Today we want to talk about stroke efficiency and how to calculate your stroke efficiency. Now, for those of you that don't have a wearable, an apple watch or bootstrap, you know, or any of the other wearables that are out there giving you data. And even those of you that do wear these, the accuracy of what you do is really still kind of dependent on you.

So we're going to go through very easily how you can calculate your stroke efficiency, simply by counting strokes and getting your time, you can enter that data into the new app, and it will give you a score along with that score will come recommended videos based on that score. You can do this for any length of swim. But it's usually good to have a set or a test, set a test swim that you do. And you do that regularly, maybe once a week, maybe once every two weeks. If you do these things every day, if you do it too frequently, you're there's a chance you can be discouraged because it's not going to make huge differences in a short period of time. differences are made over a long period of time with a lot of study and focus and understanding of technique. So again, we're going to go very quickly through how to get your stroke efficiency on each stroke and how to enter it into the app. And let's go from there.

To effectively calculate your stroke efficiency index or SPI, we're going to need a couple of points of data. First of all, how long is your pool? 25 yards, 25 meters, 50 meters. The second thing is, what stroke are you doing? Next? How long did it take you to go from one end to the other. And finally, how many strokes Did you take. So we're going to look at our swimmer here, swimming freestyle. We'll start with the freestyle. And in order to get all this at the same time, what we're going to do is we're going to add a clock to right about the time that she's pushing off. So we try to sync that up a little bit. Mostly people will get it when their hand leaves the wall. So as Kerry's handling the wall, the clock has kind of started. So what we're going to do now is we're going to count the number of hand hits or times for hands hit the water. So the strokes that she takes, and each one is an individual stroke or hand hit. So let's just watch this now.

So we know that she took 16 strokes, we see that she has it took 19 seconds. And so we put those data points into the calculator, which then gives the CI or stroke efficiency index and then recommends videos.

We'll move on to breaststroke. Now we're going to count every propulsive phase on carries length of breaststroke. And you'll see that she does an underwater breaststroke pole, we're going to count that as a stroke because it is a is a complete pole and a complete kick. So some of these things will be variables we'll talk about in a little bit. So first, we'll get the clock set. And we will start here going.

Here comes the underwater pull, there's one stroke and one kick. So that's one complete stroke. With a long glide at the end. So we know that she took 10 strokes and 26 seconds. And she did have a long line at the end. But that deceleration is going to impact her stroke efficiency. So the trade-off of one more stroke in one more second or one less second could be significant.

The next stroke is backstroke. And one of the things that we're going to look at here is the number of underwater dolphins. Now we talked about it a little bit on free stuff. Now, you are encouraged to learn great underwater dolphins. But as you start the process of understanding stroke efficiency, do understand that the number of dolphin kicks you take underwater will it can impact your overall length, especially as you swim farther, you may run out of air. So the ability to hold air on the underwater dolphins is good. Using nose plugs is good. But it's really the consistency of how you measure your ci if you all of the sudden are taking to dolphin kicks off the wall and then on one length you take seven dolphin kicks. So that's going to reduce the number of strokes you take which will impact your stroke efficiency. Now the time that it takes to get from one into the other will also come into consideration. So there is a potential that you'll do more dolphin kicks, less strokes, and the same time that will impact your stroke efficiency. So we're going to start the clock now.

And we're going to count Carrie's strokes, not the underwater dolphins and a long glide again at the end. So 21 seconds 15 strokes. That's what we will use to calculate her stroke efficiency.

And finally, we get into butterfly is again, like freestyle or backstroke, it's going to be the hand hits out front pressure, it's the only one that's a little bit different. But right here a butterfly is very easy to tell. Again, we take into consideration how many underwater dolphin kicks Carrie takes if she gets started. Let's get her a little bit more forward. We're going to set the clock now. And here we go.

So 10 and 18 seconds, 10 strokes in 18 seconds. So that's what we will use to calculate her stroke efficiency for butterfly


Calculate Your Stroke Efficiency with the GoSwim App