Why Fit Adults Get Exhausted After Swimming 50 Yards

You can run several miles. You ride your bike regularly. You work out three or four times a week. Then you get in the pool, swim 50 yards of freestyle, and find yourself hanging on the wall trying to catch your breath. You might be asking yourself: “Why do I get tired swimming?”

If you’re reasonably fit on land but swimming leaves you exhausted after a length or two, your cardiovascular fitness may not be the main problem.

Swimming creates some challenges that running, cycling, and most other forms of exercise don’t. You have to coordinate your breathing with your movement. Your body has to stay balanced in an environment that constantly creates resistance. And inefficient movements can dramatically increase the amount of energy required to travel through the water.

For many developing adult swimmers, the answer isn’t simply to get in better shape. It’s to become a more efficient swimmer.

1. Your Body Position May Be Creating Too Much Drag

Imagine trying to ride a bicycle with the brakes lightly applied. You could still make the bike move by working harder and powering through it. Or you could simply take your hands off the brakes. Poor body position creates a similar problem in swimming.

If your head lifts, your hips and legs may sink. If your body isn’t well aligned, you’re pushing a larger surface through the water. If your legs are kicking primarily to keep you afloat rather than helping your swimming, they can consume a tremendous amount of energy.

The solution isn’t necessarily a stronger kick or pulling harder. It’s about getting level in the water and swimming through a narrower tube using balance, body line, and alignment. A swimmer needs learns to move through the water rather than just move water around by fighting against it. As you cut down on resistance, you’ll effectively slow down less between strokes and preserve your momentum. Reducing resistance is one of the closest things swimming has to getting distance and speed for free.

2. Breathing May Be Disrupting Your Entire Stroke

Sometimes a swimmer looks reasonably comfortable until it’s time to breathe. Then everything changes. The head lifts. The lead arm pushes down. The body loses alignment. The legs spread apart or kick harder to keep the swimmer from sinking. The swimmer gets the breath but has to rebuild the stroke afterward. Repeat that every few strokes and swimming becomes exhausting and enormously frustrating.

That’s why we don’t think of breathing as something separate from freestyle technique. Effective freestyle breathing depends on balance, rotation, timing and a comfortable exchange of air. Ideally, the breath fits into the stroke without requiring the rest of the stroke to stop working.

3. You May Be Holding Your Breath

Holding the breath is one of major culprits we examine when an otherwise fit swimmer becomes surprisingly winded. On land, you breathe whenever you want. Swimming is different. Your face is underwater much of the time, so breathing has to become part of the rhythm of your stroke.

Developing swimmers often take a breath, put their face back in the water, and hold some or all of that air until they’re ready for the next breath. Then they do an explosive exhale and gasping inhale during the brief moment their mouth is out of the water. That can quickly create the feeling that you’re desperate for air. A better pattern is to allow air to escape while your face is in the water so that, when you rotate to breathe, you primarily need to inhale.

For many adults, learning to exchange air comfortably is more important initially than trying to increase the number of laps they can swim.

4. You’re Working Much Harder Than You Think

Another common problem is intensity. A fit adult may approach swimming the way they approach running or cycling: if you’re not moving fast enough, work harder. Unfortunately, that can make swimming worse.

The swimmer kicks harder. Pulls harder. Moves the arms faster. Tightens the shoulders. Holds more tension through the body. Heart rate and breathing rate increase—but speed may barely change. Water is roughly 800 times denser than air, so fighting against it is expensive. Not to keep dropping the physics, but, as you double your speed, the resistance goes up by a factor of four. Pushing through it and working harder is most often the last thing you’d want to do.

Good swimmers aren’t simply capable of producing more force. They’re also good at avoiding unnecessary resistance and applying force effectively. If every 50 feels like a sprint, learning to swim easier may help you more than trying to swim harder. In fact, learning to swim easy is a critical first step in building the aerobic base you need to make swimming a great form of exercise.

5. You’re Trying to Create Fitness Before You’ve Created Efficiency

There absolutely is a conditioning component to swimming. Eventually, if you want to swim 500, 1,000 or 2,000 yards continuously, you have to develop the fitness to do it.

But there’s an important distinction between being tired because you’re appropriately challenging your swimming fitness and being tired because you’re spending far too much energy on every yard. If technique is the limiting factor, simply swimming more can sometimes mean practicing the same inefficient movements while becoming better at surviving them.

We’d rather improve the situation in the following order:

1. Reduce unnecessary resistance
2. Improve how effectively you apply pressure to the water
3. Learn to maintain those skills as distance and intensity increase.

When you can achieve all three steps, conditioning becomes much more productive.

So What Should You Do?

If you’re getting exhausted after 25 or 50 yards, don’t immediately judge your swimming by how far you can go. Instead, try swimming an easy 25 and pay attention to a few things:

• Balance: Do you feel supported by the water, or are you fighting to keep your hips and legs up?
• Breathing mechanics: Can you take a breath without the rest of the stroke falling apart?
• Breathing: Are you comfortably exchanging air, or holding your breath?
• Effort: Does an easy swim actually feel easy?
• Tension: Can you keep your neck, shoulders, hands and recovery relaxed?
• Repeatability: Can you swim another 25 with approximately the same technique?

Those observations can tell you much more than simply seeing how many laps you can survive.

The Goal Isn’t Just to Swim Farther. It’s to Swim Better.

One of the most rewarding moments in coaching adults is when a swimmer who has always considered swimming exhausting suddenly finishes a length and says: “That felt easy.” That’s an important breakthrough. They haven’t magically developed a new cardiovascular system. They’ve begun learning how to work with the water instead of constantly fighting against it.

From there, we can build distance. We can build speed. We can develop fitness. And, eventually, swimming can become something very different from the exhausting experience they started with.

At Chicago Blue Dolphins, we work with adults across that entire progression—from people learning to swim for the first time to experienced swimmers and triathletes trying to become more efficient.

If 50 yards currently feels much harder than you think it should, don’t assume you’re simply out of swimming shape. There may be a better way to swim those 50 yards.

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