Swimming calculator
SWOLF calculator
Swim golf: the strokes you take for a length plus the seconds it takes you. Enter one length and get your score normalised across 25 m, 50 m and 25 yd pools, so it means the same thing everywhere. Free, instant, no sign-up.
You are covering 1.39 m per stroke at 54 strokes a minute. SWOLF prices one stroke at one second, so two fewer strokes and two more seconds would score exactly the same 38 — and be a slower length. Read the score with your pace beside it, never on its own.
Efficiency is a technique problem — the coach keeps the rest of the week honest while you fix it.
What is SWOLF?
SWOLF is swim golf, a drill popularised by Gennadi Touretski — Alexander Popov's coach — and now computed automatically by every swim watch on the market. Count your strokes for a length, add the seconds it took, and try to shoot a lower number. Adding a stroke count to a stopwatch reading is dimensional nonsense, and that is exactly the point: it prices a stroke at one second and makes you trade the two against each other.
How this calculator works
The raw score is strokes plus seconds for one length, and it only compares against another score from the same pool — both halves scale with the length, so a 50 m score is roughly double a 25 m one. We normalise every score to 25 m using the pool's real length in metres, which also handles the short-course yards pool properly at 22.86 m instead of pretending it is 25. Then we split the score into the two things you can actually train: distance per stroke, and stroke rate.
What is a good SWOLF score?
For freestyle at a steady aerobic effort in a 25 m pool, most club swimmers land in the high 30s to high 40s, competent age-groupers in the mid 30s, and elite distance swimmers in the low 30s or below. Treat those as orientation only. SWOLF has no governing body and no published norms, breaststroke and butterfly score around ten points higher than freestyle at the same fitness, and every score falls as the effort rises. The only comparison that means much is against your own score in the same pool, same stroke, same effort.
Lowering it without swimming slower
The trap is chasing the stroke count. Gliding drops strokes, adds seconds, and can leave the score unchanged while the swim gets slower — which is why this page prints your pace next to it. Take a set of 10 × 50, hold a target time, and try to cut one stroke per length: if the time holds, the efficiency is real. Check the score at race effort as well as at cruise, too. A swimmer whose SWOLF collapses the moment the pace rises has a stroke that only survives when it is easy.