defining a stroke

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.

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.