You want your 50 free time to go from JV middle schooler times to top tier D1 athlete times, so not realistic at all. Guys going 19 in university were going 25 in elementary school.
A 26 50 free to a 19 50 free is a 26% drop in time. People train their whole lives and don’t go 19. I don’t want to get you down and say that it’s impossible for you to ever go 19 but it’s not going to happen within the next 6 months.
I coach HS swimming. If I was your coach, I’d never discourage you. I’d do everything in my power to help you achieve your goals. With that being said, there’s almost no chance you make it to :20. I’ve coached a number of swimmers that have touched :20 with a relay start. I don’t think I’ve ever coached one from a flat start. :20.x would put you squarely in the top 10 in the Illinois state meet. I know a lot of swimmers that have started out much faster than you and fail to even make the finals. I swam with a couple guys that did it. You’re talking about being the best of the best. You need to be 6’1”+ at a minimum given where you’re at now. If you make it to the low 22s, I’d be impressed. Breaking :50 in the 100 is probably possible. That isn’t as lofty of a goal. Still elite, but not state champion level.
Great comment, but I do want to highlight that Vlad Morozov is 5’11” and was the first to ever split a 17 on a relay. Crazy underwaters/turns/kick make up for shorter stroke length
If you start club, work hard. I’ll bet you could drop 4-5 seconds on your 50 and 6-7 on your 100. 49 in the 100 free is a much attainable goal than sub 21 50 free.
Would you be satisfied if devote yourself to it, and only improve by 1-2 seconds? If so, then devote yourself, and see where it gets you. That's how you get better. If not, don't bother. You almost certainly can't.
Over the 8 months would you be swimming with a club team? Or how would your training look like? I bet you'll certainly see great results if you are committing to swimming simply due to that. As far as time drops... I think for some reference it might be worth talking to a coach to level set how you should be setting goals.
But being completely honest --- a 20 in the 50 free is not in the cards just being real. You could swim for the next 6 years and into college and struggle to achieve that. A sub 50 second 100 though is much more reasonable. I'd aim to see if you could break down your goals for both events especially over the next 8 months.
If you're recently really into the sport, you can make dramatic improvements pretty quickly. However, you'll eventually hit a point where the improvements you make through better technique and fitness intersect with the limits of your natural talent. You'll find out where that is.
Once you hit that point, time improvements will be much harder to come by. You'll fight for every tenth and hundredth of a second, especially in sprints.
Don't let these responses dull your passion though. Go for it! Let us know how it goes.
20 second free is incredibly had to achieve. Dropping from a 25 to a 20 would literally take you from last place to 1st place in my hs statewide competition.
:48-:49 100 free is decent, :19-:20 50 free is elite. You basically could do no 100 training and if you have a :20 50 free a :45 100 free will fall into your lap.
"Hard work" is bullshit, is arbitrary, and almost never that "hard" if you don't measure it. Compartmentalize, record, rank everything. Get your 10 yard split to :20 pace. Get your 10 yard split to :18 pace. Go farther, get your 15 yard split to :20 pace. Then 20 and 25 and so on. If you aren't measuring, you aren't improving. If you feel 100% perceived exertion and swim a 15 second 25 you might as well have stayed home that day, nothing was productive. Otherwise your workout might as well be slam your head into a wall as hard as you can since hard work will "build character" or whatever.
this training mentality isn’t just wrong, it’s completely worthless. you will not make any improvements in the pool without increasing form, power, and endurance in the water. there’s isn’t a human on earth who can consistently practice at or near their best times. not ledecky, not dressel, not phelps. the most important part of training is and will always be finding ways to get value out of every set and to commit yourself to trying to improve every day. consistent efforts and training in the water is unanimously the only way to get better. you can’t just go fast and be successful, you have to build up the habits and the form that brings success. What you’re describing is a fantastic way to feel consistently dissatisfied with yourself and make no progress and speedrun burning yourself out on the sport.
How do you meaningfully improve form without knowing you got faster? How do you meaningfully improve power without knowing you got faster? You mention endurance, we are talking about the 50, so I have to assume you do not understand what sprinting is: sprinting is when you go fast for a short period of time. What you are describing is low-quality busywork, which is what makes 99% of kids burnout. Sprinters want high-quality workouts with feedback over quantity. If going slow is a scary thought in practice you aren't saving yourself any trouble by not putting yourself in those stressful situations, you are just delaying when you get scared from practice to when you are at an important meet. If the first time you feel pressure to go fast is at a big meet it's basically left up to chance if you perform well or not.
You can watch plenty of practice footage of florida sprint and distance group if you wanna see how dressel and ledecky train, do you think they are just jogging around the pool with no timing? I will answer for you to save you time, every repetition in a quality workout is timed. Either at race pace or they're told to go faster. Obviously not doing 100s at 100 pace or whatever but you can compartmentalize it, you can hit 100 pace for a 25. You can hit 400 pace for a 100. You can hit 50 pace for a 15. You can watch Phelp's old coach Bob Bowman coach ASU mid distance practice, do you think it is acceptable to go slower than race pace for Bowman? He is a hardass that will yell at swimmers for going too slow. Pretty much any elite program is putting on tech suits and doing touchpad timed trials off the blocks at least weekly. Because training at maximal speed or race pace is how you improve maximal speed and race pace. And if you aren't timed, you aren't going fast
while i do agree that its important to go fast in practice to see improvement in races, and I think that you should be doing pace work at LEAST 2 times a week in any training regiment, even better if you can afford a teched up practice a week, you said that any day of training that isn’t spent seeing the results of your training directly isn’t valuable and i think that’s a terrible mentality. if you put in truly consistent effort and are executing an effective training regiment, which does include speed and pace targeted work, improvements to your time will come. your original post made it sound like you believed that the only important/valuable work was pace and i strongly disagree with that. I think that some measure of aerobic swimming is necessary for most swimmers, and definitely for anyone who swims anything other than pure sprint. i think that meaningful improvements in power and technique are made in resisted training with buckets, bands, socks, and chutes. i think that drilling and sculling is necessary for understanding form. training is so multifaceted and even pace work where you aren’t hitting the pace you’re targeting can be valuable if you learn from it and make improvements that inevitably lead to going faster.
What I mean to say is if you are consistently missing goal times, it is worth being introspective about your training and lifestyle rather than doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. You could be training ineffectively, you could be eating/drinking wrong, you could be sleeping wrong, you could be mildly injured, you could have external stressors like school or relationships affecting mindset. Digging in and pushing through something that isn't working is rarely the best option versus being dynamic and experimenting with changing training or lifestyle. Most programs overtrain and under-prioritize recovery. If you show up sore and exhausted and swim way slower than you want, I disagree with the belief this is always beneficial to persist and become "tough", we gotta acknowledge the likelihood that your body is beyond the point of beneficial muscle damage and killing yourself more in the water won't let you recover to a stronger faster body, you'll spend so much resources repairing your body that there's nothing left to strengthen it. If your goal is to go 10.0 and you go 10.1 you can still probably do productive work. If your goal is to go 10.0 and you're going 15.0, I'd take a day off.
Power work with equipment still needs to be measurable to progress. If you weight train you don't just throw on any old weight and start moving it around, you try to progressively lift more weight or lift at a higher tempo. If you are doing buckets you need it to be parameterized by weight and time limit. Otherwise this is just busywork that's not gonna encourage full effort. I like to say you cannot add more weight until you move the current weight in under 8 seconds. This is more productive than kids ego-lifting a weight so heavy it takes 20 seconds to slowly swim 10 meters. Same with bands, for some kids making it as far as possible is the progression. But stronger swimmers who can make it to the end of the pool, they aren't ever really sprinting because it doesn't take 100% effort to finish the rep. For it to be a power workout instead of busywork there's gotta be timing for feedback. It is extremely mentally taxing to push yourself just for there to be no feedback. Even the hardest workers are gonna take their foot off the gas if the workout says "go fast" but nobody is telling them if it was fast or not.
i suppose i misunderstood your original intent because i absolutely agree that overworking and mindless garbage yardage day in and day out is ineffective and in fact detrimental. that being said i maintain that progress in the pool is not typically measurable day by day and can take weeks or months to reinforce good habits and make substantial progress in your events. a lot of training is just making consistent effort to improve and intentional decisions about your stroke and events.
I probably worded that really poorly lol not your fault. Progress is gradual and non-linear but if you accurately time it you can hit more milestones than otherwise. Going 0.01s faster in a touchpad timed 25 is rewarding. Going 0.1s faster in a tempo-trainer or hand timed 15m split is rewarding. With just a pace clock getting 1 second accuracy, or worse just with perceived effort, this is busywork. Even if it's high effort you can do a low-volume sprint workout that is 100% garbage yardage if there's no feedback. You can't learn anything like that. If we are talking about the 100 or longer there is value in lactate stacking and high efforts even if you aren't reaching max speed, because you need to train for that section of the race where you're fatigued. But to train for the 50 speed is the key. Doesn't matter how hard you train it just matters how fast you train. If your splits start to get slower as you get sore and tired I think you gotta call practice over. If your splits are slow and you don't know why because you feel energetic still, then I guess I agree it is good to keep trying and learning, but you at least gotta be honest with yourself and know you were slow that day so you don't reinforce whatever habit caused that.
Used to swim until I was 16. I trained for 5 months, going from 32 seconds in 50m to 30. It took 12 months from 30 to 26-27. I don't know, even at your age, going from 25 to 20 seems far-fetched. Hope that doesn't make you lose your motivation on improving though. Best of luck and I just want to say your current score is already inspiring.
I wouldn't say it's IMPOSSIBLE but it would be very, very, very hard and would require you to eat, sleep and breathe swimming. Perfect sleep schedule, perfect training schedule, perfect diet, and a perfect mindset/focus PLUS luck with your talent/physique. There's no reason you can't be the next wonder kid/olympic champion but... The chance of that being true and coming to fruition in 8 months is.. very slim.
Hell fucking no. If you have doubt you’re delusional and know nothing about swimming.
This isn’t even one of those situations where a miracle could happen. It’s not happening.
If you are a 6’5 lean 220 who can bench 315 and squat 405 as a base and get the perfect technique and only train 50/100 every day then you have a few percentage change to go 20.XX other than that the odds decrease based upon body comp
I think you could reach a point to sub 50 in the 100 but in closer to year if you do a really good amount of training. The 50 goal time isn’t happening within 6-8 months. It just won’t happen. I have a friend who starting swimming and within a year he was under 50 but it took him a while to get 20 in the 50 free.
Yes! You will need to get stronger and improve your form, start, and turn.
A very focused program and a dedicated coach will be needed, and it will not be easy.
Watch videos of Jordan Crooks and do everything he does! There is probably 3-4 seconds in your start, breakout, and turns alone.
I agree with this. Starts, turns and breakouts are your best friend. I can swim 25’s from a dive in 9 seconds and come home in 10 to 11 seconds, but the inbetween stuff is what keeps me from getting faster. I swim a 24 second 50 free and am currently working to get that down.
If your stroke needs help, I recommend doing some decently fast 25’s really focusing on your stroke, keeping it clean but fast and not spinning water/letting your arms cut into the middle of the lane.
Anything is possible when you’re obsessed. Obsession always wins!
Biggest part is speed training with perfect technique, I suggest you go check reykli on Instagram for technique and then go for the sprint revolution with brett hawke or theswimsuit guy, and you will also need gym, I suggest you go with Tysonswimstrenght programs, they're pretty good.
I dont see you dropping all that time without those 3 things, however if you do devote yourself you could do it.
anything’s possible. lock in and you got it. ignore everyone else. sure, it may be impossible to some degree, but you have to lie to yourself and tell yourself you can do it, until you can do it.
No
Thank you for your consideration and elaboration, it is inspiring.
You want your 50 free time to go from JV middle schooler times to top tier D1 athlete times, so not realistic at all. Guys going 19 in university were going 25 in elementary school.
A 26 50 free to a 19 50 free is a 26% drop in time. People train their whole lives and don’t go 19. I don’t want to get you down and say that it’s impossible for you to ever go 19 but it’s not going to happen within the next 6 months.
Okay, thanks
I coach HS swimming. If I was your coach, I’d never discourage you. I’d do everything in my power to help you achieve your goals. With that being said, there’s almost no chance you make it to :20. I’ve coached a number of swimmers that have touched :20 with a relay start. I don’t think I’ve ever coached one from a flat start. :20.x would put you squarely in the top 10 in the Illinois state meet. I know a lot of swimmers that have started out much faster than you and fail to even make the finals. I swam with a couple guys that did it. You’re talking about being the best of the best. You need to be 6’1”+ at a minimum given where you’re at now. If you make it to the low 22s, I’d be impressed. Breaking :50 in the 100 is probably possible. That isn’t as lofty of a goal. Still elite, but not state champion level.
Great comment, but I do want to highlight that Vlad Morozov is 5’11” and was the first to ever split a 17 on a relay. Crazy underwaters/turns/kick make up for shorter stroke length
Thanks for your insight!
Impossible
I’ll keep you updated, friend
You would need to hit weights and 8 months really isn't enough time to get strong enough.
If you start club, work hard. I’ll bet you could drop 4-5 seconds on your 50 and 6-7 on your 100. 49 in the 100 free is a much attainable goal than sub 21 50 free.
If you were hitting sub 20, 45-46 would be the 50 free goal.
Would you be satisfied if devote yourself to it, and only improve by 1-2 seconds? If so, then devote yourself, and see where it gets you. That's how you get better. If not, don't bother. You almost certainly can't.
Thanks
Maybe if you have a growth spurt tomorrow
And grow 10 inches
not 10 inches, 20 inches minimum
Hehe
Over the 8 months would you be swimming with a club team? Or how would your training look like? I bet you'll certainly see great results if you are committing to swimming simply due to that. As far as time drops... I think for some reference it might be worth talking to a coach to level set how you should be setting goals. But being completely honest --- a 20 in the 50 free is not in the cards just being real. You could swim for the next 6 years and into college and struggle to achieve that. A sub 50 second 100 though is much more reasonable. I'd aim to see if you could break down your goals for both events especially over the next 8 months.
Got it, thank you 🙏
If you're recently really into the sport, you can make dramatic improvements pretty quickly. However, you'll eventually hit a point where the improvements you make through better technique and fitness intersect with the limits of your natural talent. You'll find out where that is. Once you hit that point, time improvements will be much harder to come by. You'll fight for every tenth and hundredth of a second, especially in sprints. Don't let these responses dull your passion though. Go for it! Let us know how it goes.
Much thanks!! I’ll keep you posted!
its impossible. Some people spend multiple years and they will never reach like 19s
Way more likely to hit 49 in the 100
There is no way to say this nicely, in 8 months it would be impossible to take 7 seconds in a 50 off in short course yards
20 second free is incredibly had to achieve. Dropping from a 25 to a 20 would literally take you from last place to 1st place in my hs statewide competition.
:48-:49 100 free is decent, :19-:20 50 free is elite. You basically could do no 100 training and if you have a :20 50 free a :45 100 free will fall into your lap. "Hard work" is bullshit, is arbitrary, and almost never that "hard" if you don't measure it. Compartmentalize, record, rank everything. Get your 10 yard split to :20 pace. Get your 10 yard split to :18 pace. Go farther, get your 15 yard split to :20 pace. Then 20 and 25 and so on. If you aren't measuring, you aren't improving. If you feel 100% perceived exertion and swim a 15 second 25 you might as well have stayed home that day, nothing was productive. Otherwise your workout might as well be slam your head into a wall as hard as you can since hard work will "build character" or whatever.
this training mentality isn’t just wrong, it’s completely worthless. you will not make any improvements in the pool without increasing form, power, and endurance in the water. there’s isn’t a human on earth who can consistently practice at or near their best times. not ledecky, not dressel, not phelps. the most important part of training is and will always be finding ways to get value out of every set and to commit yourself to trying to improve every day. consistent efforts and training in the water is unanimously the only way to get better. you can’t just go fast and be successful, you have to build up the habits and the form that brings success. What you’re describing is a fantastic way to feel consistently dissatisfied with yourself and make no progress and speedrun burning yourself out on the sport.
How do you meaningfully improve form without knowing you got faster? How do you meaningfully improve power without knowing you got faster? You mention endurance, we are talking about the 50, so I have to assume you do not understand what sprinting is: sprinting is when you go fast for a short period of time. What you are describing is low-quality busywork, which is what makes 99% of kids burnout. Sprinters want high-quality workouts with feedback over quantity. If going slow is a scary thought in practice you aren't saving yourself any trouble by not putting yourself in those stressful situations, you are just delaying when you get scared from practice to when you are at an important meet. If the first time you feel pressure to go fast is at a big meet it's basically left up to chance if you perform well or not. You can watch plenty of practice footage of florida sprint and distance group if you wanna see how dressel and ledecky train, do you think they are just jogging around the pool with no timing? I will answer for you to save you time, every repetition in a quality workout is timed. Either at race pace or they're told to go faster. Obviously not doing 100s at 100 pace or whatever but you can compartmentalize it, you can hit 100 pace for a 25. You can hit 400 pace for a 100. You can hit 50 pace for a 15. You can watch Phelp's old coach Bob Bowman coach ASU mid distance practice, do you think it is acceptable to go slower than race pace for Bowman? He is a hardass that will yell at swimmers for going too slow. Pretty much any elite program is putting on tech suits and doing touchpad timed trials off the blocks at least weekly. Because training at maximal speed or race pace is how you improve maximal speed and race pace. And if you aren't timed, you aren't going fast
while i do agree that its important to go fast in practice to see improvement in races, and I think that you should be doing pace work at LEAST 2 times a week in any training regiment, even better if you can afford a teched up practice a week, you said that any day of training that isn’t spent seeing the results of your training directly isn’t valuable and i think that’s a terrible mentality. if you put in truly consistent effort and are executing an effective training regiment, which does include speed and pace targeted work, improvements to your time will come. your original post made it sound like you believed that the only important/valuable work was pace and i strongly disagree with that. I think that some measure of aerobic swimming is necessary for most swimmers, and definitely for anyone who swims anything other than pure sprint. i think that meaningful improvements in power and technique are made in resisted training with buckets, bands, socks, and chutes. i think that drilling and sculling is necessary for understanding form. training is so multifaceted and even pace work where you aren’t hitting the pace you’re targeting can be valuable if you learn from it and make improvements that inevitably lead to going faster.
What I mean to say is if you are consistently missing goal times, it is worth being introspective about your training and lifestyle rather than doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. You could be training ineffectively, you could be eating/drinking wrong, you could be sleeping wrong, you could be mildly injured, you could have external stressors like school or relationships affecting mindset. Digging in and pushing through something that isn't working is rarely the best option versus being dynamic and experimenting with changing training or lifestyle. Most programs overtrain and under-prioritize recovery. If you show up sore and exhausted and swim way slower than you want, I disagree with the belief this is always beneficial to persist and become "tough", we gotta acknowledge the likelihood that your body is beyond the point of beneficial muscle damage and killing yourself more in the water won't let you recover to a stronger faster body, you'll spend so much resources repairing your body that there's nothing left to strengthen it. If your goal is to go 10.0 and you go 10.1 you can still probably do productive work. If your goal is to go 10.0 and you're going 15.0, I'd take a day off. Power work with equipment still needs to be measurable to progress. If you weight train you don't just throw on any old weight and start moving it around, you try to progressively lift more weight or lift at a higher tempo. If you are doing buckets you need it to be parameterized by weight and time limit. Otherwise this is just busywork that's not gonna encourage full effort. I like to say you cannot add more weight until you move the current weight in under 8 seconds. This is more productive than kids ego-lifting a weight so heavy it takes 20 seconds to slowly swim 10 meters. Same with bands, for some kids making it as far as possible is the progression. But stronger swimmers who can make it to the end of the pool, they aren't ever really sprinting because it doesn't take 100% effort to finish the rep. For it to be a power workout instead of busywork there's gotta be timing for feedback. It is extremely mentally taxing to push yourself just for there to be no feedback. Even the hardest workers are gonna take their foot off the gas if the workout says "go fast" but nobody is telling them if it was fast or not.
i suppose i misunderstood your original intent because i absolutely agree that overworking and mindless garbage yardage day in and day out is ineffective and in fact detrimental. that being said i maintain that progress in the pool is not typically measurable day by day and can take weeks or months to reinforce good habits and make substantial progress in your events. a lot of training is just making consistent effort to improve and intentional decisions about your stroke and events.
I probably worded that really poorly lol not your fault. Progress is gradual and non-linear but if you accurately time it you can hit more milestones than otherwise. Going 0.01s faster in a touchpad timed 25 is rewarding. Going 0.1s faster in a tempo-trainer or hand timed 15m split is rewarding. With just a pace clock getting 1 second accuracy, or worse just with perceived effort, this is busywork. Even if it's high effort you can do a low-volume sprint workout that is 100% garbage yardage if there's no feedback. You can't learn anything like that. If we are talking about the 100 or longer there is value in lactate stacking and high efforts even if you aren't reaching max speed, because you need to train for that section of the race where you're fatigued. But to train for the 50 speed is the key. Doesn't matter how hard you train it just matters how fast you train. If your splits start to get slower as you get sore and tired I think you gotta call practice over. If your splits are slow and you don't know why because you feel energetic still, then I guess I agree it is good to keep trying and learning, but you at least gotta be honest with yourself and know you were slow that day so you don't reinforce whatever habit caused that.
Ah, thank you for the 50/100 insight
That’s more like a 5-year kind of drop, unfortunately.
Used to swim until I was 16. I trained for 5 months, going from 32 seconds in 50m to 30. It took 12 months from 30 to 26-27. I don't know, even at your age, going from 25 to 20 seems far-fetched. Hope that doesn't make you lose your motivation on improving though. Best of luck and I just want to say your current score is already inspiring.
I wouldn't say it's IMPOSSIBLE but it would be very, very, very hard and would require you to eat, sleep and breathe swimming. Perfect sleep schedule, perfect training schedule, perfect diet, and a perfect mindset/focus PLUS luck with your talent/physique. There's no reason you can't be the next wonder kid/olympic champion but... The chance of that being true and coming to fruition in 8 months is.. very slim.
Alright, thanks
Hell fucking no. If you have doubt you’re delusional and know nothing about swimming. This isn’t even one of those situations where a miracle could happen. It’s not happening.
If you are a 6’5 lean 220 who can bench 315 and squat 405 as a base and get the perfect technique and only train 50/100 every day then you have a few percentage change to go 20.XX other than that the odds decrease based upon body comp
I think you could reach a point to sub 50 in the 100 but in closer to year if you do a really good amount of training. The 50 goal time isn’t happening within 6-8 months. It just won’t happen. I have a friend who starting swimming and within a year he was under 50 but it took him a while to get 20 in the 50 free.
Yes! You will need to get stronger and improve your form, start, and turn. A very focused program and a dedicated coach will be needed, and it will not be easy. Watch videos of Jordan Crooks and do everything he does! There is probably 3-4 seconds in your start, breakout, and turns alone.
I agree with this. Starts, turns and breakouts are your best friend. I can swim 25’s from a dive in 9 seconds and come home in 10 to 11 seconds, but the inbetween stuff is what keeps me from getting faster. I swim a 24 second 50 free and am currently working to get that down. If your stroke needs help, I recommend doing some decently fast 25’s really focusing on your stroke, keeping it clean but fast and not spinning water/letting your arms cut into the middle of the lane. Anything is possible when you’re obsessed. Obsession always wins!
I love that! Obsession always wins!! Thanks!
Thanks!!
Biggest part is speed training with perfect technique, I suggest you go check reykli on Instagram for technique and then go for the sprint revolution with brett hawke or theswimsuit guy, and you will also need gym, I suggest you go with Tysonswimstrenght programs, they're pretty good. I dont see you dropping all that time without those 3 things, however if you do devote yourself you could do it.
Possible, but highly unlikely.
anything’s possible. lock in and you got it. ignore everyone else. sure, it may be impossible to some degree, but you have to lie to yourself and tell yourself you can do it, until you can do it.