50m swimming events added to the Olympics at last

Yesterday was a historic day for swimming. For years we have waited for the news that yesterday brought and that was the addition of the stroke 50s to the Olympics schedule. No longer will the fastest butterfly, backstroke and breaststroke swimmers in the world be overlooked and they will get to showcase their talent on the biggest stage. In this blog, I am going to talk about what this means for the swimming world going forward.

Sprint Training development

To put it simply, very few swimmers in the world truly train as a sprinter should. There are two main reasons for this.

• The first is that we are generally archaic in our methods, pride ourselves in hard work/volume and don't understand what it takes to train for a 50.

• Until now if you swam any stroke apart from freestyle, you had to train for the 100 or 200 if you had any dream to ever make the Olympics. Even if you were naturally better at the 50m of your stroke than the 100m, you had to work out a way to get better at the 100 if you had any ambition to make it in this sport (often resulting in you being told to do MORE and work HARDER). Even if you were a freestyler, the 100/200 have a way easier pathway to making teams due to relay, giving an additional reason to focus on them over the 50.

Because of this, sprint training has remained in the dark ages with the best 50m sprinters in the world probably training in a way that would be the equivalent of Usain Bolt running a marathon every day (which was very far from the case for Usain). Even crazier is that while elite swimming programs would be giving different sessions daily for the sprinters versus distance swimmers, they probably had an equal amount of exposure to the water (10x2 hour pool sessions). How does that even add up? Again it would be like Usain Bolt having the same timetable as Eliud Kipchoge and the two of them trained at the same time, with small variance in their sessions.

Now we have always had trailblazers. From a coach's perspective we have had the likes of Brett Hawke, James Gibson and more recently Tim Lane, take a completely different approach to training sprinters with bespoke programs and for the swimmers, the likes of Cam McEvoy, Ben Proud and Dylan Carter.

You see sprinting (any of the strokes) over 50m has very little in common with any other distance (even the 100). On the 50, efficiency can be sacrificed for sheer top-end speed meaning the technique is different. Elements like the start and underwater phase take up 35% of the race and for butterfly and freestyle, you don't even breathe. This means there is very little to gain from swimming anything other than at full speed. The technique transfer of easy aerobic swimming to 50m events is the equivalent of Noah Lyles strolling to get his groceries and hoping that makes his strides better during a 100m run.

The bottom line is you have to train in a very specific way. First and foremost, overall volume doesn't need to be tracked (volume at intensity is a different beast). If you were to tally it up though it is not even necessary to get to 10km a week (an average elite swimmer swimming 50-200 events would be swimming at least 50km a week). The more garbage yardage you do, the duller your knife will be. For example:

• With generic training, the fastest you may be able to go a 50 in training is 25.0 seconds. However, you can repeat 25s with not much rest for 10 reps but even if you only were doing one rep, you would not be any faster.

• With true sprint training, you can go 23.5 but you can't move for an hour after because you were able to output that much more. You just can't do it again and again.

Ultimately though, you only need to be able to do it once (you get recovery between prelims & finals) so why are we training to do rep after rep when it is completely obsolete? Fitness by definition is to meet the demands of your environment and if that is to swim one length as fast as possible, that's all you should be training for.

While I could keep writing more and more about sprint training, I have other points to cover. My final sentiment though is that recovery is key (so swimming twice a day can often be negative), land training can be as important as wet and specificity in the pool is everything.

If you are someone who is all about the 50m events, regardless of stroke and knows they are not training properly but wants to get faster, then check out my RAW SPEED MEMBERSHIP that is currently at an introductory price of just £29 a month for 3, world-class, specific, sprint sessions a week that will see you swimming faster than EVER.

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Funding, support and longevity of swimmers

As a long-time swimming fanatic, it always hurts to see great swimmers stop early. The most likely cause for this is financial trouble (often from a lack of funding or support) and an inability to keep doing the hard grind some swimmers have done since they were 9.

The addition of the 50s to the Olympic program means that not only will 50 swimmers have the opportunity to be selected for the Olympics, but also national governing bodies will have to open up funding opportunities for them and change their selection policy for other international meets like world champs. Time and time again I have seen swimmers all around the world be ranked top 5 or even be the fastest in a 50m race and not selected for a world championship team because they are not fast enough at the 100m.

It also makes sense that if you are a swimmer who races 200m and beyond, there gets to a point in your late 20s where you can't physically (because of injuries and wear and tear) or mentally keep slogging 70km+ weeks. Being able to shift your focus to being a sprinter can offer a new challenge, a different mental outlook and a much more sustainable balance in your life if you wish to keep competing in your 30s. I am not saying the switch will be easy or even possible for anyone but it has already been shown possible. Cam McEvoy was previously a world-class 100/200 freestyler and is now at the top of the world in the 50 free and fly.

long term athlete development

Most national governing bodies have policies in place that allegedly have the best interest of an athlete's development in mind. This has led to some stupid decisions. For example at the National Summer Age Group Championships in the UK, you can swim any event from 13 years old except the 50s. You can't swim the 50s until you are 15 and even then you can only qualify for the 50s via the 100. It is not until you are 18 you can outright qualify for the 50s. Let that sink in for a moment.

Now I am sure you can make a counter-argument to this (that the bigger kids are better at 50s at young ages and that's not fair - like genetics don't play a huge role regardless of age) but when you coach age groupers that are 13-15, if you give them enough volume and heart rate work, they will very quickly get faster at the 200/400 events. But this is the exact opposite of long-term athlete development as it normally comes with a sacrifice of skills, technique (to get in as much grind) and everything that will end up making swimmers great in the long run (again I am sure there are exceptions to this but not many).

Regardless of optimal training, more importantly, kids should be able to swim in the events they enjoy, they are good at, and that excites them.

A great example is a lad I started coaching at 13. He initially was on the cusp of quitting because he preferred playing football (much less training, much more competition, team-based). I realised that physically he probably was more suited to the 200 but he only really cared about sprinting and loved the 50. So I leaned into that, he won the national silver (he could race the 50 at that age back then) in the 50 and the national title in the 100 and 3 years later is still swimming (fast). More recently he realised that he could be suited to the 200 and at 15 went a 2.00 200m backstroke while still loving the shorter races. LTAD should not be specialising at 13, but instead, keep an open mind as the swimmers grow with a full skillset to take on any race.

I think keeping younger kids happy and in the sport is better than trying to make them fit a mould and I hope that the addition of the 50s at the Olympics will make Aquatics GB rethink their LTAD as well as other nations who have similar policies in place.

spectator satisfaction

I am of a small majority that will watch every major swimming race on the edge of my seat but I know for the everyday swimmer and even more so to non-swimmers, the thought of watching a race where someone swims up and down a pool for 15 minutes is unappealing. Now we will have 4 events at the Olympics that are fast, and furious and have so many opportunities for upsets from any lane that I am sure will bring more eyes onto our sport.

I dream of a day where we have serious money in swimming like most other professional sports and the first step in getting there is by having people want to watch our sport. During the Olympics we will always get eyes, we need the eyes to love what they see so much they want to watch non-Olympic swimming events.

Overall I feel very grateful for this announcement and I don't doubt the athletes will step up and deliver some brilliant races. Thanks to the IOC and World Aquatics for making it happen and to Brett Hawke for being so persistent with his pressure for the events to be added, he surely made an impact!

Let the sprinting commence....

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