconds is a solid marker, and under 30 seconds is genuinely quick. Competitive age-group and masters men often land in the 25–29 second range, with women a few seconds behind that; national-level sprinters go under 23 seconds. For context, the elite men chasing medals — swimmers like Cam McEvoy, whose training PB prompted this article — race the 50 freestyle around 21 seconds. Judge yourself against your own history rather than the podium: a good 50 time is one that is faster than your last, achieved with a real start and clean underwaters instead of a lucky lunge at the wall.

How do I swim a faster 50m freestyle?

Train speed directly. A 50m relies heavily on high-intensity energy, but aerobic support still matters for repeatability and recovery. Use short, fast reps (25s and 50s) with enough rest for technically sound efforts. Layer three things on top: sharp starts and underwater dolphin kicks off each wall, a high stroke rate that still holds its length, and a comfortable breathing pattern that preserves your line. Add a lactate-tolerance session only when your recovery supports it, then retest rather than assuming a fixed number of sessions will move every swimmer's time.

Should I breathe during a 50m freestyle?

Use the fewest breaths that let you hold good form, while breathing whenever you need to stay relaxed and safe. Every breath can tilt the head and hips slightly, so practise a controlled pattern that keeps the line clean without breath holding. A controlled breath beats a panicked, form-wrecking gasp — practise your chosen pattern in training and never sacrifice a clean stroke to avoid a breath you need.

How often should I do sprint training for the 50m freestyle?

Two dedicated speed sessions a week is the sweet spot for the 50 freestyle. Sprint work is high-quality, low-volume: a full session might only cover 1,200–1,600 metres because most of it is rest. Because each effort demands a fresh nervous system, you cannot pile these back-to-back — space them out and keep the rest of your week easy so you arrive at each speed session recovered. More than two hard sprint sessions a week usually makes you slower, not faster, because tired fast-twitch fibres cannot fire at full speed.

How long does it take to get faster at the 50m freestyle?

Because the 50 is so dependent on skill and neuromuscular speed rather than aerobic fitness, the early gains come fast — many swimmers drop a second or more within four to six weeks of consistent speed work, largely from better starts, tighter underwaters, and simply practising going fast. Those technical wins are almost free. Fitness-driven improvements come more slowly and taper off, which is why elite 50 sprinters chase tenths for years. Retest your 50 every four to six weeks so you can see the technical gains land, and film a start occasionally — the wall is usually where the next chunk of time is hiding.

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 50m has a large high-intensity contribution, while aerobic fitness still supports repeatability and recovery. Easy mileage alone will not replace direct speed practice, which is why fit distance swimmers can still find that their sprint has not budged.

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 as Garmin-compatible FIT workouts — so every fast rep in the pool has a plan behind it.

Pure Speed — Top-End Sprint Set

Train raw speed with full recovery · 1450m total

400m Easy freestyle + backstroke — GA1 · Long and relaxed. A sprint session lives or dies on how fresh you are, so the warm-up is about waking the body up, never tiring it out.
6 × 50m Build to fast — GA2 · Rest 20s between repeats · Descend the effort 1→6 so the last two are near top speed. Prime the fast-twitch fibres before you ask them for everything.
6 × 25m Starts + underwater breakouts — TU · Rest 40s between repeats · Push hard off the wall, hold a tight streamline, take 3–4 dolphin kicks, then explode into a fast breakout and hold speed to the flags. Free speed lives here.
8 × 25m All-out 25s from a push — SP3 · Rest 1:00 between repeats · Maximum stroke rate with a clean, long stroke and relaxed breathing. The full minute of rest is the point: every rep is fresh, so you rehearse top speed, not fatigue.
4 × 50m Fast 50s — build then hold — SP2 · Rest 1:30 between repeats · Build the first 25 to top speed, then fight to hold it through the second. This is the exact shape of a raced 50 — the win is in not slowing down.
200m Easy choice swim — ReKom · Loosen the arms and shoulders at recovery pace, any stroke, no clock.

Race the 50 — Lactate-Tolerance Set

Hold goal pace as the fatigue floods in · 1300m total

300m Easy freestyle — GA1 · Conversation pace. Settle the breathing rhythm you will hold in the fast work.
4 × 50m Descend 50s — GA2 · Rest 20s between repeats · Get progressively quicker so the engine is warm and the stroke is turning over before the main set.
4 × 25m Sharp breakouts — TU · Rest 30s between repeats · Fast off the wall into the underwater kick and breakout — activate the pattern you will race on.
6 × 50m Race-pace 50s — SA · Rest 1:00 between repeats · Hold your goal 50m race pace on every rep. The minute of rest keeps the quality high, but by rep four it will burn — that burn is the whole training target.
4 × 25m Fast finish 25s — SP3 · Rest 45s between repeats · All-out and already tired. This rehearses the last 15 metres of a real 50, where the race is actually decided.
300m Easy backstroke + freestyle — ReKom · Flush it out. Two easy lengths of backstroke to open the shoulders, then relaxed freestyle.

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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.

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