Stroke rate

It often happens that when we watch professional swimmers, we get the impression that they are completing lengths with very few strokes. This is misleading, especially when we want to imitate them, because most people do not realize that they do take fewer strokes per length than we do, but they do not pay attention to the speed at which they swim, which is higher than us swim.

Neither we usually take into account their size, their height, their technique, their strength, much less do we think about the degree of sensitivity to water that they have and we do not. We leave out many important variables and only stay in appearance.

For example, the average height of the champions of the crawl events (50m, 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, 1500m, 10k, and triathlon) in the recent Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 was: 186cm the boys , and 176 cm the girls. These values are far from the average height of amateur swimmers.

If we want to imitate these portents and wanting to swim taking a few strokes per length without realizing how slow we are, generate many errors: over gliding, swimming with stop and starts without thinking about the density of the water, raising your hands at the entrance generating a brake, push the water down instead of backwards, increase the beat because you are not pulling with the arms and therefore generating more fatigue, etc.

Next I show you a table with the winners of the crawl races at the Olympic Games, with the approximate calculation of their swim cycles per minute in different parts of the race, the average cycles per minute, final time, and average swimming pace at 100m.

50m crawl
Swimmer	Height	Cycles 20m	Cycles 30m	Cycles 40m	Average Cycles	Final Time
Caeleb Dressel	191 cm	65	65	65	65	21.07
Emma Mckeon	180 cm	60	60	60	60	23.81

100m crawl
Swimmer	Height	Cycles 40m	Cycles 70m	Cycles 90m	Average Cycles	Final Time	Swimming Pace 100m
Caeleb Dressel	191 cm	50	50	60	53	47.02	47.02
Emma Mckeon	180 cm	50	50	50	50	51.96	51.96

200m crawl
Swimmer	Height	Cycles 50m	Cycles 100m	Cycles 150m	Cycles 200m	Average Cycles	Final Time	Swimming Pace 100m
Tom Dean	194 cm	40	40	40	42	40.5	1:44.22	52.11
A Titmus	177 cm	48	48	48	48	48	1:53.50	56.75

400m crawl
Swimmer	Height	Cycles 100m	Cycles 200m	Cycles 300m	Cycles 400m	Average Cycles	Final Time	Swimming Pace 100m
A Hafnaoui	178 cm	40	40	42	44	41.5	3:43.36	55.84
A Titmus	177 cm	43	43	43	47	44	3:56.69	59.17

800m crawl
Swimmer	Height	Cycles 200m	Cycles 400m	Cycles 800m	Average Cycles	Final Time	Swimming Pace 100m
Robert Finke	185 cm	38	38	45	40	7:41.07	57,63
K Ledecky	183 cm	45	45	45	45	8:12.57	01:01.57

1500m crawl
Swimmer	Height	Cycles 500m	Cycles 1000m	Cycles 1500m	Average Cycles	Final Time	Swimming Pace 100m
Robert Finke	185 cm	37	37	45	39.5	14:39.65	58,64
K Ledecky	183 cm	43	41	43	42	15:37.34	01:02,48

10 k
Swimmer	Height	Cycles Last KM	Final Time	Swimming Pace 100m
F Wellbrock	192 cm	38	1:48:33.7	1:05,13
A.M. Cunha	163 cm	47	1:59:30.8	01:11,70

Triathlon 1500m
Swimmer	Height	Lap 1	Lap 2	Average Cycles	Final Time	Swimming Pace 100m
V Luis	177 cm	37	40	38.5	17:39	01:10,60
J Learmonth	168 cm	45	45	45	18:24,00	01:13

If you prefer to count the strokes, you can multiply the cycles by two to know the strokes per minute that the swimmers are doing in the different chosen parts of the races.

As advice and to be aware of what w are trying in this post, it would be perfect if you tried to swim 25 or 50m at those frequencies strokes using a metronome.

And yes, they give fewer strokes per length than us, but swimming much faster, having a stroke rate much higher than we can bear, and above all because they catch much more water by applying much more strength than we are, and not because of OVERGLIDING, which is what happens to us when we want to imitate them.

In conclusion, we must adapt the ideal swimming pattern to our characteristics, and not the other way around. It would be good to take a frequency stroke test to see which is the best fit to our characteristics and sensations.