“Everyone can sit and hold their breath for 20 seconds,” said Ana Martinez, 23, of the US. But try sprinting and spinning upside down and lifting your teammates up and out of the water multiple times for 2 to 3½ minutes.

In the team acrobatic event, there are seven lifts, and athletes may catch a breath for 10 seconds, but then it’s “back underwater when your heart rate is at the roof,” said Georgia Courage-Gardiner, 22, of Australia. “When my legs are jelly and my lungs are burning, I still have to stand on this [platform] that my teammates have created and push a person above me.”

At that point, Courage-Gardiner says, “I calm myself down before the lifts and go through the little checklist in in my head: This is what I need to do: Zoe jumps off me, I push her, then I turn.”

However, the checklist won’t be effective unless athletes’ bodies are fully prepared. To do that at the highest level, swimmers shared a few of their teams’ unique training techniques.

Australia: HIIT and Kettlebells

Courage-Gardiner said Australia’s new gym program has been focused on CrossFit, Kettlebells, and High Intensity Interval Training (or HIIT) sessions in the pool.

The HIIT sessions incorporate sections of Australia’s routines. The athletes might repeat one-minute pieces of a routine and rest only 10 seconds in between. And just when the athletes think they’re finished, a coach may throw in an extra piece.

Adding that little extra bit at the end when you’re already maxed out and quite dead,” Courage-Gardiner said, “will help you push through and break that [pain] barrier” in competition.

Then, in the gym, she said, “we’ll do some unconventional carries maybe with a weight above our head or some Kettlebells.  We’ve carried 24-kilo [53 lb.] Kettlebells – one in each hand, walked 10 meters, turned around, and walked back. Or carry a 30-kilo [66 lb.] medicine ball in a bear hug, walk 10 meters, and come back with it sitting on our lungs.”

Other days might involve picking up and hurling that 30 kg medicine ball over one shoulder, picking it up and doing it again, she said – “maybe five times per shoulder, rest, then do three more sets of 10.”

Or doing overhead press with a barbell loaded with 30 kg of plates (total).

Italy: Weight Belts and Tabata

Italy’s Sofia Mastroianni, 23, has the job of being on the very bottom of the team routines.  So twice a week, she and her teammates (except for the flyer) will practice in the pool wearing 4-5 kilogram [9-11 lb.] weight belts which means not only are the swimmers less buoyant, but they also have to lift the extra weight of their teammates.

The Italian team also spends almost two hours in the gym every day.  

On four of those days, Mastroianni said, they’ll do Tabata, a variation of high-intensity interval training. Normally, Tabata is 20 seconds of all-out exertion followed by 10 seconds of rest (a 2:1 work-to-rest ratio) but Mastroianni says the team will triple that and do 45 seconds of exercise with only 15 seconds of rest, “then change exercises, and do maybe four times a circuit of 10 exercises that work on legs, arms, and abs so maybe we’re doing squats, jumps, running.”

USA: Harnesses and STUNT

Nineteen-year-old Elle Santana is one of the flyers on the US team so the demands of her role are slightly different.  

“As a flyer, flexibility is most necessary,” she said.

“Also, as a flyer, we have to jump hard off our legs and use the force of our arms to get into the air. And when you’re in the air doing tricks or flips – or even the balance lifts – you have to be so set in your core. Basically, you have to be able to isolate parts of your body at different times.”

To that end, Santana said, “We do some cross training on trampolines in harnesses. We also have a STUNT coach who works at Cal Baptist University. He’s been able to add a different aspect, new grips, and teach the flyers how to control themselves, where to look and spot the water, especially when flipping.”

STUNT is an offshoot of competitive cheerleading that uses tosses, pyramids, and lifts in a head-to-head format. It is a quickly-growing varsity sport in high schools and universities in the US, and although it’s performed on dry land – as Santana points out, some of the skills are transferable.

Canada:  Weights and Injury Prevention

Canada’s Halle Pratt, 25, said her team has been not only focusing on stability and power, but also,  “doing a lot of injury-prevention stuff because new rules mean that certain movements are worth more points now, so you’ll tend to repeat those movements more to get more difficulty points. For example, when you turn from a knight position into a vertical position, you’re rotating your left shoulder a lot. So we try to keep everything stable to avoid injuries that can really mess up your shoulders.”

That means Team Canada is in the gym three days a week, usually in the morning before they spend six more hours in the water. Two of those gym days will be deemed high-intensity.

“We all work in different things in the gym,” Pratt said. “ I probably work a bit more on my leg strength – and we ALL work on our upper-body strength.”

Her approach, she said, is to use heavy weight and do only a few reps. Asked to define “heavy,” Pratt said she’ll do single-leg presses on machine with 70 kilos [154 lbs.] on each leg, just five per side, then repeat the set three times. Or, for seated leg extensions, she’ll build up to lifting 60kg [132 lbs.] four or five times by her last set.  Or, for single-arm lat pulldowns, she’ll pull about 50kg [110 lbs.], six times per arm.

When all that training becomes especially grueling, Pratt says one thing always helps: “Feeding off the team energy. We really motivate each other. When people are feeling like, ‘This is really hard,’ you can see it in each other’s eyes. So we pump each other up and try to keep the energy high, even when it’s tough.”