Recently, we have developed a series of charge balanced polyampholytes (PA) physical hydrogels by random copolymerization in water, which show extraordinarily high toughness, self-healing ability and viscoelasticity. The excellent performance of PA hydrogels is ascribed to the dynamic ionic bonds formation through inter-and intra-chain interactions. The randomness makes ionic bonds of a wide strength distribution, the strong bonds, serve as permanent crosslinking, imparting the elasticity, while the weak bonds reversibly break and re-form, dissipating energy. In this work, we developed a simple physical method, named as pre-stretch method, to promote the performance of PA hydrogels.By imposing a pre-stretch on the sample at as-prepared state, the ion complexation during dialysis is prominently accelerated and the final performance is largely promoted. Further analysis suggests that the strong bonds formation induced by pre-stretch is responsible for the change in final performance. Pre-stretch decreases the entropy of system and increases the chain alignment, resulting in an increased possibility for strong bonds formation.