How to organise your training to finish the swim strong

Finishing the swim strong is important for several reasons. Obviously, you’ll swim faster, which is the whole point of racing! Beyond that, it builds momentum and confidence for the rest of the race. Let’s take a look at some ways to help you consistently finish the swim strong.

Create a habit

Finishing strong isn’t just about being fit. While you certainly need to be fit to accomplish your goals, there’s more to it than that. Finishing strong is a habit.

If you always practise finishing strong, or at least finishing stronger than you started, you’ll develop the skillset and the habit of bringing it home at the end.

Just like working on specific skills reinforces those skills, working on a particular approach to your racing and training will reinforce that approach.

If you want to finish your races strong, and you want to develop the confidence to know you’ll be able to do so, you have to train for it.

While you certainly should develop a solid fitness plan, how you approach the execution of that plan will influence your ability to finish each race exactly like you want.

The more often you finish repetitions, sets, and workouts strong, the more likely it is you’ll do so in a race. Let’s take a look at three strategies that will help you do just that.

Start slow

While it may seem counterintuitive in a world where harder is better, if you want to consistently finish races strong, starting slower is a powerful strategy. The last thing you want to practise is going out too hard and then fading into the finish.

Instead, start slow, perhaps even a little slower than you think is necessary, so that you will have the energy and the confidence to know you’ll be able to finish strong.

As you get more experience and confidence, you can increase your initial speed while still retaining the ability to finish strong. Set yourself up for success.

Use descending efforts

Building upon the previous strategy, use descending efforts where each swim is faster than the previous one. For instance, if you’re performing 5 x 200m freestyle, the goal would be to swim slightly faster each repetition.

Doing so reinforces your ability to pick up the pace and finish strong at the end of a set. The more consistently you do so, the more it becomes a habit and the stronger your belief in your ability to finish well.

Use negative split efforts

You can take it one step further and use negative split efforts, where the second half of each repetition is faster than the first half. The ‘negative split’ means that the second half split is faster than the first half split.

Using the same example as above, if you’re performing 5 x 200m freestyle, the goal would be to swim slightly faster the second half of each repetition as compared to the first half.

As with descending efforts, this reinforces the ability to finish strong, building the fitness and the confidence to do so.