The Power Shift: Why Quality Is Replacing Quantity in Masters Swimming
One of the unexpected benefits of hosting Torpedo Swimtalk Podcast over the past six years has been the opportunity to spot patterns. After many conversations with Masters world champions, coaches, sports scientists and strength specialists, certain themes begin to emerge. Sometimes they reinforce what we already believe about swimming. Occasionally, they challenge it completely.
One of those themes resurfaced during a recent conversation with British Masters world champion Martin Bennell.
Bennell arrived at the World Championships in Singapore and produced the meet of his life. He left with multiple British records, lifetime best performances and three world titles. Naturally, I wanted to know more about the training behind those results. Like many swimmers, I assumed there must be huge mileage involved. Endless laps. Double sessions. A life built around chasing volume.
Instead, Bennell spoke about discipline, consistency and purposeful training. He described himself as someone who has "more discipline than most" and explained that much of his swimming training has been built around "two, three times a week, one-hour swims". It wasn't the answer I expected. More importantly, it wasn't the first time I had heard something similar.
Over the years, I have interviewed swimmers in their thirties right through to their seventies and beyond, who continue to improve long after conventional wisdom suggests they should have plateaued. Different countries. Different backgrounds. Different events. Yet again and again, a common thread emerges. The swimmers continuing to thrive are rarely obsessed with simply doing more. More often, they are focused on becoming stronger, moving better, recovering better and making every session count.
Martin's story made me realise that perhaps many of us are asking the wrong question.
Spend enough time around a Masters pool deck and you'll hear plenty of conversations about fitness. How many sessions should we be doing? How many kilometres are enough? Should we be swimming more? But what if the biggest challenge facing many Masters swimmers isn't aerobic fitness at all? What if it's power?
The Old Masters Swimming Playbook
For decades, swimming culture has been built around volume. Many of us grew up in an era where success was measured in kilometres. The hardest workers were often assumed to be the best athletes. More sessions were better than fewer sessions. More metres were better than fewer metres. Fatigue was worn almost as a badge of honour. If you weren't improving, the answer was usually simple: swim more.
To be fair, that philosophy wasn't completely wrong. Swimming is a technical endurance sport, and building an aerobic engine remains important. Young swimmers often benefit enormously from high volumes of quality training. But Masters swimming is different.
Most of us are no longer seventeen-year-olds with endless recovery capacity and afternoons free for double sessions. We bring jobs, families, travel, injuries, stress and ageing physiology to the pool deck. Recovery matters more. Sleep matters more. Strength matters more.
And increasingly, it seems that training quality matters more too. The question is no longer simply how much work can I do? The more useful question might be: what type of work will have the greatest impact?
What The Science Actually Says
The science of ageing provides some clues. While aerobic fitness certainly declines with age, it often remains surprisingly trainable well into later life. What tends to disappear much faster is strength, power and the ability to generate force quickly.
Sports scientists refer to part of this process as sarcopenia, the age-related loss of muscle mass and strength. Beginning gradually and accelerating after middle age, sarcopenia affects virtually everyone to some degree. For athletes, however, the issue goes beyond muscle mass alone.
Fast-twitch muscle fibres, the fibres responsible for speed, explosiveness and acceleration, gradually decline in both number and size. At the same time, the nervous system becomes less efficient at recruiting those fibres quickly and forcefully. The result is a gradual loss of power.
Importantly, power often declines faster than strength, and strength often declines faster than endurance. For swimmers, this can be difficult to recognise. You may still feel fit. You may still be able to complete long aerobic sets. Yet starts become less explosive. Turns lose their snap. The ability to surge at the end of a race becomes harder to access. The swimmer beside you gains half a body length off every wall despite having similar aerobic fitness. Many Masters swimmers assume they are losing fitness. In reality, they may be losing power. And that distinction matters because more aerobic swimming doesn't necessarily solve a power problem.
My Own Wake-Up Call
That idea has become increasingly relevant to me over the past few years. When I returned to competitive swimming after more than twenty-five years out of the water, my instinct was the same as many swimmers. If I wanted to improve, I needed to swim more. And certainly, consistency in the pool helped enormously. There is no substitute for time in the water when rebuilding feel, timing and confidence.
But when I look honestly at some of my biggest improvements over the past few years, they have not always coincided with simply adding more swimming volume. More often, they have coincided with becoming stronger and becoming more purposeful in the way I train.
As strength training became a consistent part of my week, things started to change. My open water performances improved. I felt stronger late in races. My ability to hold pace improved. Starts and turns became more powerful. Perhaps most importantly, I felt more robust. My body tolerated training better, recovered better and coped more consistently across a long season.
At the same time, my swimming shifted away from the traditional mindset of accumulating endless kilometres. Instead, more of my pool work became focused on race pace, anaerobic threshold and the specific demands of the events I actually race. Broken 100s and 200s, pace-control sets, race-pace repetitions and quality aerobic work began replacing much of the slow, mindless swimming that had once dominated my Masters training programs. Rather than simply becoming fitter, I was teaching my body to swim faster, hold speed longer and repeatedly reproduce the demands of racing.
Looking back, the biggest gains did not come from any single change. They came from the combination of becoming a stronger athlete in the gym and a more purposeful swimmer in the pool. The two worked together. Strength gave me greater physical capacity, while race-specific swimming taught me how to apply that capacity when it mattered most. I didn't suddenly become twenty years younger, but I did become a better athlete.
Coaches Are Seeing The Same Thing
One of the most memorable comments I've heard on Torpedo Swimtalk came from Western Australian coach and strength specialist Ryan Evernden, "If you don't have the physical capacity to do something, it doesn't matter how many times you tell someone how to do it."
It's a simple statement, but it challenges one of swimming's most cherished beliefs. Swimming culture loves technique. We analyse catches, entries, rotations and body position. We spend hours discussing stroke mechanics and searching for technical improvements. Yet Ryan's point is difficult to ignore.
If a swimmer lacks the mobility, stability or strength to achieve a position in the water, no amount of technical instruction can fully compensate. A swimmer may know exactly what a great catch should look like, but without the physical capacity to hold that position under load, the technique breaks down. In many cases, the limitation is not technical, it's physical.
American strength coach Jack Brown made a similar point when we discussed preparing swimmers for the demands of the sport, "If your body can't handle what you're asking it to handle, of course at some point you're going to face injury. But if we can prepare and truly be ready for the sport, then you're more equipped."
That phrase “ready for the sport” stuck with me.
Many Masters swimmers train incredibly hard in the water while neglecting the physical preparation that allows them to perform effectively. Strength, mobility and resilience are often treated as optional extras when they may actually be foundational. How often do you pre-activate before a session?
New York swimmer and coach Dan Daly sees swimming and strength through the same lens. Rather than treating them as separate disciplines, he views them as complementary parts of the same athletic system. Discussing Masters swimmers returning to training, Daly explained that he would want strength work included from the beginning because swimming, despite being relatively kind on the body, still creates repetitive stresses and imbalances. Without complementary work, those imbalances can eventually contribute to aggravation or injury.
Taken together, these coaches are pointing towards the same conclusion. The goal is not simply to become a fitter swimmer. The goal is to become a more capable athlete.
What The Champions Are Actually Doing
Perhaps the most compelling evidence comes from the athletes themselves.
British world record holder Jo Corben once laughed during our conversation that her coach had "managed to get this old woman swimming faster than I did when I was a child." It's a wonderful quote because it captures both the humour and the possibility that exists within Masters swimming. Faster than her teenage self. Not despite being older, but while being older. Of course, nobody is suggesting that ageing doesn't matter. It does. But Jo's story reminds us that improvement remains possible for far longer than many athletes realise.
Her coach, Tony Corben, has never been obsessed with endless mileage. Instead, his philosophy places enormous emphasis on quality execution, skills, starts, turns and technical detail. Tony's coaching philosophy can perhaps be summed up in a simple phrase: "the little things matter". The details compound. Small gains accumulated over years become significant gains.
The same pattern appears in my interview with Canadian world champion Cindy Mabee. Despite competing successfully at the highest levels of Masters swimming, Mabee has often balanced swimming with triathlon, strength work and other athletic pursuits. At various points she has trained only two or three times per week in the pool.
Again, the lesson isn't that everyone should immediately reduce their swimming volume. The lesson is that performance is multi-dimensional. Swimming fitness is only one part of the equation because strength, power, mobility, recovery and skill matter as well. Most importantly, how those pieces fit together matters.
A Quiet Shift In Masters Swimming
Listening to these conversations over the years, I've found myself wondering whether Masters swimming is in the middle of a quiet shift. For decades, success was often measured by how much work an athlete could tolerate. More sessions. More kilometres. More fatigue. Yet the athletes producing some of the most impressive performances today seem to be approaching the sport differently. Rather than asking how much training they can cram into a week, they are asking what training will deliver the greatest return.
Martin Bennell's success in Singapore wasn't a victory for low-volume training. It was a victory for purposeful training. The same theme appears in the stories of Jo Corben, Cindy Mabee and the coaches featured in this article. Swimming fitness still matters, but it is increasingly being supported by strength training, mobility work, power development, race-specific swimming and a greater emphasis on recovery.
Perhaps the biggest lesson is that many Masters swimmers don't necessarily need more training. They need more targeted training. The goal is not to accumulate kilometres for the sake of it, but to identify the factors that are most likely to improve performance and focus on those relentlessly. Strength gave me greater physical capacity, while race-specific swimming taught me how to apply that capacity when it mattered most. Increasingly, I suspect that combination is where many Masters swimmers will find their greatest gains.
Footnote
In a forthcoming article, I'll move from the theory spoken about here, to what this looks like on pool deck and in the gym. We'll look at the types of strength training, race-pace work, threshold sets and quality-focused swimming sessions that are helping Masters athletes continue improving well into middle age and beyond.