According to the Masters swimming rulebook, “technically” a stroke is butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, or freestyle. But this isn’t what you are looking for. So according to my Webster’s dictionary a stroke is: 1) one of a series of propelling beats or movements against a resisting medium , 2) a single unbroken movement; especially: one of a series of repeated or to-and-fro movements
My third source for the technical definition of a “stroke” is the coach. And, while your individual coaches may vary, mine considers a stroke to be 1 arm pull. At least, this holds true, when she is asking for us to count our strokes or breath every third or fifth stroke. And since the first rule of swimming is “The coach is always right, even when they are wrong”, I have to go with the coach and say one stroke is one arm pull.
I always thought that a FULL STROKE was like a FULL cycle, so from say Right hand entry and then left hand entry all the way back to the start (2 PULLS in other words)
I'll echo Rob's sentiments, but from a coaches viewpoint. What a "stroke" means is whatever your coach wants it to mean. Anything else and you have "failure to communicate", as Strother Martin's Captain would put it. Or, put another way, if your concept of what a "stroke" means differs significantly from your coach's concept then your life will be tougher than it needs to be till you "get your mind right".
We already have a term, "stroke cycle", for the set of actions that involves BOTH arms starting and completing their motions to return to where the previous cycle started from. It only makes sense to have the single word "stroke" refer to some subset of the "stroke cycle". If not, then someone needs come up with a term pretty quickly.
So, in our program, one has his mind right when one refers to the actions of ONE arm - at least in the long axis strokes.
