You're right, you count both arms so 46. For the speed you're swimming that's low but I'd see that as a great thing. You've got a very clear element you can work on.

You might find this a good read. I think the chart is pretty interesting rather than sticking to particular figures.

Coach said to me this summer swimming is not like running or cycling.

Priority being on the stroke length (dps and efficiency, hand leading elbow or high elbow).
So there is a lot of body-skill involved in turning the arms over.

I knew that already. But in achieving a higher elbow and not collapsing my arm (dropping elbow) I had to work a lot on re-wiring movement, and rotation etc. I had trouble due to mid-spine flexibility - still working on that in the gym every week.

The coach video'd me and after looking good setting the pull, the arm was caving. Easy to see!

I think after the stroke is sound enough, cadence can be applied. For this summer I really needed to go slower and work on that proper arm movement otherwise it can be just "beating up the water", which is counter productive.

Hope that makes sense. Maybe others can chime in on whether the above is accurate

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The Garmin measures one arm, so double that to 46 strokes/minute. The Garmin will also tell you strokes/length (or you can back calculate). Swimming 25y/short course, the length of your wall push-off will affect that relatively more of course, but will still give you a decent relative number.

Good news is that—while your tempo is very slow—at 1:48/100y pace and 46 strokes/min, you are doing 20.7 strokes/length, which is reasonable. If you managed to hold onto the same amount of water and keep your stroke count the same while increasing tempo to 60 strokes/minute, you’d be swimming at 1:23/100y pace.

But at your current pace and tempo, you are likely gliding a lot with significant dead spots . So when you try to increase your tempo with the same form, you’ll be taking a lot more strokes/length until you improve your catch and the amount of water you are grabbing and holding through the stroke.

Successful open water swimmers have a tempo of between 1.2 to 2.0 sec/cycle. This is about 55 strokes to over a 100 strokes a minute. The front pack men at Kona are usually between 1.3 and 1.6. If you are just starting out, focus on swimming hard in your workouts with a focus on improving your technique. Focus on one piece of your technique to improve at a time. I would pay attention to improving the efficiency of your stroke (generally considered distance per stroke) and your overall swim fitness. The last thing you would want to consider would be tempo.

Hope this helps.

Tim

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Many of the best open water swimmers have a high stroke rate (70-80+). Swimming in a pool is obviously different than open water swimming, and open water favors higher turnover in general (especially when the water is less than ideal). I don't know how much it's important to train to specifically increase your rate, but it's something to keep in mind. Overgliding is a thing and it's often detrimental to many folks (who aren't natural fast swimmers) in open water situations.

FWIW, I am on the pretty low end of swimmers my speed (stroke rate around 50-60 for longer sets/swims of 500 yards+) and am trying to work on being comfortable increasing my stroke rate, without it being the primary goal of my swim training. For me, it falls into the camp of "you can't improve what you don't measure". So being aware of it, being able to increase/decrease your rate as conditions allow and dictate is the first step.

I think that there is a bit of oversell by coaches who teach triathletes that length of stroke is the most important thing. It is true that comparing the stroke patterns of the best distance freestyle swimmers (Ledecky, Paltrinieri, Hackett, Thorpe, etc) ti newer swimmers in triathlon shows the triathletes to have pretty choppy strokes and not as much reach and glide.

My experience is that many tri coaches who don’t have a really solid background as swimmers miss the reasons for the long stroke, and instead teach it without knowing why top pool swimmers have this pattern and why they think newer tri swimmers need to have this pattern.

Firstly, however, I would like to say that a good pull pattern underwater is essential. Most tri coaches teach the GOALS properly, and can call out technique flaws when they don’t see smooth hand entry, reach, high elbow, pull with the lats, etc.

However, without understanding what limitations the triathletes themselves bring to swimming, and without knowing what separates the elite pool swimmers’ techniques, the coaches might be just creating some goals that in a pure sense are unattainable, while they should be teaching swimmers to make tweaks here and there with the goal of having a better stoke with more efficiency in a way that suits their bodies.

Before everyone starts flaming me, let me start by describing what I mean by “limitations,” and why teaching a very long teaching stroke doesn’t work with newer adult swimmers as it does with the best pool swimmers.

Adults who have come to tri with running or cycling backgrounds, or with very little athletic background are limited by range of motion issues, especially in their hips, ankles, and shoulders. These are important because flexibility and ROM in these areas are essential for the stroke the pool swimmers do, and swimmers have spent literally thousands of hours and millions of meters getting that. Especially with lifelong runners, ankle and hip flexibility and ROM is limited by the elasticity and tightness of of those joints that are normally used to bounce feet off pavement. Runners, cyclists, and AOS also don’t have the shoulder ROM built over the years by swimmers. Simple tests you can do prove this: can you plantarflex your feet so that the toes are really pointed, yet there’s a looseness in your ankles? In swimmers, that helps with the whip action of the kick. While standing, can you cover your ears with your delts, fully lock your elbows in extension, and put one hand over the other to create a sandwich? That ROM helps with the reach that coaches are getting after their swimmers for.

World class swimmers who we try to emulate have been swimming for decades. They’ve put in tens of millions of meters and tens of thousands of hours in training. They can each and roll so much further because they have powerful kicks, which power them through the dead phase of a stroke pattern that has an over-emphasized length and reach, in part because their ankles and hips allow for an easy whiplike action in the kick. They can reach so far because those decades of training have made their should ROM what it is, and their back muscles so strong.

I’m not trying to break any spirits here or try to say that the long reaching and rolling stroke is wrong or unattainable. I would just suggest that the emphasis be on what the natural ROM of new swimmers is, while teaching the essentials of a high elbow pull and a quiet hand entry and exit, along with smooth breathing technique and position. By all means, keep training!

I would also VERY strongly encourage triathletes with weaker swimming to spend the months of November to March doing almost exclusively swimming, with a coach and team who know what they’re doing. You have to put in the hours, especially in swimming. Here’s the catch, according to THIS coach: do as much swimming WITH FINS as possible. This runs counter to what most tri coaches say. But I say the fins will more rapidly help increase hip and ankle flexibility than anything. ABSOLUTELY ditch the pull buoy and floaty shorts. Do 30% of the free sets with paddles, to help increase ROM. The only problem I see with the fins approach is that it may take a slight bit of elasticity out of the ankles and hips, and therefore efficient energy return on foot strike in running. By the gains in swimming will give big returns.

As for cadence, it will rise with speed. However, the end goal isn’t the length of stroke. While you do want to reduce your full cycles per length as you get better on swimming, you’ll pick up speed with a higher cadence. Feel free to do a little bit shorter of a stroke to increase tempo, provided it isn’t choppy but is in your shoulder ROM and your kick can keep you moving. Think of it like pedaling in the small ring. You can do that all day, as opposed to grinding it out in the big ring for short bursts.

A few years ago, some triathletes I coached pledged to do a 100,000y or 90,000m swimming for the month of November. They basically did all their workouts as swimming. This included a 2:27 marathoner (who used fins much of the time), a pro 70.3-140.6 athlete, two AG Kona podium finishers, and a guy who got a KQ a few years later. All saw massive improvements in their spring events, with little or no loss in cycling or running performance.

Work with what you’ve got, make small changes, and if you really want to see a difference, put in lots of time over the late fall and winter in the pool. Just don’t sweat the whole long reach-shoulder roll stroke. It looks good on Ledecky and Paltrinieri, but they can run to save their lives.

I did a marathon swimming relay with my partner yesterday. We were about the same speed (normally about 22 minutes per km in calm water), but I noticed we had a very large difference in our cadence. He is about 45 strokes per minute and I'm about 60. The water temperature was 29°C.

Does that mean I'm inefficient and should learn from him? However, the squad coach always want me to increase my stroke rate from 60 to more than 64 or even 70 per minute, which I absolutely can't do that in 29°C due to overheating.

If you’re going the same speed, doesn’t really much make a difference. The overheating thing is a bit of a concern, so maybe consider going without a cap.

A quicker, shorter stroke is also more adaptable in OWS. You can react more quickly to current, elbows, waves, wind if your arms aren’t stretched out in the dead phase of your stroke. It’s more stable to have a shorter stroke. Same idea as 29” tires on a Mt bike: more contact with the ground and an easier time absorbing the bumps and stumps. You would definitely want a to push a baby stroller with bigger wheels over crappy sidewalks and high curbs. Even the ultra swimmers in Channel crossings have shorter strokes. The strokes just look long because they’re slow and tired. Swim “in the small ring.”

22/k ... willing to bet the issue isn't your stroke rate but probably poor head/body position.

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I don't think I have a poor body position as putting a pull buoy makes me even slower.

+1. Just for my own experience. I wasted and entire year trying to learn how to swim with a bunch of people telling different things (note to new triathletes...dont ask too many people for advice it doesn't end well). After frustration with no progress two things really helped me: speaking to a coach who had a sports science background and going to a Swim Smooth workshop. First, I will tackle the coach. When I talked him he told me needed to a one hour interview (at the time I thought that was strange). We met and he asked me to do a bunch of different things and he basically told me I have long arms and long legs (I am quite tall) but my lack of mobility would mean that I would able to do all the things you need to be a good swimmer starting with body position. It meant I would create so much drag that I would tire myself just trying to swim. Thats the short story...the second thing was going to a Swim Smooth session, where I learned (based on my own experience) that a lot of swim coaches try and apply the same principles to every swimmer. They don't take into account your body type, your mobility, your injuries anything. They just tell you (for example) every third stroke breath, you need a high elbow catch, your cadence is too low. They don't put anything in context for you or look at you in totality and then make recommendations, its the same formula for everyone. I was breathing every third stroke because thats what I was told to do, and was trying to force that just because I thought it was the only way to do it and I made NO PROGRESS. I made more progress in that two hour session with my swimming for a technique perspective than I had in a year. Again, thats the short story but what I have learned about cadence is that everyone differs and pool style doesn't always translate to OWS (try doing that pool glide in OW and then you come to a complete stop). Sorry the long story but thanks for to you for actually putting some context with the advice you gave. For those of us who are or were newbies its helps and will save a lot of frustration in the end. :)

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"see the world as it is not as you want it to be"

Thanks everyone for the comments, this is very interesting and some makes a lot of sense to me. I think I absolutely have a lot of dead spots and over gliding. In my head, reaching out and holding it seems to be smooth and good technique, but I know nothing about swimming. In videos I've watched it seems like good swimmers just look effortless. What jumped out at me is they would reach and almost hold, although my perception could be very off. Could be they were also exaggerating/slowing something to make it easy to see. I have someone to work with and will do that sooner than later.