What’s YOUR best stroke count: How I found mine. And why it’s still evolving

The answer to “What’s your best stroke count?” is “It depends.” As we hope to make clear with our Green Zone chart, any swimmer should have a range of efficient counts. not a single all-purpose count. But that range may evolve–upward or downward–over time. Therefore it helps to be flexible–but not complacent–about this.

I consider stroke count such an important measure that I’ve counted almost every stroke I’ve taken in pool practices and Masters races for the past 25 years. I’ve done this because Strokes Per Length (SPL) is a simple, moment-by-moment measure of Stroke Length (SL)–long recognized as the strongest factor correlating with higher-level performance.

Is it difficult to count strokes? It can be at the beginning. But if you are patient and consistent in doing it, it becomes second nature fairly quickly. For many years it has required almost no brainpower for me to maintain an accurate count, which allows me to also pay close attention to my focal points–and even remember most of my stroke count details to record in a practice log an hour or so after finishing practice.

Here’s a brief history of my SPL Journey:

1964-1972 Throughout my years on summer league, high school, and college teams I believed that a fast turnover was all that mattered in swimming fast. I never counted strokes–and never swam fast either. Recalling the windmill sensation of my stroke during those years, I’m fairly sure my average count was above 20SPL for 25 yards.

1973-1989 From Day One of my coaching career, I became convinced of the importance of longer strokes. Soon after I began to have my swimmers count strokes on certain training sets.  The objective of these sets was to consciously reduce the count as a stroke-lengthening exercise. I also began to instruct them to add the time for the repeat to the stroke count to achieve a score. This was an early–though primitive–way of taking Stroke Rate into account.

These were just two, among many, modalities I used to improve my swimmers’ efficiency. I swam irregularly during this time, but had begun counting my own strokes. The lowest count I could attain for 25 yards was 17SPL, because I didn’t yet know much about streamlining. (Learn about streamlining in our 1.0 Effortless Endurance Freestyle Self-Coaching Course.)

1990-2004 As we began teaching ‘Fishlike’ technique to TI camp and workshop attendees, I gained a steadily increasing understanding of ‘vessel-shaping’ as Bill Boomer termed it. The first 10 years of my own TI practice, I worked assiduously  to reduce my stroke count. It dropped steadily until in the early 2000s, I managed once (while swimming with Shane Gould in Perth, Australia) to cross a 50m pool in 26 strokes . My SPL in 25y pools was typically 10 to 13.

2005-2014 I first used a Tempo Trainer in 2004. This revealed to me that I’d been focused so intently on lowering my SPL that I had dramatically slowed my stroke rate to do so. Consequently, I had a bit of a “rut” in my nervous system, unable to swim comfortably  and efficiently at tempos of 1.2 sec/stroke or faster. As a result, I wasn’t swimming very fast. But I could go long. I swam the Manhattan Island Marathon in 2002 at an average SR of 49 strokes per minute (about 1.2 sec/stroke), completing my 28.5-mile loop in 30% fewer strokes than nearly anyone else in the field.

Tempo Trainer–the efficient, and fast, swimmer’s friend.

Beginning in 2005 my emphasis shifted from maximizing stroke length to maximizing the paces at which I could swim–without forgetting that one needs both Length and Rate to achieve Velocity. The Tempo Trainer was an invaluable tool to achieving comfort and maintaining efficiency at tempos as fast as .85 sec/stroke–about 70 strokes per minute. While I only swam at this tempo infrequently, doing so made me even more comfortable at my typical racing tempo (for a mile in open water) of .95 seconds.

As a result of increasing tempo, my range of SPL in a 25 yd pool rose to 13-16.  According to the Green Zone chart, this is a zone of exceptional efficiency for someone of my 6′ height.

Find your efficient stroke count range of 25y pools.

2015-2017 During the past two years, my stroke count range has increased again–mainly as a result of cancer treatments that have sapped my strength. So now my SPL range in a 25y pool is 14-17. My tempo is also down considerably, because my red blood cell count is lower than it used to be, meaning the rate of oxygen delivery to my muscles is down quite a bit. My fastest comfortable tempo at the moment is 1.2. That combination of taking more strokes and a considerably higher tempo (which means the ‘time cost’ of every added stroke is now about 1.2 seconds whereas it used to be about 1 second) is the ‘mathematical’ reason my times have slowed considerably.

At 14-17 SPL I remain within my Green Zone and have a far more efficient stroke than I did in my teens, 20s, and 30s. As this account illustrates, your stroke count can go down, then you might choose to let it rise again. It makes swimming interesting and fun and keeps your brain engaged.

Learn More

If there was any period during which I feel I overachieved, with regards to my full  potential, it was between 2006 and 2011, during which I won all of my six National Masters Open Water Championships. medaled in the World Masters OW Championship and broke two USMS records. I’ve recorded many of the insights I gained then on optimizing Stroke Length and Tempo in Lesson 4 of our 2.0 Freestyle Mastery Self Coaching Course. Click here to order.