I'll Show You My Stroke Count If You Show Me Yours

Enough feel-good recovery talk for a minute. It's time to get back to some hard numbers.

We've spent a lot of time cutting junk yardage out of your week. The next place to find free speed is inside every single length you swim. Specifically, how many strokes it takes you to get from one wall to the other. How many are you using? Where are they going? And can you cut some of them without slowing down?

The answer is yes. Check this out.

Say you're a fairly typical age-group triathlete taking 20 strokes per 25 yards. Now say you clean up your swimming enough to take 19. One stroke. That's it.

"Meh," you might say. "One stroke doesn't mean much to me."

Fine. Here's what one stroke per 25 adds up to over a race:

• Sprint (750m): about 33 fewer strokes
• Olympic (1500m): about 66 fewer strokes
• 70.3 (1.2 miles): about 84 fewer strokes
• Ironman (2.4 miles): about 169 fewer strokes

Still meh? Try it this way. At 20 strokes per 25, those saved strokes are like getting free distance. About 40 yards of a sprint swim. About 80 yards of an Olympic. Over 100 yards of a 70.3. And over 200 yards of an Ironman swim, done for you, without lifting your arm once. That's 5 percent fewer pulls, every single time, for the entire race.

And that's one stroke. Most triathletes I see have a lot more than one to give.

Here In The TRI Swim Club Pool

When I swim aerobically, I'm usually at about 10 strokes per 25 yards. I'm not telling you that to brag. Okay, a little. I'm telling you because it shows how far the range goes. Strokes aren't fixed. They're a result of how you swim, and how you swim can change.

But Stroke Count Isn't Speed

Before anyone runs off to the pool to glide their way to a 6-stroke length, let's be clear. A low stroke count doesn't automatically mean you're fast. You can take very few strokes by kicking off the wall hard, gliding forever, and swimming slowly. Congratulations, you're efficient at going nowhere.

What stroke count shows you is efficiency. How much distance you get out of every pull. Speed shows you how fast you're covering the distance. The goal is both at once: fast, without spending much energy to get there. That's the swimmer who comes out of the water near the front and still has legs for the bike.

A handy way to track both together is SWOLF, which a lot of swim watches already show you. It's your time for a length plus your stroke count for that length. Lower is better. If your stroke count drops but your time goes up just as much, you didn't get better, you just moved the numbers around. If both come down, now we're talking.

The Free Strokes In Open Water

Here's a bonus most people never think about. Drafting lowers your stroke count too. Sit on someone's feet or hip in open water and you're moving through water that's already been pushed out of the way, so every stroke carries you a little further. That's one more reason making the pack in the first 400 matters so much. The draft doesn't just save energy, it saves strokes.

The Big Three

So how do you actually get your count down? Hit these three and almost anyone can drop a stroke or two per length.

1. Body position. Stop looking forward. Look down at the bottom of the pool, keep your neck long, engage your core, and keep your legs working so your hips stay up near the surface. Sinking hips are like dragging an anchor behind you. Every stroke you take is partly spent fighting your own legs. Lift the hips and the same stroke suddenly carries you further.

2. A better catch. Most triathletes slide their hand forward and push water down or sideways, which does almost nothing. A good catch means a high elbow and getting your forearm vertical early, so your whole forearm and hand are grabbing water and pushing it straight back. More water moved per stroke means fewer strokes needed. This is the single biggest technical difference between swimmers who look effortless and swimmers who look busy.

3. Hip-driven freestyle. Stop swimming with just your arms. Your arms and shoulders are small muscles, and they tire out fast. Drive each stroke with a rotation from your hips and core, and let your lats do the pulling. You've got big muscles in your back and middle, so use them. As a bonus, rotating from the hips puts you on your side more often instead of lying flat, and a body on its side cuts through the water with a lot less drag than one lying flat across it.

Fix those three, and a couple of strokes per 25 is a very realistic goal. Do the race math again with two or three strokes saved instead of one, and it gets a lot less meh.

Your One Job This Week: Play A Round Of "Golf"

Next session, let's play a round of swim golf. It's exactly what SWOLF is, time plus strokes, and like real golf, lowest score wins.

Here's the course. Swim 4x50 with plenty of rest between each, about a minute, so you're playing fresh instead of just getting tired. For each 50, check your time and count every stroke. Add them together. That's your score for the hole.

So if you swim a 50 in 33 seconds and take 20 strokes, your score is 53.

Then play the next hole and try to beat it. Hold your stroke longer and see what happens to your time. Kick harder and see what happens to your count. Lift your hips, grab more water with the catch, drive from your hips. You'll find out pretty fast which changes actually make you better and which ones just shuffle the numbers around.

Write down your best hole of the four. That's your number. Send it in and tell me what you got, and let's see who wins.

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