Training Tools for Competitive Swimmers
Train Elite. Swim Fast.
AI coaching, 3D biomechanics visualizer, technique library, workout generator, pool-deck timers, race planner, training analytics, race strategy, nutrition, mental performance, taper protocols — everything a competitive swimmer needs.
Tidelyne
Two ways to swim
Pick one to get started. You can change your mind whenever you like.
Individual
The whole site, free, straight away. Your training log is saved in this browser, and nothing about it is sent anywhere unless you choose to sync it to your own account.
- Every tool, library and calculator
- Signed out, your log stays on this device
- Works in a pool building with no signal
- Only the four AI features ask who you are
Team
Your coach creates a team and gives you a code. Practices go to a board your squad and your coach share.
- A practice log built for a squad, not one swimmer
- Fix a practice you typed wrong — on the record
- See what everyone swam, and leave notes
- A distance leaderboard for the whole team
A Complete
Training Platform
Built on established sports science and competitive programming.
3D Stroke Visualizer
Elite stroke demos on video, paired with an interactive 3D biomechanics model — slow any movement down, orbit any angle, isolate a single phase.
- Real elite technique video for every stroke
- Joint-by-joint 3D reconstruction
- AI: describe any movement, watch it rebuilt
- Phase-by-phase coaching breakdown
AI Swim Coach
Coaching answers that stream word by word — briefed on race strategy, technique, and physiology. Free account required.
- Real-time streaming output
- General coaching knowledge — check its numbers against the pages here
- Race prep & taper advice
- Physiology explained with numbers
Technique Library
Phase-by-phase breakdowns of every stroke, turn and start, with elite benchmarks and coaching cues.
- Freestyle, back, breast, fly & IM
- Underwaters, turns and starts
- Drills with elite benchmarks
- A coaching cue on every card
Race Strategy
Meet-day timeline, warm-up protocol, pacing science and race plans for the core events.
- Meet-day timeline & warm-up protocols
- Race plans for the 50, 100, 200, 100 breast and 200 IM
- Split targets & pacing science
Nutrition & Fueling
Pre-training, intra-session, and recovery nutrition. Race-day fueling and everyday habits for swimmers.
- Daily fueling around AM/PM sessions
- Race-day and between-event eating
- Recovery & hydration protocols
Mental Performance
Visualization protocols, arousal control, race-day anxiety management, focus techniques.
- Visualization protocols
- Arousal & race-anxiety control
- Focus cues and a pre-race routine
Stroke Visualizer
Watch real elite technique on video, then study the same movement joint-by-joint in the interactive 3D biomechanics lab below.
Watch It — Real Stroke Demos
Freestyle · Demo Freestyle stroke breakdown
Division I coach breakdown of front crawl technique.
Backstroke · Demo Backstroke with perfect technique
Six elements of backstroke with perfect technique.
Breaststroke · Demo Breaststroke timing & coordination
Pull-breathe-kick-glide timing and coordination.
Butterfly · Demo Master butterfly undulation
Olympian Dylan Carter on mastering butterfly undulation.
Underwater · Demo Gretchen Walsh's underwater dolphin kick
One of the fastest underwater dolphin kicks in the world, broken down.
Study It — 3D Biomechanics Lab
A realistic human swimmer, built in your browser from real athlete proportions and driven by elite stroke-phase timing. Slow it down, orbit any angle, isolate a phase or X-ray the skeleton — and see what video moves too fast to show.
Left and Right arrow keys step through the stroke phases, here and on the phase strip along the bottom of the frame, where Home and End jump to the first and last phase; the stroke and phase buttons below do the same. Plus and Minus zoom in and out; drag to orbit, and once the lab is focused the scroll wheel zooms too. Each phase is described in words in the panel underneath.
Drag to orbit · Click the lab, then scroll to zoom (or hold Ctrl/⌘, or use the zoom buttons) · Drag to orbit · Use the ＋ / － buttons to zoom · Choose a phase on the strip under the swimmer to jump to it
Force and velocity values are illustrative teaching approximations, not measured data — glide-phase drag in particular is shown well below measured passive drag (about 50–70 N at 2 m/s) so the propulsive phases stay readable. The arrows show the direction and the relative size of the forces through the cycle, not a scale you can integrate: the speeds are keyed to elite race data and the forces to readability, so the two are not numerically consistent. Efficiency is an illustrative economy index — the share of a phase's effort that becomes forward motion, so a passive streamline reads highest — not measured propelling efficiency. Lift here is the vertical support the stroke and kick give the body (it keeps the hips high), shown separately from thrust — not the lift component of the hand force that propulsion papers describe. The numbers are keyed to an elite male swimmer; the female model shares them — elite women swim about 10–13% slower in the 50s and 100s the lab is keyed to, narrowing to 6–7% at 400 m and beyond.
Select a stroke
Ask the Visualizer
Ask the AI to explain any biomechanical concept with detailed force analysis, phases, and coaching cues — streamed in real time. Free account required.
AI-generated from general biomechanics knowledge — angles, depths and forces are typical values, not measurements of you or of the lab above; check anything you act on with your coach.
Select a concept and press Generate.
Response streams in real time.
Technique Library
Phase-by-phase breakdowns — pull mechanics, timing, breathing, underwaters, turns, starts and the IM — with elite benchmarks, exact numbers, and the physiology behind the movement.
Entry & High Elbow Catch
▾Hand enters in line with the shoulder — between the shoulder line and the head, never across the centerline — at 10–15° downward. The high elbow catch is the single highest-ROI skill in swimming. Elbow rises and flares outward while wrist presses down, creating a large vertical forearm surface against still water.
- Entry angle
- 10–15° below horizontal.
- Elbow height
- Always above wrist through catch.
- Catch depth
- Forearm vertical, hand below the elbow — about 40–50 cm deep at the catch and ~55 cm at its deepest mid-pull (what the 3D lab shows).
- Elite catch
- From entry to a locked catch takes about 0.3–0.45 s at race rate (the lab shows ~0.45 s at 48 cycles/min) — quick, but never rushed past the extension.
Pull Path & Hand Acceleration
▾The hand path is nearly straight back under the body — the slight S you see on film comes from the body roll, not from sweeping the hand. Hand accelerates throughout — slowest at catch, fastest at exit. The hand must push all the way past the hip — thumb brushing the thigh.
Body Rotation & Head Position
▾Shoulder roll: about 45–60° each side at distance pace, less (30–40°) in the 50/100 where turnover is higher; the hips roll roughly half as much. Head position: hairline at the surface, eyes at the pool floor. Even a 5 cm head lift forces the hips down.
6-Beat Kick Mechanics
▾The kick supplies up to ~30% of propulsion in sprint freestyle (≈10–15% at distance pace). The kick originates at the hip — knee bends only 30–40° on the downbeat. Ankle plantarflexion is the biggest limiter for most swimmers.
Golf Score — Freestyle Benchmarks
▾Golf Score = 50 m split (seconds) + stroke count per 50 m (count each arm in free and back; one stroke per cycle in fly and breast). Lower is always better. Elite benchmarks (a 50 at 100-pace effort, 50 m pool): Below 60 = world class. 60–66 = senior national. 67–74 = competitive club. Fly and breast read about 15 lower on this scale, so compare those against your own trend. The same count works in every stroke; the full level guide and the calculator are on the Pace Calculator.
Body Position & Duck Drill
▾Correct position: hips at the surface, ears slightly submerged, eyes up toward the ceiling with the chin neutral (look at the flags, not at your feet — a chin-tuck lifts the head, drops the hips and loads the neck). Even a small hip drop adds frontal area and the drag climbs with it — at race speed a few centimeters costs measurable time. The Duck drill is that position without the arms: backstroke kick with the arms at your sides, chin neutral and hips riding high, so the body sits on the surface the way a duck does — kick a length this way before adding the arms, then keep exactly the same head and hip position once you do.
Pinky Entry & 2-2-2 Drill
▾Entry is pinky-first, hand rotated so the palm faces out — pinky down, thumb up. Arm enters directly above the shoulder. The 2-2-2 drill (2 right strokes, 2 left strokes, 2 full) isolates each side.
Bent-Arm Pull & Hand Path
▾Backstroke is the only stroke pulled upside down, and the catch is made early: after the pinky entry the hand sinks and the elbow bends straight away, dropping toward the bottom of the pool while the hand stays above it. From there the elbow holds its place and points down while the hand presses back under the shoulder toward the hip, the arm straightening through the press. The finish is deep beside the thigh with the palm pressing toward the feet, and the hand exits thumb-first at the swimmer's point of maximum rotation. A straight arm dragged around the outside is the most common fault: the hand skates near the surface, never turns to face backward, and the pull becomes a recovery in the water.
- Catch elbow
- About 100° between upper arm and forearm, pointing at the pool floor — the angle the 3D lab holds through its bent-arm pull phase.
- Hand width
- Widest at about half a meter outside the shoulder line, then back under the shoulder — not around it.
- Finish
- Hand deep beside the thigh, palm down toward the feet; exit thumb-first as the opposite hand enters.
- Elite rate
- 100 back 48–54 cycles/min, 200 back 37–46 — the ranges in the Timers race-rate table.
Rotation, Timing & Breathing
▾The arms are opposite and continuous: one hand enters as the other finishes, so there is no glide and no dead spot. Rotation drives both — the shoulders roll about 30–45° each side as a unit with the hips, and the roll is what puts the pulling shoulder deep enough to catch and lifts the recovering shoulder clear. The head does not roll with it: chin neutral, eyes up, ears in the water. The kick is a steady six-beat, small and fast from the hip with the toes just breaking the surface. Breathing is the one thing backstroke gives you for free — fix it to the stroke rather than taking it at random: in on one arm's recovery, out on the other, every cycle, so the rhythm never changes late in a race.
2K1 Scull — The Core Drill
▾2K1 (two kicks, one stroke) is the foundational breaststroke drill. Doubling the kick slows tempo dramatically — forcing the swimmer to feel the glide, catch, and full out-scull before pulling.
Breaststroke Kick — 60–70% of Propulsion
▾Heels draw up narrow — not wide. Feet evert into "duck feet" before sweeping in a circular arc and finishing together in streamline.
Out-Sweep, In-Sweep & Arm Recovery
▾The breaststroke pull is short and lives in front of the shoulders. From the streamline the hands slide apart and press out to about a meter wide and a hand's depth under, arms still straight with the elbows high near the surface — that is the catch, and the hands turn the corner there rather than sweeping past it. The in-sweep is the propulsive half: the elbows stay high and bend to roughly 110° as the forearms scull in and up underneath them and the hands meet in front of the chin. Then the hands shoot forward into the lunge and the arms lock out. Nothing is pulled back past the shoulder line — World Aquatics SW 7.3 keeps the hands in front of the hip line except on the pullout, so a pull that goes long is both slow and a DQ risk.
- Out-sweep
- Hands to about 1.1 m apart and 17 cm deep, arms straight, elbows high near the surface (the 3D lab's catch frame).
- In-sweep elbow
- About 110° between upper arm and forearm, elbows held 13–15 cm deep — above the hands, never below them.
- Hands meet
- In front of the chin, about 15 cm apart, then straight forward — not down.
- Elite rate
- 100 breast 44–58 cycles/min, 200 breast 31–43 — the widest spread of any stroke, because glide length is a choice.
Timing, Breathing & the Glide
▾The order never changes: pull, breathe, kick, glide — SW 7.2 requires one arm stroke and one leg kick in that order. The kick lands in the hole the arms make as they shoot forward, so the legs are still recovering while the hands are still sweeping in; if the kick fires with the pull, the two cancel. Breathing is not a separate movement — the in-sweep's own lift carries the chest and chin up, the head goes back down between the arms as they shoot, and SW 7.4 requires the head to break the surface once in every cycle. The glide is where the time is made or lost: elite swimmers spend roughly 40–46% of a 100 m cycle with the legs together and streamlined, and the shorter the race the shorter that hold — which is why the rate range for the 100 is so much higher than for the 200.
Undulation — The Wave from Chest to Feet
▾Butterfly is wave-driven, not arm-driven. The movement: chest presses down → hips rise → feet drive down. Hip amplitude: about 10–20 cm — the wave grows toward the feet (toes 45–60 cm — larger than the underwater kick because the surface kick also drives the body wave).
2-2-2 Drill & One-Arm Fly
▾2-2-2 drill: 2 right-arm strokes, 2 left-arm strokes, 2 full butterfly strokes. Isolates each side's pull pattern and makes bilateral asymmetries obvious immediately.
One-arm fly: the full body wave and both kicks with one arm stroking and the other extended in front (breathe to the side or to the front), 25 m on each arm — it isolates the kick timing against the pull and shows which side's catch collapses.
The Keyhole Pull
▾Both arms enter shoulder-width, fingertips first, and press out and down — not straight back. The elbows stay high and wide near the surface while the forearms rotate to face backward, and at the catch the hands are inside and behind the elbows with the elbow bent past a right angle. From there the hands sweep in under the chest until they nearly touch — the narrow waist of the keyhole — then accelerate back and out past the hips into the fastest instant of the cycle, exiting little-finger first. Pressing the hands straight back from the entry with straight arms is what makes butterfly feel impossible: the arms lift the body instead of moving it forward, and the recovery then has to start from a stop.
- Catch elbow
- About 60–70° between upper arm and forearm, elbows high and wide, hands inside and behind them (the 3D lab's catch frame, hands about 0.40 m deep).
- Keyhole waist
- Hands about 20 cm apart under the chest at their narrowest, roughly a third of a meter deep.
- Recovery
- Straight relaxed arms, low and wide over the water, thumbs down — about a third of the cycle is spent over the surface.
- Elite rate
- 100 fly roughly 52–60 cycles/min, 200 fly 48–55 — fly and breast count one stroke per cycle.
Two-Kick Timing & Breathing
▾Two kicks per cycle, and they are not the same kick. The first is big and lands as the hands enter, driving the hips up behind a pressing chest; the second is smaller and snaps down as the hands finish and leave the water, carrying the shoulders forward into the recovery. Lose the second kick — the one that goes first when a 100 fly hurts — and the hips sink, the recovery has to be muscled, and the stroke collapses inside a length. Breathe late and low: the chin comes forward, not up, as the hands push past the chest, and the head is back in the water before the hands are. Keep both kicks all the way to the wall — SW 8.2 and 8.3 require the arms and the legs to move simultaneously, so a kick dropped from fatigue is also where fly gets disqualified.
Underwater Dolphin Kick — The 5th Stroke
▾Underwater dolphin kick is the fastest a swimmer moves after the push-off — quicker than any surface stroke. At elite level, UW velocity exceeds surface swimming speed. Elite programs feature UW 15 m work in nearly every session.
- Streamline
- Hands stacked dominant-on-top, arms past ears, core rigid.
- Kick amplitude
- About 40–50 cm toe-to-toe at the feet (0.45 ± 0.06 m in elite sprinters; the hips move only ~15 cm). Hip-driven.
- Swim depth
- 0.5–0.6 m below surface.
- Elite rate
- About 1.9 Hz on average at race speed (≈115 kicks/min), with the fastest sprinters at 2.0–2.5 Hz (120–150). Rate, not amplitude, is what rises with speed.
Freestyle Flip Turn
▾Elite push-off velocities reach ~2.5–3.0 m/s and decay through the glide. Every 0.1 s lost at the wall costs more energy to win back than it took to lose. Approach at full speed and never look for the wall. Start the somersault as your head crosses the T — its cross line is 2 m from the wall — so the last stroke and tuck bring you over about a body length out. Drive into tight streamline with 5 m+ of underwater dolphin kick off every wall. The 3D lab's underwater dolphin kick shows the streamline and the first kicks phase by phase.
Breaststroke Pullout
▾The breaststroke pullout is the fastest point in the stroke. Legal sequence: push off → streamline glide → one full underwater arm pull back to the thighs → arms recover forward → one breaststroke kick → break out. One dolphin kick is allowed anywhere before that first breaststroke kick (SW 7.1 — most swimmers take it as the pull starts, but at the hands' exit or into the recovery is equally legal). Your head must break the surface before your hands turn in at the widest point of the second stroke: surfacing late is the most common breaststroke DQ. Begin the pull the moment you sense velocity starting to drop.
Backstroke Turn
▾Count your strokes off the flags — they sit 5 m from the wall — and take the same number every time so the turn never has to be guessed at. Once you turn past vertical toward the breast you are committed: SW 6.4 allows a single continuous turning motion, so it is one pull into the roll, straight onto the somersault, feet planted, and no extra kick or pull once the shoulders have passed vertical. Push off on your back, hold the streamline and take the underwater dolphin kicks — your head must break the surface by the 15 m mark, the same limit as the start.
Fly & Breast Open Turn
▾Both hands must touch simultaneously and at the same level — SW 7.6 and 8.4, and a split touch is the most common age-group disqualification in either stroke. Swim into the wall at full stroke rather than gliding the last meter: touch with the arms nearly extended, drop the near shoulder and let the legs swing under you as one hand leaves the wall and swings over the water, the other pushing off beside your ear into the streamline. Leave on your side and rotate onto the front under water — then the fly breakout kicks, or the breaststroke pullout.
IM Transitions
▾The three transitions are where IM races are lost, and each has its own rule (SW 9).
- Fly → back
- Simultaneous two-hand touch, then push off on the back. You may not leave the wall on your front.
- Back → breast
- Touch while still on the back, then an open turn or a crossover turn — once the shoulders pass vertical past the touch there is no kick or pull, and you must leave the wall on the breast.
- Breast → free
- Simultaneous two-hand touch, then any turn you like — and any stroke after it, so the underwater dolphin kicks are back.
- Where time goes
- The breaststroke leg is the slowest and the wall into freestyle is the one most swimmers rush. Practise all three at race pace, not fresh.
Grab Start & Track Start Mechanics
▾Track start (one foot back) is now dominant at elite level; the grab start (both feet at the front edge, hands gripping the block) is the older individual start — a stronger but slower push, now rare in elite racing. Relay takeovers use a different start again: the step-through (swing) start, an arm swing from the back of the block timed to the incoming swimmer's touch. Reaction time target: under 0.65 s. Takeoff is near horizontal — the block height gives the flight.
- Reaction time
- Fast-elite: ~0.60–0.64 s; most swimmers are slower — chase clean, not just fast.
- Takeoff angle
- Near horizontal — about 0–10° above the horizontal; the 0.5–0.75 m block height gives the flight.
- Entry angle
- About 30–40° to the surface — hands, head, hips and feet through one hole.
- UW distance
- Elite: 10–15 m before breakout.
Backstroke Start
▾The only start taken in the water. Both hands hold the grips, feet on the wall with the toes under the surface — SW 6.1 does not allow them to curl over the gutter lip — and on "take your marks" you pull yourself up into a tight tuck with the hips close to the wall. The pull-up is the start: the arms throw back and around, the head leads back over the water and the legs drive the hips over the surface, so the body arches and enters through one hole hands-first, not sitting down into the water. A backstroke ledge, where the meet provides one, lets the feet sit higher and flatter for the same drive. Then streamline, dolphin kick, and break out by 15 m.
- Set position
- Tight tuck, hips near the wall, toes under the surface and at or below the gutter lip.
- Flight
- Arched over the water — the head and hands lead, the hips clear the surface.
- Entry
- Hands first through one hole, then immediately into the dolphin kick.
- 15 m rule
- The head must break the surface by 15 m — the same limit as every other start and turn.
IM Order & Transition Strategy
▾IM order: Butterfly → Backstroke → Breaststroke → Freestyle. Each transition is a critical moment where drag and tempo change dramatically.
- Fly pacing
- Go out controlled — 200 IM is not a 50 fly sprint.
- Breast leg
- The race decider. If you've gone out too hard, breaststroke is where you pay.
- Elite split
- 200 IM — fly ~22%, back ~25%, breast ~28–29%, free ~24–25% of race time: breaststroke is the slowest leg, fly (with the dive) the fastest. Full patterns in the Race Planner's split reference.
Technique Video Library
Elite technique on video — by stroke, plus underwaters, dryland and race analysis. Each clip loads only when you press play.
Freestyle · Full Stroke Freestyle stroke breakdown
A Division I swim coach breaks down front crawl technique step by step.
Freestyle · Catch High elbow swimming — 4 tips
Global Triathlon Network on the single most impactful freestyle skill.
Freestyle · Kick Front crawl 6-beat kick
Step-by-step guide to the 6-beat kick rhythm and mechanics.
Backstroke · Full Stroke Backstroke with perfect technique
Six elements of backstroke: body position, rotation, entry, pull, kick, and timing.
Breaststroke · Timing Breaststroke timing & coordination
The pull-breathe-kick-glide sequence explained clearly.
Butterfly · Undulation Master butterfly undulation
Olympic Channel: Olympian Dylan Carter on the chest-down wave that drives butterfly.
Underwater · Dolphin Kick Gretchen Walsh's underwater dolphin kick
Breakdown of one of the fastest underwaters in the world — the 5th stroke.
Underwater · Turns How to flip turn
Every component of the freestyle flip turn broken down.
Dryland · Strength 30-minute dryland workout
Complete no-equipment dryland session built for swimmers.
Race · Analysis Popovici world-record analysis
Technique analysis of David Popovici's 2022 world-record 100 m freestyle (46.86, since beaten).
Training Set Library
Ready-made sets by purpose — aerobic, threshold, kick, technique, warm-up and speed — with the distance, the interval and what each one trains.
| Set | Details | Purpose & Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2 rounds: 20×50 FR @ :55 | Rd 1: steady aerobic (HR 25–27) · Rd 2: AeT ceiling (HR 28) 60 s between rounds · 2,000 m · Benchmark check on Rd 2 Your interval: Z2 pace per 50 + 10–15 s rest | Aerobic Base BenchmarkPrimary testing set — the Rd 2 ceiling is the benchmark. |
| 12×200 FR @ 3:00 | Reps 1–2: Cruise · 3–12: AeT HR 24–28 · 2,400 m Your interval: Z2 pace per 200 + 20–30 s rest | Volume LoadFlagship Meso II aerobic set. |
| 5 rounds: 5×100 BK | Rd 1: Duck drill @ 2:00 · Rd 2–5: swim @ 1:25 (Technique › Backstroke) 60–90 s between rounds · 2,500 m · HR 24–28 Your interval: Z2 pace per 100 off your best 100 back, + 20–25 s rest · drill round + 45–60 s | Stroke-Specific AeTBackstroke aerobic maintenance. |
| Set | Details | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| 6×400 FR @ 6:00 | Threshold · HR 28–31 · 2,400 m Your interval: Z3 pace per 400 + 30–45 s rest | Threshold IntroductionWeek 4 first threshold. |
| 3 rounds: 3×400 FR @ 6:00 / 5:45 / 5:30 | Threshold · HR 28–31 · interval tightens each round · 3,600 m Your interval: Z3 pace per 400 + 60 s, then + 45 s, then + 30 s (printed here as 6:00 / 5:45 / 5:30) | Progressive PressureHold threshold pace; rest shrinks from ~60 s to ~30 s as the send-off tightens. |
Pick your column by your best 100 free: A under 1:05 · B 1:05–1:15 · C over 1:15. If your 100 kick is slower than your column's interval, kick on your own send-off instead — your 100 kick time plus 15 s — and take 5 s off it each round of the ladder.
| Set | Details | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| 10×100 FR Kick | Intervals by column (see above): A 1:45 · B 1:50 · C 2:00 · No board | Aerobic Kick BaseCorrect body position required. |
| Kick Ladder (2,000 m) | Intervals by column, each round 5 s tighter than the one before: 8×100 @ A 1:40 · B 1:45 · C 1:55 (snorkel) → 6×100 @ A 1:35 · B 1:40 · C 1:50 → 4×100 @ A 1:30 · B 1:35 · C 1:45 → 2×100 @ A 1:25 · B 1:30 · C 1:40 | Threshold KickMost demanding kick set — it starts 5 s under your column's Aerobic Kick Base interval in the row above and descends 5 s a round. |
| Set | Details | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| 10×50 FR Paddles + snorkel | Reps 1–5: descend to your best-average Golf Score · 6–10: hold it Paddles lower the count — track this set against itself, not against the Golf Score bands (or swim the last 2 reps without equipment for a true score) | Golf Score TechTechnique under a number: once you find your best average, hold it — a faster split bought with extra strokes does not lower the score. |
| UW 15 m IM Drill @ 1:00 | Race depth (0.5–0.6 m) · tight streamline · fly, back and free; a legal pullout on the breaststroke length · every session | Underwater DevSingle most consequential drill. |
| Element | Prescription | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Easy swim + IM 400–600 m | HR below 22 (easy end of Zone 1) | Thermal + Neural PrimingRaises muscle temperature 1–2°C. |
| Kick on back 4–8×50 | Fins, dolphin or flutter | Hip ActivationFin overspeed primes kick velocity. |
| Build swims 4×50 | Build to ~80% | Aerobic PrimingRaises baseline oxygen uptake so the first hard repeat is less anaerobic, and rehearses race tempo. |
| Set | Details | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| 10×25 Sprint | Full rest 2–3 min · max effort each rep | Pure VelocityMaximum neuromuscular output. |
| 8×50 Race Pace | Target 100 race pace · 3–4 min rest | Race-Pace SpecificityTrains exact neuromuscular patterns. |
Dryland Programming
Four principles that transfer directly to water: scapular stability, rotational power, hip hinge strength, and core anti-rotation.
Day 1 — Monday Pull Strength
- 4×6Weighted Pull-Ups
- 3×10Single-Arm Cable Row
- 3×12Face Pulls with Band
- 3×8Trap Bar Deadlift
- 4×30 sDead Bug
3–4 min between main-lift sets, RPE 7–8 — leave 2 reps in reserve on every set.
Day 2 — Tuesday Rotational Power
- 4×8Med Ball Rotational Throws
- 3×10Cable Chops High-Low
- 3×10Pallof Press
- 3×8Single-Leg RDL
- 3×20 sCopenhagen Plank
Full recovery between throw sets — power dies with fatigue. Throw every rep as hard as the first or stop the set.
Day 3 — Thursday Explosive Power
- 4×4Box Jumps
- 4×6Hang Power Clean
- 3×8Lat Pulldown + Pause
- 3×12Hip Thrust
- 3×15Serratus Punch
3–5 min between box-jump and clean sets, RPE 7 — these are speed lifts; the bar and the jump should look fast or the set is over.
Day 4 — Friday Shoulder & Ankle Health
- 3×15Sidelying External Rotation
- 3×12Y-T-W-L on Incline
- 3×30 sCross-body stretch — sleeper stretch only if a coach or physio has measured limited internal rotation (GIRD); skip it if your shoulders are loose
- 3×20Ankle Circles + Toe Spreads
60 s between sets, light — this is prehab, not a workout. Never train it to failure.
Daily Mobility Routine
- 2 minAnkle Plantarflexion Loading
- 2 minThoracic Rotation
- 3 minShoulder CARs
- 1 minHip 90/90 Switches
Workout Generator
Set up your session and the AI streams a complete, printable workout — a draft from general coaching knowledge for your coach to adjust, not a prescription. Free account required.
Pace Calculator
Golf Score, race splits, training pace zones and pool-format conversions — type one time and read the rest.
Golf Score Calculator
Score Guide
| Score | Level |
|---|---|
| Below 60 | World Class / National Elite |
| 60–66 | High Performance / Senior National |
| 67–74 | Competitive Age-Group / Senior Club |
| 75–84 | Developing — significant improvement available |
| 85+ | Beginner — major gains available |
Bands assume a 50 at 100-pace effort in a 50 m pool with every hand entry counted; fly and breast (one count per cycle) read about 15 lower, so compare those against your own trend. Short-course scores read lower: the second push-off alone takes a few points off a 50 in a 25 m pool, and a 25-yard pool is also 8.6% shorter, so a yard 50 reads about 10 points lower — compare short-course scores with short-course scores, or add a few (25 m) or about 10 (25 yd) before reading the bands.
Race Split Generator
Split Table
Training Pace Zones
Zone Table
Reference paces scaled from your best 100 (same unit in, same unit out — meters or yards), not lab-tested lactate zones — the drop-off from a best time varies by swimmer, so adjust to feel, heart rate and how the set actually goes. For a measured threshold pace, run the Critical Swim Speed test in Analytics. The HR counts assume a maximum heart rate near 200 (teens and young adults); if yours is lower — most masters swimmers — multiply each count by (your max ÷ 200).
Pool Format Converter
Conversion Results
Training Zones
Five intensity zones, set by blood lactate and a 10-second pulse count — what each one feels like, what it trains and how much of a season it should get.
Zone 1 Recovery
Lactate: below 2.0 mmol/L · HR: under 24 on the 10-second count · Easy enough to hold a full conversation. Warm-up, cool-down, recovery between hard sets — and a large share of base volume: elite programs log about 40% of their meters here (Hellard et al. 2019). Going too hard in what should be Zone 1 is the most common way swimmers blunt the next quality set.
Zone 2 — AeT Aerobic Threshold
Lactate: 2.0–3.0 mmol/L · HR: 24–28 on the 10-second count · Zones 1–2 together carry roughly 70–80% of training volume (elite programs: about 40% below 2 mmol/L and most of the rest between 2 and 4 — Hellard et al. 2019). Builds mitochondrial density, oxidative enzyme capacity, cardiac output.
Zone 3 Threshold
Lactate: 3.0–5.0 mmol/L · HR: 28–31 on the 10-second count · Three-to-four-word sentences at most. Typically introduced around Week 4 of a season and expanded progressively through Meso II.
Zone 4–5 VO₂ Max & Sprint
Zone 4: 5.0–8.0 mmol/L · HR 31–33 on the 10-second count · repeats of 1–5 min (100–400 m) with equal or longer rest · 48–72 h recovery. Zone 5: sprint / anaerobic — two kinds. Alactic speed: efforts of up to about 10–15 s (12.5–25 m, or 15 m off the wall) on full rest; lactate stays low and HR is not the guide. Lactate production: 50–100 m maximal efforts (8.0+ mmol/L, HR near max), 2–5 min rest, 1–2× a week at most.
My PRs
Tap any time field and type your personal record as ss.ss or m:ss.ss (24.10, 1:02.45). Every field is optional — fill in the events you race. All data saved locally in your browser, and not sent anywhere unless you switch on syncing in the panel below — which is off until you do.
Enter the time as ss.ss or m:ss.ss, for example 24.10 or 1:02.45 (1.02.45 also works on a number keypad)Swimmer
PRs auto-saved in your browser SCY
One course for the whole grid — the planner warns when a plan is in a different course. SCY and LCM times differ by roughly 14% (more for 50s and 100s, a little less for 200s and up; see the Pool Format Converter's note). The grid and the Race Planner list the events swum in that course (500 / 1000 / 1650 free in yards, 400 / 800 / 1500 in meters, 100 IM short course only).
Freestyle
Backstroke
Breaststroke
Butterfly
Individual Medley
Everything here is saved only in this browser. Export a backup before clearing your data or switching devices, then import it to restore your PRs and their course, your name, training log, Race Planner goals and meets, fitted predictor profile and last split plan, and your timer and analytics settings.
Your Account
On. Your PRs and training log are saved to your account.
Only you can read it — it is tied to your account and nobody else, your coach included. Sessions from every device are kept together, so logging on your phone never overwrites what you logged on a laptop. Turning this off stops this device syncing; what is already on your account stays until you delete it. What is stored.
Training Log
Signed in, every session is saved to your account, so the same log opens on any device you sign in to — the switch, and what it stores, are on My PRs. Signed out it stays in this browser and nowhere else. Your most recent 2,000 sessions are kept on this device; your account keeps up to 4,000, so a trim here is not a loss there.
Log a Session
30-Day Summary
Session History
Nutrition & Fueling
What to eat and drink day to day, on race day and after training, with targets per kilogram of bodyweight.
Pre-AM Session (60–90 min before) Morning Fuel
- 1–2 slices white toast + jam (fast carbs)
- Banana or 200 ml orange juice
- 250 ml water on waking
- Avoid high-fat, high-fiber foods
Recovery Window Post-Session
- Within 30 min: 1–1.2 g/kg carbs (45–70 g for a 45–60 kg swimmer, 60–95 g at 60–80 kg) + 0.3–0.4 g/kg protein (15–30 g)
- Chocolate milk, Greek yogurt + banana
- 1–1.5 L water over the next 2 hours
Pre-PM Session (2–3 h before) Afternoon Fuel
- 1.5–2 g/kg carbs (70–90 g at 45 kg, 120–160 g at 80 kg), 0.3–0.4 g/kg protein, low fat
- Chicken + rice + vegetables
- 500 ml water in the 2 hours before
Carbohydrate Targets
- Base training: 6–7 g/kg bodyweight
- Double days: 8–10 g/kg
- Taper weeks: 5–6 g/kg as volume drops (weight stays stable)
- Before a meet: 8–10 g/kg on the day before racing (start 2 days out for a multi-day meet)
Protein Targets
- Total daily: 1.6–2.2 g/kg
- Per meal: 20–40 g
- Post-session priority: within 30 min
- Pre-bed: casein-rich foods
Night Before Carb Loading
- High-carb dinner: pasta, rice, bread
- Low fiber, low fat
- 8–10 g/kg over the day
Morning of Race Pre-Meet Meal
- 3–4 h before: 1–2 g/kg carbs
- 600 ml water with breakfast
- Caffeine (adult athletes): 3 mg/kg 60 min before — not advised for junior/adolescent swimmers
Between Events Intra-Meet
- 30–60 g simple carbs every 60–90 min
- Sip 150–250 ml every 30–45 min — to thirst, a little more in a hot natatorium — and add an electrolyte drink rather than more plain water if the session runs past 3 hours
- Avoid heavy food within 90 min of any event
The 30-Minute Recovery Window
Glycogen resynthesis is fastest in the first 1–2 hours after training, so the 30-minute target matters most when the next session is within about 8 hours (a double day or a multi-session meet); otherwise the day's total carbohydrate does the job. Target: 1–1.2 g/kg carbs + 0.3–0.4 g/kg protein — the same dose as the Post-Session card under Daily Fueling. Best options: chocolate milk, rice + protein, yogurt + banana.
Daily Hydration
- Baseline: 35–45 ml per kg bodyweight per day
- Add 400–600 ml per hour of training
- Urine target: pale yellow
- Electrolytes recommended on 90+ min sessions
Race Strategy
The meet-day timeline, the warm-up, a plan for every core event and the pacing science behind them.
Meet Day Timeline
- T−3 h: Pre-meet meal. Carb-heavy, familiar, low fiber/fat.
- T−75 min: Begin warm-up (before your first race; use the pool's warm-up slot if it is fixed). Never skip.
- T−30 min: Complete warm-up. Dry off, stay warm, hydrate.
- T−10 min: Behind the blocks. Controlled breathing.
- After each race: swim down 200–400 easy within 10–15 min (or 5 min of easy walking and arm swings if there is no swim-down pool) — clears lactate faster than sitting.
- Next race more than 45 min away: re-warm 10–15 min before it — 100–200 easy with 2×15 m builds, or on deck: arm swings, 3–5 jump squats, 20 s of fast arm action. Racing speed drops once the gap from warm-up passes about 45 min.
Behind the Blocks
- Focus only on what you control: first 5 strokes, your turn, your pace
- Box breathing: 4 in, 4 hold, 4 out, 4 hold
- One or two focus cues only — more than that is too many (see Mental › Focus & Cues)
- Never watch your main rivals warm up
Competition Warm-Up Protocol
- 400–600 m easy: HR below 22 (easy end of Zone 1). No rushing.
- 4×50 kick: easy to moderate, streamline or board (fins only if the meet allows equipment in warm-up — most championship meets do not).
- 4×50 drills: Race-stroke drills. One technical cue.
- 4×25 builds: Gradually build to 85% on final 25.
- 2×15 m sprint: Full race pace from a push.
- 200 m easy to finish: drop HR before the race.
| Event | Strategy | Key Tactic | Common Error |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50 Free | All-out from start | Clean start, max UW, no breathing | Tension in the stroke |
| 100 Free | 95% out, hold 75 m, sprint home | Minimal breathing first 50 | Going out at 100% and dying |
| 200 Free | Even effort — hold the third 50 | First 50 controlled, build 100–150 | Going out too fast |
| 100 Breast | Strong first 50, patient second | Legal pullout every wall | Overlap — kick before pull finishes |
| 100 Back | Out hard off the dive, hold the back half | Clean backstroke start and underwaters; rate up, not length down | Shortening the stroke to hold pace |
| 200 Back | Even effort — second 100 within 4% | Underwaters off every wall | Chasing the first 50 |
| 100 Fly | Controlled first 50, fight the back 25 | Two kicks per cycle to the end, low chin on the breath | Sprinting the first 25 |
| 200 IM | Fly controlled, build through back | Legal transitions — DQ risk | Dying on breaststroke leg |
| 500 / 400 Free | Even 100s, lift the last 100 | Settle by the third 50, breathe to a pattern | Going out inside goal pace |
Pacing Science
100 m: the first 50 is normally faster than the second — by about 4% of the race time in free and back (≈2 s at 50 s, 2.8 s at 1:10) and about 6% in fly and breast (3–4 s) — the dive and the underwater do that for you, so the job is to minimize the fade, not to negative split. A freestyle second 50 more than ~10% slower than the first (the normal pattern is ~8%) means you went out too hard.
200 m: the second 100 is normally 2–4% (2–3 s) slower than the first in every elite final — about 3% in freestyle, 4% in backstroke — so the target is to hold the third 50 at the pace of the second; butterfly and breaststroke 200s fade more — the second 100 is typically 5–6% slower in breaststroke and 8–10% slower in butterfly, so holding the third 50 is a stretch target there.
400 m and up: even 100s, with the lift coming at the end. The championship-final split patterns behind these targets are in the Race Planner's split reference.
Taper & Recovery
A full taper is for the one or two championship meets of a season; in-season meets are swum through with at most a couple of easier days.
Sprint Taper (14–21 days)
- Week 3 before: volume down 20–30%, speed and power work kept
- Week 2 before: volume down 40–50%, race-pace and power touches in every session
- Week 1 before: volume down 60–70%, short fast work, full rest — keep every session, shorten them
- Day before: 20–30 min easy + 4–6×25 race-pace
- Avoid long rest — 7+ days completely off makes sprinters feel slow
Distance Taper (7–14 days)
- Week 2 before: volume down 20–30%, keep one solid aerobic set
- Week 1 before: volume down 40–50%, keep the daily aerobic rhythm and race-pace 100s/200s — keep every session, shorten them
- Day before: 30–40 min easy with a few builds
- Trust the process — feeling sluggish mid-taper is normal
Evidence: Strong Sleep
- The strongest recovery tool there is
- Hours, naps and sleep hygiene: see the Sleep tab
Evidence: Moderate Cold Water
- 10–15 min at 10–15°C post-training
- Not within 4 h of a strength session — it blunts the strength adaptation
- Best within 30 min of finishing
- Useful in a meet or a hard week, not a daily habit
Evidence: Moderate Active Recovery
- Easy pool swim 800–1,200 m (15–25 min), Zone 1
- HR below 22 on the 10-second count — the easy end of Zone 1 (its ceiling is 24)
- Even 10–20 min beats complete inactivity
Sleep Optimization
- 9–10 hours for elite adolescents, 8–9 hours for adult competitive swimmers
- Consistent sleep schedule matters more than occasional extra hours
- 16–18°C optimal sleep temperature
- Avoid screens 60+ min before bed
- Casein protein + tart cherry juice before bed
- Naps: 20–30 min between double sessions
Mental Performance
Visualization, arousal control, focus cues and a pre-race routine you can rehearse.
Visualization — Mental Rehearsal
Visualization activates much of the same motor cortex activity as physical practice. 10–15 min daily — morning after waking or evening before sleep. Full race visualization should match real race time.
- Both first-person and third-person perspectives
- Include sensory detail: chlorine, water feel, starter signal
- Visualize the process more than the outcome
- Also visualize imperfect scenarios and recovery
Optimal Arousal
Too calm = under-activated. Too anxious = overthinking. Every swimmer has their own optimal zone — finding it is a training task.
Regulation Tools
Down-regulation: Box breathing 5×, progressive muscle relaxation, slow warm-up, 60–80 bpm music.
Up-regulation: Explosive warm-up bursts, 120–140 bpm music, explosive activation (arm swings, 3–5 jump squats), activating self-talk.
Focus Cues
- Maximum 2 focus cues per race
- Cues should be action-based: "High elbow" not "Don't drop my elbow"
- Practice cues in training until automatic
- Self-talk in final 50 m: "This is what you train for."
Pre-Race Routine
- T−15 min: 3 min box breathing
- T−12 min: Visualize first 50 m in real time
- T−8 min: Review 2 focus cues only
- T−5 min: Physical activation behind the blocks — arm swings, fast squats
- T−1 min: One breath. Step up on the long whistle and activate.
Injury Prevention
Prevention by body region — what causes each problem in swimmers, and the daily work that keeps it away.
Causes
- Serratus anterior weakness
- Rotator cuff imbalance
- Crossover entry (crossing centerline)
- Flat, dropped elbow catch
- Excessive paddle volume
Prevention
- Serratus punches: 2×15 daily (3×15 on dryland days)
- External rotation: sidelying, 1×15 each side daily, 3×15 on dryland days
- Correct entry: never cross centerline
- High elbow catch on every single stroke
If it already hurts
- Phase 1 — settle it. Cut volume rather than stopping dead; drop paddles, bands and fly entirely; kick on your back or with a board held short, not overhead. No pressing or overhead lifting. Days, not weeks, before reassessing.
- Phase 2 — rebuild what failed. Scapular and cuff work daily at a load you can do cleanly — the Prevention routine is the same movements. Add range only while it stays pain-free the next morning.
- Phase 3 — back into the water. Return stroke by stroke and distance before intensity: free and back before breast and fly, aerobic before threshold, no paddles until a full week pain-free. If a step hurts the next morning, go back one step.
- Pain that has not improved at all after two weeks of this is an assessment, not a programming problem.
Breaststroker's Knee
- Primary cause: valgus/rotation load from a wide-knee recovery and kick volume; hip abductor/adductor weakness adds to it
- Copenhagen plank: 3×20 s daily (in the Prevention routine; also on Dryland Day 2)
- Narrow heel recovery drill
- Self-test: kick on your back — can you see the inside of your knees?
Low Back Pain
- Swimming cause: repeated back arching — butterfly and breaststroke undulation, the breaststroke pullout and dolphin kicking load the lower back on every cycle. Keep the wave coming from the chest and hips, not the lower back
- Body cause: tight hip flexors + weak glutes + weak deep core
- Daily hip flexor stretching (90/90, couch stretch)
- Glute activation: hip thrusts, clamshells
- Dead bug for deep core stability
- Red flag: low-back pain in a teenager that is worse arching back (fly, breast, dolphin kick) and lasts more than two weeks needs a physician or physio — a stress reaction in the spine (spondylolysis) is the most common cause of back pain in adolescent athletes, is over-represented in butterfliers and breaststrokers, and must not be swum through
Causes
- Repetitive breaststroke whip-kick external rotation under load
- Femoroacetabular impingement (FAI) from years of forced hip ROM
- Chronically tight hip flexors from the prone swimming position
- Weak glute medius — lets the hip drop or rotate during the kick
- Butterfly's repeated hip-driven undulation without adequate mobility work
Prevention
- 90/90 hip switches: 1 min daily (in the Prevention routine; also in the Dryland mobility routine) — builds rotational range in both directions
- Glute medius activation: banded clamshells, monster walks, 3×/week
- Couch stretch for hip flexor length, 2 min per side daily
- Limit breaststroke whip-kick volume during growth spurts in younger swimmers
- Any pinching pain at the front of the hip during kick — stop and get it assessed, don't swim through it
Return to Kick After Hip Pain
- Phase 1: Flutter or dolphin kick only — no breaststroke whip-kick
- Phase 2: Slow, shallow-range breaststroke kick on the back, focused on pain-free range only
- Phase 3: Full-range breaststroke kick again — start at 50% of your normal kick volume for the first week back, then build
Swimmer's Elbow (Medial/Lateral Epicondylitis)
Less common than shoulder issues but shows up in swimmers who paddle-train heavily or have a flat, dropped-elbow catch that loads the forearm flexors and extensors instead of the lat and pec.
- Primary cause: excessive paddle volume before the forearm has built tolerance
- Secondary cause: a catch that relies on wrist/forearm flexion instead of a high elbow — the small muscles around the elbow take over for the big back muscles
- Prevention: introduce paddles gradually over weeks, not days; fix the high-elbow catch first so the lat does the work
- Forearm work: wrist curls and reverse wrist curls, 3×12, two or three times a week if you paddle-train, to build tendon tolerance — an add-on, not a slot in the Dryland plan
- Self-test: pain when gripping or extending the wrist against resistance points to the elbow, not the shoulder
Neck Pain — Breathing and Head Position
Neck pain in swimmers is almost always a head-position problem, not a neck-strength problem. Habitually lifting the head to breathe instead of rotating it within the body's bow wave puts repetitive strain on the cervical spine across thousands of strokes per week.
- Freestyle: lifting the head to breathe instead of rotating with the body roll — fix the stroke before treating the symptom
- Backstroke: a chronic chin-tuck (looking at the feet) or a lifted chin — keep the neck neutral, the Duck-drill position (Technique › Backstroke)
- Breaststroke: lifting the chin to breathe instead of riding the body's natural lift from the pull
- Prevention: daily neck CARs (controlled articular rotations), and film yourself breathing from above to check for head lift
- Persistent neck pain unrelated to a recent technique change warrants a look from a physio rather than continued self-treatment
Exercise-Induced Bronchoconstriction (EIB)
- Significantly more common in competitive swimmers than the general athletic population, likely linked to chronic low-level chlorine byproduct exposure in indoor pools
- Symptoms: coughing, wheezing, or chest tightness during or after hard sets — easy to mistake for "just being out of breath"
- If symptoms appear consistently with intensity (not just once), get evaluated by a doctor rather than assuming it's normal fatigue
- Good pool ventilation and showering promptly after practice reduce chlorine byproduct exposure
Underwater Work & Breath-Holding Safety
- Shallow water blackout is a real risk from repeated breath-holding or hyperventilation before underwater swimming — it can happen with no warning symptoms
- Never practice extended underwater distance alone, and never hyperventilate before a long underwater swim to "load up on oxygen"
- UW training sets (15 m off the wall) at normal training volumes are not the same risk category as deliberate breath-hold/static apnea training — the latter needs supervision and should not be self-coached from generic advice
- Coaches should know the difference between healthy UW kick technique work and breath-hold training that carries real risk
General Respiratory Health for Swimmers
- A persistent cough, recurring chest tightness, or breathing that feels disproportionately hard relative to your fitness level are reasons to see a doctor, not push through
- Asthma is manageable for competitive swimmers with proper diagnosis and treatment — many elite swimmers compete successfully with diagnosed asthma
- This section is informational only and does not replace medical evaluation for breathing symptoms
Daily Prevention Routine (10 min)
- Ankle plantarflexion loading: 2 min (the same daily dose as the Dryland mobility routine)
- Serratus punches: 2×15
- External rotation: 1×15 each side
- Hip 90/90 switches: 1 min
- Copenhagen plank: 3×20 s
- Dead bug: 3×30 s (4×30 s on Dryland Day 1)
Season & Meet Calendar
Reads today's date to tell you where you are in the swim season — short course or long course, and what's coming up on the national calendar.
Where you are in the season
—
National Meet Calendar
| Meet | Dates | Course | Status |
|---|
Dates reflect the published USA Swimming national events calendar and are subject to official updates — always confirm with usaswimming.org before planning travel.
Futures, Juniors & National Cuts
Futures
Entry point to the national meet pipeline — between Sectionals and Speedo Junior Nationals. One national time standard; you swim at the site for your zone. Sectional cuts, by contrast, are set per Sectionals meet — each zone's sites publish their own standards.
View official Futures standards — opens USA Swimming's time-standards pageSpeedo Junior Nationals
Summer (LCM) and Winter (SCY) editions. Standards differ by edition and are faster than Futures.
View official Juniors standards — opens USA Swimming's time-standards pageToyota Nationals & U.S. Open
The deepest domestic senior fields. Nationals (summer) is the selection meet and carries the fastest domestic cuts; the U.S. Open (December) is the next tier — both standards are on usaswimming.org.
View official Nationals standards — opens USA Swimming's time-standards pageMotivational Times (B → AAAA)
The current National Age Group Motivational Times — six tiers from B to AAAA, used to set and track season goals at any age. They run on a four-year cycle and were revised in late 2025 to add the 50s of stroke for 13–18; the year range on the published table is the one to trust, not a copy of it here.
View official Motivational Times — opens USA Swimming's time-standards pageAI Swim Coach
Streaming · free account · 5 messages every 5 hours
Coach Chat
General coaching knowledge · 5 messages per 5 hours · answers can be wrong — check anything about health or injury with a coach or physician (more)
Scrollable conversation. When focused, use the arrow keys to scroll it.
You are offline — the coach needs a connection
Up to 600 characters.Swim Timers
A stroke-rate metronome, a work/rest circuit timer, a pace clock with send-off and split tools, and a plain stopwatch and countdown — big numbers, big buttons, sound, and nothing leaves your device.
Tempo trainer
Keys, once the trainer is focused or running: Space starts or pauses; the Up and Down arrows change the tempo by 1, or by 5 with Shift. Your last setting is remembered on this device.
Elite race stroke-rate ranges
| Event | Cycles / min | Seconds / cycle | Strokes / min single-arm, free & back | Load into the tempo trainer |
|---|
Load sets the middle of a range in cycles/min. Ranges merge men and women and long- and short-course clean-swimming data, rounded outward: the 2019 European Short-Course Championships freestyle analysis (324 swimmers; Staunton, Ruiz-Navarro & Born 2025), a 2025 analysis of 59 elite 100 free finalists (Scientific Reports), the 2021 European Championships 200 m analysis of all four strokes and its 50 m butterfly counterpart, a 2020 study of short-course 100 breaststroke, and The Race Club's published backstroke stroke rates. No published 100 fly race series was found, so that row is an estimate between the 50 and 200 fly data. The freestyle rows are the men's and women's bands from the Analytics elite freestyle reference merged into one envelope, so the two pages always agree.
Interval timer
Space bar starts and pauses once the timer is focused or running. Short beeps at 3-2-1, a different tone at each change, a rising triple at the end. The screen stays awake while it runs, where the browser allows it.
Circuit Setup
Presets
The exercises for each block live on the Dryland page — shoulder health, rotational power, hip hinge and core anti-rotation. Presets set the structure only; use movements and loads you have been coached on.
Pace clock
Send-off calculator
Set on an Interval
Leave Times
| Rep | Leave (clock) | Finish | Rest |
|---|
Split taker
With the split taker focused, Space starts, then records a split on each press. Stop records the final split. Times come from the device's high-resolution clock, so a hidden screen does not drift them.
| # | Cumulative | Split | Δ prev | Per 100 | Note |
|---|
Stopwatch
| # | Lap | Total |
|---|
Countdown
It beeps on the last three seconds and again at zero. Keep this tab in front — a phone that locks itself stops the sound.
No sound, or a timer paused? Read this
On iPhone, browser audio follows the ring/silent switch — if you hear nothing, switch to ring and raise the volume. The tempo trainer pauses itself if the screen is hidden (press Resume). The interval timer keeps counting while the screen or tab is hidden, but many browsers mute its beeps until you return, so keep the screen on for sound. Opening another Tidelyne page pauses both — the split taker keeps timing.
Race Planner
Set goal times against your PRs, see what one swim implies about another, plan every length of a race and count down to the meet.
Enter a goal time or add a PR for this event to plan its splits.
Pace per 50 and per 100 assumes the same course as the PR (set on My PRs — SCY, SCM or LCM). World-ranked senior swimmers typically improve about 0.6–1% between seasons; developing swimmers improve more, so use the quick-fill buttons as starting points, not targets. Everything on this page saves in this browser only and is included in the My PRs backup.
Predict from One Swim
Fit Your Own Exponent
Two PRs in the same stroke give your personal exponent. It shifts every prediction toward your actual speed–endurance balance.
Exponent Table — Where the Numbers Come From
▾Riegel's original endurance equation (1981) reports a swimming exponent close to 1.03 — but that fit covered events lasting roughly 3.5 minutes and longer, which in the pool means 400 m and up. Record ratios show the exponent is much steeper at the sprint end: the start is a fixed-time bonus and the 50 is almost purely anaerobic, so a 100 costs about 2.2× a 50, not 2×. The table below lists the typical exponent for each step on the event ladder, the plausible spread between speed-type and endurance-type swimmers, and the multiplier that step implies.
Multi-step predictions chain these segment by segment (100 → 200 → 400). Confidence drops with every step: one doubling is a reasonable estimate, two is a rough one, three or more says little. Typical values are the mean of the men's and women's long-course world-record ratios for each step (World Aquatics records as of September 2026); the plausible band narrows with distance: about ±0.04 at the sprint steps, ±0.03 through 200 → 400, and ±0.02 for 400 → 800 and 800 → 1500, where speed-type and endurance-type swimmers differ least.
Plan the Race
IM is always split by stroke leg, so the strategy is fixed for it.
Positive = second half slower (fade). Negative = negative split. Applies to swum lengths; the dive is handled by the start bonus.
How much faster the opening length is than a mid-race length at equal effort, because it starts from the blocks. Typical: 1.2–1.8 s in a 50 m pool, 0.7–1.2 s in a 25 m/yd pool.
Split Table
How Elite Races Are Split — Reference Patterns
▾Share of total race time in each segment, typical of championship finals. The opening segment always includes the dive, which is why even a perfectly even swim shows a faster first split. Butterfly and breaststroke 200s fade the most; 400 and longer freestyle is close to even with a lift on the final segment. Ranges are ± the tolerance shown; individual finals vary by about that much. Derived from the published splits of world-record and championship-final swims.
Next Meet
Second Meet (Optional)
Taper windows follow the Taper page (sprint 14–21 days, distance 7–14 days, short 3–7 days for a club or age-group load; an in-season meet is trained through, with no taper window). Checkpoint content is drawn from the Taper, Nutrition, Race Strategy and Mental pages so the countdown never contradicts them.
Training Analytics
Weekly volume, consistency, intensity distribution and rule-based observations from your Training Log, plus three pool-deck efficiency calculators — all computed in your browser.
Nothing to Analyze Yet
This page reads the sessions you save on the Training Log page. Three things make the analytics useful from the first week:
- Log every session — pool and dryland — with the date it happened. Weeks run Monday to Sunday.
- Fill in distance and duration for pool sessions. Distance drives the volume chart; minutes drive the intensity chart.
- Set the primary zone and effort (1–10) honestly. The zone menu defaults to Z2 AeT — change it when the main set was something else, or the distribution below will not mean much.
Once a few weeks are in, this page shows week-over-week volume, streaks, your low-versus-high intensity split, and calm rule-based observations a coach can act on. The efficiency calculators further down work without any log data.
The training log stored on this device could not be read, so there is nothing here to analyze. This is not an empty history — it does not mean your sessions were never saved.
The Training Log page says what happened to it and what to do next. Restoring a backup from My PRs brings your sessions, and this page, back. The efficiency calculators further down work without any log data.
Weekly Numbers
Weeks run Monday to Sunday (ISO weeks). Distance is in the unit you log — meters or yards; pick one and stick to it, and every number here is in that unit. A streak counts consecutive weeks with at least one logged session of any type; the current week does not break a streak until it ends. This page sends nothing anywhere; it reads the log already on this device.
Last 12 Weeks
Stacked bar chart of weekly training volume for the last 12 weeks with a four-week rolling average line. Focus the chart and use the left and right arrow keys to read each week, Home and End for the first and last week, and Escape to clear. The same data is available as a table with the Show as table button.
The current week is drawn lighter because it is still in progress. The rolling average uses the four most recent weeks (fewer at the very start of your log); its dashed last point includes the week in progress, so it sits low until the week is complete. Dryland sessions have no distance, so switch the measure to Minutes to see them.
Minutes by Zone, Last 4 Weeks
Method: each pool session's minutes are attributed to the primary zone you logged for it (dryland sessions are excluded; Mixed sessions are shown but cannot be split). Warm-up and cool-down are therefore counted at the session's main zone, so the true low-intensity share is somewhat higher than shown. The reading compares against published elite distributions (Seiler 2010; Hellard et al. 2019), which describe what elite programs do, not what any individual should do. Your coach's plan takes precedence.
Rule-Based Insights
Plain pattern checks on your log — no AI, no guessing. Each one says what was noticed and why it might matter; none of them is a prescription.
SWOLF, Stroke Rate & Critical Swim Speed
Three deck-side calculations that turn a stopwatch and a stroke count into numbers you can track over a season. They work with or without log data.
SWOLF — One Length
How to Read It
- Pool length matters. A 50 m SWOLF is roughly double a 25 m one for the same swimmer, and a 25 m pool has a push-off and glide every length that counts for no strokes. Only compare scores from the same pool length, from the same kind of start (push, not dive).
- Counting convention. Freestyle and backstroke: count every hand entry (each arm). Butterfly and breaststroke: one stroke per cycle. Use the same convention every time.
- Same effort, same pool, over weeks. The useful signal is your own trend at a fixed pace or effort — for example, best SWOLF on a 25 at 200-pace. Comparing against other swimmers is confounded by height and arm span.
- Relation to Golf Score. The Golf Score on the Calculator page is the same idea over 50 m (50 m split + strokes per 50) and has its own level guide there.
Stroke Rate & Distance per Stroke
Elite Freestyle Reference
Approximate mid-pool race values for the 324 swimmers who raced the individual freestyle events at the 2019 European Short-Course Championships (25 m pool, all rounds; Staunton, Ruiz-Navarro & Born 2025). Read from published density plots, so treat the bands as rounded. Rate is in cycles per minute; distance per cycle is per two arm strokes.
| Event | Men | Women | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rate | Per cycle | Rate | Per cycle | |
- Measure a mid-pool segment. Time and count strokes between two marks (for example the two 15 m marks — 15 m and 35 m in a 50 m pool — or flags to flags). A full length includes the push-off and glide, which inflates distance per stroke.
- Speed = rate × distance per cycle. The two trade off. Judge a technique change by speed at a fixed effort, or by stroke index (speed × distance per cycle), not by distance per stroke alone. Across elite fields, faster swimmers in the same event mostly cover more distance per stroke rather than stroking faster (Craig et al. 1985).
- Race values are not training values. Rate and length at training speeds differ from race values, and short-course figures include the extra underwater distance per length, so a comparison against this table is indicative only.
- Women's distance rows. In the 400 the winner held 47–53 cycles/min with the field widely spread; in the 800 the field split into two clusters — about 39–40 cycles/min at ~2.2 m and 45–46 at ~1.9 m — with every medalist in the faster-rate cluster and the winner at 48–55. Women's distance rates at this meet were higher than their 100 rates, the opposite of the men's pattern.
Critical Swim Speed (400 / 200)
| Reference | Per 50 | Per 100 | Per 200 | Per 400 |
|---|
Method & Assumptions
- Both swims all-out, from a push, in the same pool, well rested. A common field protocol is the 400 first, then full recovery (or a separate session), then the 200. A soft 400 or a 200 swum tired makes CSS wrong in opposite directions.
- What it approximates. Critical velocity is defined as the speed that could in theory be held without exhaustion; in practice it correlates strongly with 400 m performance and sits close to the 4 mmol/L lactate speed (Wakayoshi et al. 1992, 1993). Later work found it slightly overestimates the pace at maximal lactate steady state (Dekerle et al. 2005), so repeats "at CSS" are demanding threshold work, not comfortable aerobic swimming.
- The table below the result lists your own 400 and 200 paces beside CSS for comparison. How to train around CSS — offsets, repeat distance, rest — is your coach's call; this page does not prescribe it.
- D′ (anaerobic distance capacity) is the line's intercept: roughly the distance you can cover above CSS before fatigue forces you back down. From only two swims it is a rough estimate — read it in tens of meters, not units.
Physiological and load-management references are population findings from the sources named on this page (Craig et al. 1985; Wakayoshi et al. 1992, 1993; Mujika & Padilla 2000; Dekerle et al. 2005; Seiler 2010; Gabbett 2016; Hellard et al. 2019; Impellizzeri et al. 2020; Staunton, Ruiz-Navarro & Born 2025), not measurements of you.
What's New
What shipped, and when — every change to Tidelyne is written down here, newest first.
Install Tidelyne
Add Tidelyne to your home screen or desktop: full-screen, offline, one tap from the deck.
Release history
New versions download in the background; when one lands you get a small prompt to reload, never an interruption mid-set. Update checks run through your browser's service worker against this site only — nothing about you is sent anywhere. The one thing saved is the version you last read, so the nav dot knows when to appear.
About Tidelyne
A free website of training tools and reference for competitive swimmers — what is on it, and who it is for.
What Tidelyne is
A free website of training tools and reference for competitive swimmers. Its pages cover technique, training, pacing, racing, recovery and the season — among them a 3D stroke lab you can orbit and freeze mid-pull, pool-deck timers, a training log that reads back as analytics, and an AI coach. It is a web page, so it opens in any phone browser with nothing to buy and nothing to install; How to Use covers adding it to a home screen and running it with no signal, which is the normal state of a pool building.
Four features are AI and need a free account. Everything else opens signed out, and what you save stays in your own browser rather than on a server unless you switch on syncing or join a team — How to Use sets that boundary out in full, and The Mission covers why it is free and how it is paid for.
Learn, Tools, Track and Compete are the site's own menu, so what is listed here is where you will find it; the four AI features are listed on their own because they are the only part that needs an account.
Learn
- Technique Library
- Eight phase-by-phase breakdowns in the Technique Library — the four strokes, underwaters, turns, starts and the IM — each with the drills that fix it and an elite benchmark to measure against.
- Video Library
- Ten embedded clips in the Video Library: elite technique by stroke, plus underwaters, dryland and race analysis. Each one loads only when you press play. They are their creators' work rather than Tidelyne's, which Built With sets out.
- Set Library
- Ready-made sets in the Training Set Library, by purpose — aerobic, threshold, kick, technique, warm-up and speed — with the distance, the interval and what each one trains already on them.
- Dryland
- A four-day strength week on Dryland — pull strength, rotational power, explosive power, then shoulder and ankle health — plus a daily mobility routine, and how to cut the load once a taper starts.
- Nutrition
- Nutrition & Fueling day to day, on race day, after training, and for hydration, with carbohydrate and protein targets per kilogram of bodyweight.
Tools
- 3D stroke lab
- Orbit a rigged human swimmer in the 3D lab, slow it to 0.3×, jump to any phase of the pull or X-ray it to the skeleton, and read drag, thrust, speed and an efficiency index as the cycle runs — illustrative teaching figures, not measurements of you.
- Workout Generator
- Seven choices in the Workout Generator — focus, stroke, pool, session length, athlete level, equipment and meso phase — and it streams a complete printable practice. What it writes is a draft for your coach to adjust, not a prescription. Needs a free account.
- Pace Calculator
- Four tabs on the Pace Calculator: Golf Score, race splits, pace zones scaled from your best 100, and SCY, SCM and LCM conversions — flat training approximations rather than the official USA Swimming factors.
- Training Zones
- Five intensity Zones, set by blood lactate and a 10-second pulse count — what each one feels like, what it trains, and how much of a season it should get.
- Pool-deck timers
- Three Timers: a stroke-rate metronome, a work-and-rest interval timer, and a Pace Clock carrying the send-off calculator and the split taker. Big numbers, big buttons, sound.
- Race Planner
- Four tabs on the Race Planner: goal times measured against your PRs, a Race Predictor that scales one swim across a whole event ladder, a length-by-length Split Planner, and a meet countdown that says which taper window today sits in.
Track
- My PRs
- A time field per event on My PRs, plus the course they were swum in. Every field is optional, and the pace, goal and workout tools read what you put here.
- Training Log
- One row per session in the Training Log — date, session type, distance, duration, primary zone, effort, main set and notes — with a 30-day summary. The most recent 2,000 sessions are kept.
- Analytics
- Five sections in Analytics, all computed from those rows: weekly numbers, 12 weeks of volume, minutes by zone over the last four weeks, rule-based observations with no AI in them, and three efficiency calculators — SWOLF, stroke rate with distance per stroke, and a Critical Swim Speed test. The three calculators work with an empty log; the other four sections need logged sessions.
Compete
- Race Strategy
- Race Strategy — the meet-day timeline from the pre-meet meal to behind the blocks, the competition warm-up protocol, a plan for every core event, and the pacing science underneath them.
- Taper & Recovery
- Taper & Recovery — the taper protocol written out, recovery modalities graded by evidence rather than by popularity, and sleep. A full taper is for the one or two championship meets of a season, and the page says so.
- Mental Performance
- Mental Performance — visualization, arousal control, focus cues, and a pre-race routine you can rehearse.
- Injury Prevention
- Injury Prevention by body region — shoulder, knee, low back, hip, elbow, neck, and lungs and breathing — with what causes each problem in swimmers and the daily work that keeps it away.
- Season & Meet Calendar
- Season & Meet Calendar reads today's date to say where the season is — the phase, and whether it is short course or long course — and lists the national meet calendar with each meet's live status. Cut times are not copied here: Futures, Speedo Junior Nationals, Toyota Nationals and the Motivational Times each open USA Swimming's own time-standards page, so nothing on this site can hand you a stale number for a swim that matters.
The four AI features
- AI Swim Coach
- The AI Swim Coach, in six modes — coaching, technique, race, science, nutrition and mental — streamed as it writes. It answers from general coaching knowledge rather than from these pages.
- Workout Generator
- The Workout Generator writes the practice with the same model, so it draws on the same allowance as the coach.
- Ask the Visualizer
- A written stroke analysis, generated from the same page as the 3D lab.
- AI Reconstruct
- Inside the 3D lab: name a movement and it builds the animation for it.
Who it is for
Competitive swimmers — age group, senior, elite and masters. The training is taken seriously enough that the detail matters, so the numbers are given, the mechanism is explained, and nothing is rounded off to the point of being no use at a meet.
Coaches
A coach can send a swimmer to one page for one problem instead of re-explaining it on the deck. There is no coach dashboard and no way to pull up a swimmer's log — Coaches & Teams covers what that does and does not allow.
Parents
Every page can be read without signing up, and nothing on the site is social: no feed, no public profile, and no way for one user to contact another. There are no weight, body-fat or calorie targets anywhere on it, deliberately — the Nutrition page says so in those words. What a free account involves is set out in How to Use, and what exists on a swimmer who makes one is in Coaches & Teams.
How to Use It
Where to start on a first visit, an index of every tool by what you want from it, and the mechanics worth knowing before you rely on this at a meet.
Start here
A good order is these six steps, and not one of them needs an account. The first one is first because the pace, goal and workout tools all read what you put in it.
- Fill in My PRs. Set the course your times were swum in — SCY, SCM or LCM — then type a record for each event you race. Every field is optional, and each one saves as you type.
- Turn one time into training paces. Calculate pace zones on My PRs opens Pace Zones with your 100 freestyle already in the box. It scales that time into Z1–Z5, per 100 and per 50, so threshold pace becomes a number in seconds rather than a word.
- Pick one thing to fix. The Technique Library breaks every stroke, turn and start down phase by phase; the 3D stroke lab steps the same pull one phase at a time, so you can stop on the frame you are getting wrong. One cue, not ten.
- Put a number on the goal. Goal Times gives a field for each of 18 events, the gap to your PR, and the pace the goal needs per 50 and per 100. It updates and saves as you type — there is no Save button.
- Log today's session. One row in the Training Log — date, session type, distance, duration and primary zone, with effort, the main set and notes if you want them. Training Analytics is computed from those rows, so start logging before you need it.
- Export a backup. Export backup on My PRs writes your PRs, log and plans to one file. Do it now, not after you have lost it.
Find the right tool
Every page on the site, indexed by what you want rather than by the menu. What each tool actually contains is in About Tidelyne.
Technique
- Fix your stroke. Technique Library — all four strokes plus underwaters, turns, starts and the IM, phase by phase, with the drills and the focus cues.
- See what your catch is doing. 3D stroke lab — orbit the swimmer, slow it to 0.3×, step the pull one phase at a time, and read drag, thrust, lift and net force at each. Those figures are teaching approximations rather than measurements of you, which Coaches & Teams sets out in full.
- Watch it swum. Video Library — clips by stroke, each one loading its player only when you press play.
Training
- Find a set for today. Training Set Library — aerobic, threshold, kick, technique, warm-up and speed sets with the distance and the interval already on them.
- Write a whole practice. Workout Generator — warm-up to cool-down from seven dropdowns, streamed and printable. Needs a free account. The Pool dropdown follows the course you set on My PRs until you pick another. What it writes is a draft for your coach to adjust, not a prescription, and it can be wrong.
- Train on land. Dryland Programming — a four-day plan, with the dose to drop to once a taper starts.
- Understand the zone names. Training Zones — the five zones by blood lactate and a ten-second pulse count, what each trains and how much of a season it should get.
- Log what you swam. Training Log — one row per session, plus a 30-day summary. Distances stay in the unit you typed them in: pick meters or yards and stick to it, because nothing converts.
- See whether you are improving. Training Analytics — 12 weeks of volume with a four-week rolling average, minutes by zone over the last four weeks, week streaks, and plain rule-based pattern checks with no AI in them. This part needs logged sessions.
- Measure efficiency, not just speed. SWOLF, stroke rate and distance per stroke, and a Critical Swim Speed test from a 400 and a 200 time trial. All three sit past the empty state on that page and work whether the log has anything in it or not.
- Pace a set on the blocks. Pace Clock — a working clock, with the send-off calculator, the leave times and the split taker on that same tab rather than tabs of their own.
- Hold a stroke rate. Tempo Trainer — a metronome set either in strokes a minute or in full cycles, with elite race ranges you can load into it.
- Time a repeat set. Interval Timer — work, rest, rounds per set, sets and a lead-in, with presets for the dryland circuits.
Racing
- Score a 50 for efficiency. Golf Score — the 50 split in seconds plus the stroke count, with the bands to read it against.
- Work out your goal splits. Split Planner — length by length from a goal time, with the stroke, the strategy, the second-half difference and the start bonus all yours to set, and a Use my goal or PR button to fill the goal. A freestyle-only version sits on the Race Splits tab of the Pace Calculator: the same split engine underneath, but it fixes the stroke to freestyle and the second-half difference to 2%, and it carries a Surge middle pattern of its own — so the two do not always print the same table.
- Know what a time predicts in another event. Race Predictor, on the Planner rather than the Calculator. It scales one swim across that stroke's whole event ladder, or fits the curve to two of your own times first.
- Plan the meet itself. Race Strategy — a meet-day timeline from the pre-meet meal to behind the blocks, the competition warm-up written out set by set, an event-by-event strategy table, and the pacing science the targets come from.
- Know where the season is. Season & Meet Calendar — it reads today's date to say which season phase and which course you are in, and lists the national meets with live status. It deliberately prints no cut times: every standard links out to USA Swimming instead of risking a stale copy.
- Count down to a meet. Meet Countdown — up to two meets, with the taper window today sits in. This one has a Save meets button; press it.
- Plan a taper. Taper Protocol — the sprint taper and the distance taper written out separately, 14 to 21 days and 7 to 14.
- Compare a time across pools. Pool Converter — SCY, SCM and LCM. Flat factors, not the official USA Swimming ones, and the page says so; for cuts, entries and seeding use the official standards.
Fuel, recovery and staying healthy
- Fuel and recover. Daily Fueling for carbohydrate and protein targets per kilogram — general published ranges, not a plan for you. Recovery Modalities grades sleep, cold water and active recovery by the strength of the evidence rather than by popularity. There are no weight, body-fat or calorie targets anywhere on the site, on purpose.
- Stay healthy. Prevention — load management first, then a ten-minute daily routine.
- Know when not to train through it. Three pages break off to a red flag instead of a training cue: Daily Fueling on eating less than the training costs, Low Back on teenage back pain that lasts more than two weeks, and Arousal Control on anxiety that follows you home. Each one sends you to a doctor rather than back to the pool, and the Medical Disclaimer is the full version.
Ask, or just search
- Ask a question. AI Swim Coach — six subject modes, streamed, 600 characters a message, with the last 20 messages of the conversation sent as context. Needs a free account.
- Find anything. Press ⌘K — Ctrl+K off a Mac — from anywhere and type what you are after. / opens the same search when you are not typing in a field, and can be switched off in the search panel's own footer.
What needs an account
Signing up takes a username of 3 to 24 letters, numbers or underscores, an email address, a password of at least 8 characters, and a tick confirming you are 13 or older. There is no card, because there is nothing to charge.
What creating one sends, and what it does not
- Sent to the server
- Your email address, your password, your username, the 13-or-older confirmation with the time you gave it, and the version of the Terms in force when you agreed. The password is stored hashed by the authentication provider, never in readable form.
- Two emails, once
- A welcome message to you, and one notification to the site owner containing your username and email address. Neither is marketing, and there is no mailing list.
- What it unlocks
- The four AI features and nothing else. No training data syncs between devices, so signing in on a new phone brings none of your PRs or sessions with it — that is what the backup file is for.
- Age
- 13 or over to create one. Nothing else on the site asks an age. Separately, and whether or not you make an account, the Terms ask any swimmer under 18 to have a parent or guardian's permission to use the site.
Two things soften the gate. AI Reconstruct answers three cues from built-in reconstructions — a breaststroke pullout, a backstroke start and a streamline glide — which load with no account and with no connection. Offline, each AI surface says so where its answer would appear rather than opening a sign-in dialog that could not have worked. Signed out and online, it says the same thing in place and then opens the sign-in card, so closing it does not leave a silent page. Signing in itself needs a connection, so the Log in button reads as unavailable offline.
The Privacy Policy lists everything that leaves your device, and names the AI provider that your messages are passed to.
How the AI limit behaves
5 messages per rolling 5 hours, shared across all four AI features. Not 5 each: the coach, the Workout Generator, Ask the Visualizer and AI Reconstruct all go through one call and one counter, so four generated workouts leave one coach question. Rolling means the window is a lookback, not a clock that resets on the hour — your oldest message ages out five hours after you sent it, and that is when you get it back.
A message is counted the moment the request is sent, not when the answer lands, so pressing Stop part way through a reply still spends it. The count is kept on the server, so it follows your account rather than the device.
There is also a ceiling in dollars on AI spending across everyone, which can pause the AI for a while — The Mission explains why it exists. Nothing else on the site stops with it.
Your training data follows your account
Export and import a backup
Export backup lives on My PRs, not on the Log page, even though the log is most of the file. It downloads one file named tidelyne-backup- followed by the date, holding your swimmer name, every PR and the course they were set in, the whole training log, your planner goals, meets, fitted predictor profile and last split plan, and your timer and analytics settings. It is plain readable JSON and a real one is well under 1 MB, so you can open it and see exactly what is in it.
Import backup on the same page reads it back. Importing replaces what that device already holds, so when there is anything to overwrite it asks first and offers Replace or Keep mine; on a device with nothing saved yet it imports straight away. Signed in, your account holds a copy as well, so a lost phone is not a lost season — but an export is still the only copy you control completely, so take one now and again.
Install it, and use it with no signal
Install
The install card is on What's New, and its button only appears while your browser is actually offering an install prompt; when one is available, the footer and the search panel offer it too. Otherwise, do it by hand: on iPhone or iPad, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen; in Chrome or Edge, use Install in the address bar or browser menu; in Safari on macOS 14 or later, File, then Add to Dock. Installed, it opens full-screen, and the browser grants it persistent storage silently, so it stops treating your log as disposable.
Offline
The first visit saves the site to your device — sometimes after one reload, and only over https, in a browser that supports service workers. What's New states which of those you got, in plain words, on this device.
Once it has saved, the pages, the calculators, the timers, the log and your PRs all work with no signal, and the 3D lab does too once you have opened it while online. Three things need a connection — signing in, the four AI features and the embedded videos — and each says so in place rather than failing silently. New versions download in the background and offer a reload when they land, never an interruption mid-set.
The Mission
Good coaching information is unevenly distributed. This is the argument for fixing that, and the commitments that come with it.
The gap
The information gap in this sport is not a knowledge gap. What the catch is actually doing, why a race goes out on a particular split, what a taper changes and what it does not — all of it is already written down, in coaching textbooks, federation courses and journal papers. It is written for the coach and priced for the club. The swimmer doing the training is not the reader any of it was written for.
So it is not a secrecy problem. It is a distribution problem — and distribution is the part one person with a website can change. That is the whole argument for the site existing, and it is why none of it is held back for a paying tier.
Why it is free
A free site run by one person can only make promises it can afford to keep, so these are written as things the site cannot do rather than things I intend not to do. Each one is checkable. The front end is plain static files with no build step — one index.html, plus the file that draws the 3D swimmer and the one that handles offline — so none of it is compiled or minified past reading; Built With lists what it runs on. The Privacy Policy covers the server, which is the one part the page source does not show.
- No price
- No paid tier, no trial that expires, no card to enter, nothing to cancel. There is no payment code in the site at all, and its own structured data declares the price as 0 USD and the content free to access.
- No paywall later
- Nothing is being held back to charge for. Every library, calculator, timer and planner is there now, and the only rationed thing is the AI — because it is the only thing that costs money per use.
- No ads, no tracking
- No advertising networks, no analytics, no third-party tracking pixels. The Content-Security-Policy lists every origin the page may load a script, an image or a frame from, and no advertising or analytics origin is among them. The one exception to "nothing third-party loads" is YouTube: a thumbnail comes from its image servers when the Video Library opens, and the player itself, with its cookies, only once you press play. the Privacy Policy and Built With name every one.
- Nothing sold
- Nothing about you is sold, traded or handed to an advertiser, and there is no mailing list — the only mail the site sends is account mail. The Privacy Policy says so in writing.
- Who pays
- I do. Serving a set of static files is close to free. No company, no advertisers and no investors, which means nothing on the site has to be arranged around what someone else wants from it — see The Owner.
The cost ceiling
The AI is billed per request, so it is the one part of the site whose bill grows with use. Two limits sit in front of it on the server. One is per account — a message allowance shared across all four AI features rather than one each, set out in How to Use. The other is the spending ceiling, which is what this page is about.
What you type into an AI feature goes to the server and on from there to the AI provider named in the Privacy Policy, and that hop is where the per-request cost comes from. The site keeps one row per request — which account asked, and when — and that is what every limit here is counted from. The conversation itself is saved to your account as well, so you can come back to it; it is yours to delete.
A monthly budget in dollars
AI spending across everyone using the site is capped at a fixed number of dollars a month, set on the server rather than written into the page. The server does not meter real spend as it goes; it converts the budget into a number of messages using a deliberately pessimistic price per message, costed as though every reply ran to its full allowed length. A month can therefore come in under budget, but not over it.
And a day's share of it
The month's allowance is also divided into a daily share — a rolling 24-hour count, not a midnight reset — so one busy afternoon cannot spend the month. If the day's share is used up, the AI comes back over the next few hours. If the month's is used up, it comes back at the start of the next month. Both counts are of everyone's requests together, not yours, so you can meet either without having asked anything yourself. If the server cannot read those counts it declines to treat that as a free pass: the spending check is skipped for that request and the per-account limit still decides it.
What success looks like
Not a user count. A swimmer who can say why their 200 went out too fast, point at the part of their pull that is costing them time, and walk into a conversation with their coach already holding the vocabulary. If that swimmer gets there and never opens the site again, it worked.
That is also the limit of the claim. This is educational, not clinical, and not a replacement for the person on the deck — Coaches & Teams sets out what the site is not, and the Medical Disclaimer is the binding version.
Every commitment on this page is a statement about code rather than an intention, so it can be checked, and it can be held against me. When one of them changes, the change is written up in What's New, which is the record of what has shipped.
The Owner
Tidelyne is a one-person project. This is who runs it, and the swim that started it.
Who runs it
I'm Daniel Lim. I swim breaststroke in New Jersey, I'm in eighth grade, and I start high school next year. Tidelyne is a one-person project — I decide what goes on it, I build it, and I pay what it costs to run. There is no company behind it, no staff and no investors.
- Operated by
- Scarpline — the name the site is published under, not a company with people in it. The Terms name it as the operator.
- Reach me
- hello@tidelyne.com, read by one person. Contact says what to put in a bug report, and where to send a request about your account instead.
- Paid for by
- Me, out of pocket. The Mission has the funding, the cost ceiling and the commitments that follow from them.
Why I built it
It started with a championship swim I could not explain. I knew something in my stroke was wrong. I did not know what.
Breaststroke is a bad stroke to have that problem in. The pull, the breath, the kick and the glide all happen inside about a second and a half, you cannot see any of it from in the water, and from the deck it is one blur of splash. So I went looking afterwards. The video I could find played past the catch before I could see it. The material that explained the mechanics properly was written for coaches, or sat behind a subscription an eighth-grader is not going to pay for. Nothing let me stop a stroke and turn it round and look at it.
That is why the 3D lab is the thing this site was built around. It holds a stroke still at any phase and lets you rotate it, because that is what I wanted that night and could not find anywhere. The rest followed from the same habit — the Pace Calculator does the arithmetic I was doing by hand, Race Planner writes the splits out before the race instead of after it, and Race Strategy puts a meet day on paper before you are standing behind the blocks.
What I can add is the swimmer's side of it: the question in the form it comes up in at practice, rather than in the form a coaching course asks it. I am not a coach and I am not pretending to be one — what I have is the same problem you have, and more time to spend on it than is probably reasonable. The argument about why that gap exists at all, and why closing it has to be free, is on The Mission.
Still being built
It is not finished and is not meant to be. What's New is the record of what has shipped — each released version, dated, with the changes in it, newest first. It is release history and nothing more: there is no published plan for what comes next, so do not read a version note as a promise about the next one.
The gaps are deliberate in places. This is not a coach, not a meet-entry system and not a team platform — Coaches & Teams lists what it will not do, and the Medical Disclaimer covers what it is not qualified to tell you. It is not a private place to type, either: what you put into an AI feature goes to the server and on to the AI provider named in the Privacy Policy.
If something on it is wrong, out of date, or reads like it was written for somebody other than the swimmer doing the training, I would rather hear it than not.
Coaches & Teams
What a squad gets, what the site does and does not hold about a swimmer, and what it deliberately is not.
Sending a team here
Send the link. There is nothing to install, no team to create, no roster to upload and no seat count — a swimmer opens the page and starts. Using the site means agreeing to the Terms, and a swimmer under 18 should have a parent or guardian's permission first.
Only the four AI features ask who anyone is, and those are capped; How to Use sets out that account boundary and how the message limit behaves in practice. Why there is nothing to pay is on The Mission, and the inventory of what is on the site is on About Tidelyne.
What a coach can do with it
- Put the 3D stroke lab on a screen at a team meeting and freeze a catch mid-pull. The Technique Library covers the same phases in text, so a swimmer can go back over it alone.
- Use the timers on deck. The pace clock runs on each device's own time, so two phones on the same deck agree, and a sync button lines it up with a wall clock that does not.
- Plan from the Training Set Library and the four-day dryland plan. The Workout Generator prints a draft to mark up, not a session to run as written.
- Hand out the meet-day material instead of repeating it on the bus: the timeline, the warm-up protocol and the event plans on Race Strategy, and where today sits in the season on Season & Meet Calendar.
- Send one swimmer to one tab for one problem — split planning, taper, prevention work.
It runs on a phone in a pool building with no signal once that device has saved a copy; How to Use has the install and offline detail.
There is no coach dashboard
No roster, no attendance, no group view, and no way to pull up a swimmer's times or training log. That follows from where the data sits rather than being a feature nobody has got to yet: In individual mode, PRs, the training log, goal times and meet dates are written to the swimmer's own browser and never to a server, so there is nothing for anyone to read — not for you, and not for the site owner. A swimmer can switch on syncing to keep a copy on their own account, and that copy is readable only by them; it does not become visible to a coach. Team mode is the exception, and it is deliberate: practices logged there are meant for you to read, and Team Mode tells every swimmer so before they type anything.
What the Terms let you reuse
- Yours to use
- The text, calculators, code and 3D visualizer belong to the site owner, and the Terms let you use them freely for your own training and coaching — in a practice plan, on a whiteboard, in a team handout.
- Not yours to republish
- Do not copy the site wholesale, redistribute it as your own product, or resell access to it.
- The videos are not Tidelyne's
- The clips in the Video Library belong to the coaches and swimmers who made them and are shown through YouTube's privacy-enhanced player. All rights stay with them, so nothing on this site gives you permission to reuse them.
- One account per swimmer
- The Terms do not allow creating accounts for other people, so a coach cannot sign a squad up. Each swimmer makes their own, and each carries its own message limit.
- Do not automate it
- Scripting or batching AI requests to get around the per-account limit breaks the Terms, and so does using the AI for anything unrelated to swimming.
What the site holds on a swimmer
Signed out — which is every swimmer under 13, and every swimmer who never makes an account — nothing. What they type stays in that browser: PRs, the training log, race goals, meet dates, timer and analytics settings. There are no analytics, no ad networks and no tracking pixels anywhere on the site, and nothing is sold. The host's server logs may include IP addresses, and fonts, the 3D engine and video thumbnails are fetched from third parties when a page needs them.
With a free account the server holds an email address, a password stored hashed by the authentication provider — never in readable form and never visible to the site owner — a username, and the 13-or-older confirmation with the time it was given and the date of the Terms agreed to. Each AI request adds one row holding the account and the time. The conversation is also saved to the account, so a swimmer can reopen it on another device — it stays until they delete it, and deleting a chat deletes its messages with it. Signing up sends two emails: a welcome to the swimmer, and one notification to the site owner carrying that username and email address. There is no mailing list and no marketing; the only other mail the site sends is a password-reset link, and only when someone asks for one.
The AI is the exception to all of it. What a swimmer types into an AI feature goes to the server and on to the AI provider named in the Privacy Policy, which generates the reply. That policy lists every processor and is the document to read before you forward this site to parents; it also carries the address to write to for showing, correcting or deleting an account's data.
What it is not
- Not meet entry or seeding
- The pool conversions are flat approximations for training reference, not the official USA Swimming factors, and Season & Meet Calendar prints no cut times on purpose — it links the official standards instead. Confirm cuts, entries and seeding with usaswimming.org or your governing body.
- Not a measurement tool
- The force, velocity and efficiency values in the 3D lab are illustrative teaching approximations rather than measured data, and the heart-rate, lactate, pace and stroke-rate figures are typical published ranges, not readings off your swimmers.
- Not team management
- No rosters, attendance, messaging or billing. There is no feed, no public profile and no way for one user to contact another, which also means nobody can reach your swimmer through this site.
- Not a coach
- It is general educational information. Where it conflicts with the program you are running, your program wins — the site's own page footers and the Terms say so.
Medical and training disclaimer
Frequently Asked Questions
Where your data lives, what the AI coach can and cannot do, what happens if you clear your browser, and how the whole thing is paid for.
The short answers
The six things people ask first. The page or document named in each one is where it is set out in full.
- Cost
- Free. No paid tier, no trial, no card to enter, nothing to cancel — The Mission sets out how it is paid for and what the spending ceiling is.
- Account
- Needed for the four AI features only; everything else works signed out. How to Use has that boundary in full.
- Your training data
- Signed in, PRs and the training log are saved to your account and follow you to any device; signed out they stay in this browser. How to Use covers all three and what each trade-off costs you.
- AI limit
- One allowance per account, counted on the server and shared across all four AI features rather than one each. How to Use describes how that behaves in practice.
- Tracking
- No ads, no analytics, no tracking pixels, nothing sold — the commitments are in The Mission, and the Privacy Policy names every third party a page contacts.
- Minimum age
- 13 to create an account. Separately, and whether or not you make one, the Terms ask any swimmer under 18 to have a parent or guardian's permission to use the site.
Questions
Where do PRs and the training log actually live?
▾In this browser's own storage, on this device, and nowhere else — unless you switch syncing on from My PRs, which is off until you do. Left alone they are never sent to a server, which also means nobody running the site can read them. With syncing on, a copy of the same thing the backup file holds is kept on your account and only you can read it. Without it there is no server-side copy to restore from: clearing your browser data deletes all of it for good, and a different phone starts empty. Export backup on My PRs writes the lot to one JSON file, and Import backup on the same page reads it back on the new device. How to Use lists everything that file holds and what the log's 2,000-session cap means.
Does it work on a phone at the pool, and does it work offline?
▾That is what it is built for — it is a web page, so it opens in any phone browser with nothing to install, and it can be added to the home screen and run full-screen. Once offline support has installed, the pages you have already opened work with no signal, which is the normal state of a pool building. Three things need a connection — logging in, the four AI features and the embedded videos — and each says so in place rather than failing silently. How to Use has the install steps for each browser and what caches when.
Is the AI coach any good?
▾It is useful for explaining things and sketching a plan, but it is not a coach who has watched you swim, and it can be confidently wrong. It answers from general coaching knowledge rather than from the pages on this site, which the welcome message in the chat says outright, so read Training Zones and Taper & Recovery directly for Tidelyne's own zone numbers and taper windows. There are six modes — coaching, technique, race, science, nutrition and mental — the input box takes 600 characters, and the model is sent the last 20 messages of the conversation and no more.
What does Tidelyne record about an AI message?
▾What you type goes to the server and on to the AI provider named in the Privacy Policy, which is the document that names it. One row per request, holding your account and the time, is what enforces the limit. The conversation itself is saved to your account so it is on every device you sign in to, and it stays there until you delete it — Delete on a chat removes it and its messages for good. Logging out does not delete a saved chat — it is still on the account at the next sign-in. Keep health details out of it, because it is a general coaching tool and not a confidential medical service, and because what you type is now kept until you remove it.
What happens if a swimmer types something worrying into the coach?
▾Before a message reaches the model, the server checks the newest thing typed for language about suicide and self-harm; a match never goes to the model and never costs a message from the limit. It gets a fixed reply instead, which says plainly that this is a swimming tool and not the right help, gives the US 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, points anyone outside the US to a local emergency number or crisis line, and asks the swimmer to tell a parent, a trusted adult or their coach that day. The check runs on the coach, the workout generator and the visualizer's analysis, but not on the 3D reconstruction cues, whose only output is animation data. Be clear about what it is: a keyword check, not a safety net — it will miss anything phrased differently.
How do you get an account and its records deleted?
▾Email the address given in the Privacy Policy — that is the contact of record for it, and account records are kept until someone asks for them to go. Log out on its own only removes the sign-in session from this browser. Anything saved on your device never reached a server in the first place — unless you switched syncing on, in which case Delete the copy on my account on My PRs removes that copy too. The rest is yours to clear with Clear PRs on My PRs, Clear log on the Training Log, or your browser's own settings.
Who writes the technique content, and who checked it?
▾Daniel writes it — The Owner says who that is — and nothing on the site claims that an outside expert, governing body or medical professional reviewed it or endorsed it. Where a number comes from research the page names its source, and teaching ranges are labelled as such: the heart-rate, lactate, pace and stroke-rate figures are typical published ranges, and the 3D lab's force and velocity values are illustrative approximations rather than measured data. The pool-format conversions are flat approximations for training reference and are not the official USA Swimming factors, which vary by event and distance — the Pool Converter says so on the page, and for cuts, entries and seeding use usaswimming.org.
Is this a substitute for a coach, or for a doctor?
▾No, and the Medical Disclaimer says so in writing: this is general educational information about swimming, it creates no clinician relationship, and where it conflicts with what your coach or a medical professional tells you, follow them. Two parts of it are worth a parent's time — talk to a professional before starting or changing a training program and before acting on nutrition, caffeine or supplement information, and never swim alone or do underwater and breath-hold work without qualified supervision, because hyperventilating before an underwater swim can cause shallow water blackout with no warning. Coaches & Teams carries that disclaimer in full, along with what this site is not.
Something on it is wrong. How do you report it?
▾Email hello@tidelyne.com with the page, the number, and what it should be — a wrong number, a broken tool, a technique point you coach differently or a bad AI answer all go to the same inbox and reach one person directly. Every release is written up on What's New, so you can check whether a fix has shipped.
Built With
What the site runs on, what has been done for accessibility and what has not been audited, and what it needs in a browser to work at all.
What it runs on
- The site
- First-party. One hand-written index.html — markup, styles and scripts in the same file, no framework and no build step — plus viz-human.js, which builds the 3D swimmer in the browser with no model files to download.
- The service worker
- First-party. sw.js stores the shell — index.html, viz-human.js, the three legal pages, the manifest and the icons — then gives the network three seconds before falling back to the stored copy, so a stalled connection serves something rather than hanging. Only a genuine response is cached, so a server error cannot overwrite the shell. Three.js and the fonts are cached separately.
- Two pinned libraries
- Third-party. Three.js 0.128.0 for the 3D lab and supabase-js 2.116.0 for sign-in and server calls, both from the jsDelivr CDN, each pinned to that exact version with a sha384 integrity hash and named by full path in the Content-Security-Policy, so a substituted file is blocked rather than run.
- Three typefaces
- Third-party. Bebas Neue, DM Sans and DM Mono from Google Fonts; no font files ship with the site. Until they arrive a font already on your device stands in, scaled to the width of the face it replaces so the headings do not reflow when the real one lands.
- Supabase
- Third-party. Accounts, two Edge Functions — ask-ai and notify-signup — and two tables: ai_usage, the AI call counter, and profiles, which holds a username. Both functions' source is in the repository.
- Resend
- Third-party. Delivers the two emails that creating an account sends. The Privacy Policy says what is in them.
- Vercel
- Third-party. Serves the files.
- The AI provider
- Third-party, and not named here, because it can change without this page changing. What you type into an AI feature goes to the server and on to the AI provider named in the Privacy Policy.
- The video clips
- Not Tidelyne's work. The 10 clips in the Video Library belong to the coaches and swimmers who made them, embedded through youtube-nocookie.com; the player itself loads only when you press play.
Accessibility
- A skip link to the main content, first in the tab order.
- The full WAI-ARIA tabs pattern on every tab strip on the site: a labelled tablist, each tab tied to the panel it shows, one tab stop per strip, and Arrow, Home and End to move between tabs.
- Every accordion question stays a heading with a real button inside it, so it is reachable from a screen reader's headings list and reports whether it is open.
- Live regions on results, errors and saves — role="status", role="alert" and aria-live="polite" — so what changed is read out instead of having to be hunted for.
- Screen-reader-only labels and aria-labels on the icon-only controls, so none of them announces as a bare glyph.
- One prefers-reduced-motion block, kept last in the stylesheet so no earlier rule can re-enable a transition, plus a tlReducedMotion() check in the script: the stroke loop starts paused and smooth scrolls become jumps.
- A forced-colors block for Windows High Contrast: a selected control takes the system Highlight fill and adds a check glyph, so its state survives with no colour at all. A separate block steps the muted text and borders up for the Increase Contrast setting on macOS, iOS and Android.
- A visible 2px focus ring on every button, link, field, select and element carrying a tabindex.
- The router moves the showing view's footer out of main and marks it contentinfo, so there is exactly one top-level footer landmark.
- An explicit type on every button element, so none of them submits a form by accident.
What it needs to run
JavaScript, and the site says so in its own structured data: browserRequirements reads "Requires JavaScript". Routing is the URL hash, so with JavaScript switched off you get the home page, a noscript line saying the tools are unavailable, and nothing else. The 3D stroke lab needs WebGL as well. Newer CSS sits behind feature queries, so an older browser loses a refinement rather than the page.
Most of it keeps working with no connection — what works offline, and what does not.
Printing
The print styles hide the navigation, the tab strips, the 3D canvas and the forms, repaint the page black on white, open every closed accordion, and print every tab panel in sequence under its tab's name, each panel after the first starting a fresh sheet. Bar fills keep their colour so zone widths still read. The footer is cut to one line — that page's safety sentence, which hiding the footer outright had been removing from exactly the pages coaches print.
Interviews & Talks
Conversations about the project, the sport, and what goes into building it.
Interviews and talks
Conversations about the project, the sport, and what goes into building it.
Looking for technique video rather than talk? The Video Library groups clips by stroke. They were made by their own creators rather than by Tidelyne, which Built With sets out; they are general information rather than coaching advice, as the Medical Disclaimer says.
Contact
One inbox, read by one person — what to send, where to send it, and what to expect back.
Contact
Email hello@tidelyne.com — a question about a tool, a number that looks wrong, a technique point you coach differently, or a feature you want. It all arrives in one inbox, and writing in does not sign you up for anything. Interview and clinic requests go to the same address; Interviews says what kind are welcome.
Two kinds of mail go elsewhere. Anything about an account or the data attached to it — seeing it, correcting it, deleting it — goes to the address of record in the Privacy Policy, which names the contact for those requests. And keep injuries, diagnoses and medical details out of email: the Privacy Policy asks you not to send health information, and that applies to mail as much as to anything typed into an AI feature, which goes to the server and on to the AI provider the policy names.
What to expect back
One person reads it. There is no support team, no ticket system, no autoresponder and no phone line, so there is no promised turnaround and a reply takes as long as it takes. A wrong number on a page a swimmer is training from gets read before a feature request. Accessibility problems — a screen reader, keyboard or magnifier that does not work — go to the same address; Built With says what has and has not been tested.
Reporting something wrong
Four things make a problem reproducible. Without them most reports cannot be acted on.
- Where
- The page or tool, and the tab inside it if that page has tabs.
- Device
- Phone or laptop, and which browser.
- What happened
- What you did, and what the screen did instead of what you expected.
- Version
- The version shown at the top of What's New. It names the build you are actually running, which is not always the newest one.
For a wrong number, send the page, the figure as it reads and what it should be. A disagreement about technique is worth sending too, and so is an AI answer that was confidently wrong — include the question that produced it.
Check What's New first. It is the record of what has shipped: version, date and the changes in each release, newest first. A fix may already be out and waiting for a reload, and Check for updates on that page forces the check. What it does not carry is a list of what is coming — there is no public roadmap and no issue tracker, so sending a problem in is the only way it becomes known.
The documents that govern it
Three of them, linked in the footer of every page, each carrying its own Last updated date at the top.
- Safety and accuracy
- The Medical Disclaimer — the one to read before acting on anything here. It covers why this is education rather than medical, dietetic or coaching advice, water safety and supervised underwater work, younger swimmers, eating and body image, what AI output is worth, and which figures on the site are published ranges or teaching approximations rather than measurements of you. The Coaches & Teams states that position in full.
- Your data
- The Privacy Policy — what stays on your device, what is sent to a server, every processor by name including the AI provider, the request not to send health information, how under-13s are handled, how long account records are kept, and how to ask to see, correct or delete them. The How to Use describes the same boundary in practical terms.
- The agreement
- The Terms of Use — who the agreement is with, the 13-and-over rule for accounts and the parent's permission expected under 18, fair use of the AI features, what AI output is and is not, what you may reuse and what you may not, the absence of any warranty, and New Jersey law as the governing law.
Team Mode
Team mode saves each practice to a board your coach and squad share, so it needs a free account. Your own log on the Training Log page stays on this device and is not affected. Choosing Individual or Team only changes what you see — it is not a permission.
Team Mode Needs an Account
- Why an account
- Your practices are signed to your account. Nobody can post, edit or delete a practice as you — not another swimmer, and not someone who has the team code.
- What your squad sees
- Your display name, your practices and your notes. Your email address is never shown to the team.
- Under 18
- Ask a parent or guardian first. Creating an account confirms you are 13 or older.
Join Your Coach’s Team
Create a Team
Your Team Is Ready
Give this code to your swimmers. It stays on this page for you — you do not need to write it down.
- Open tidelyne.com on a phone or a laptop.
- Press Team on the first screen.
- Create a free account — a username, an email and a password.
- Enter the code .
Your Team
Coach Tools
Your team code, the roster, and everything about the team itself — its name, its unit, the weekly goal, a note for the squad and who gets in.
Roster
Your Team
What swimmers type into the practice form.
Pinned to the top of the team pages for everyone. Good for “taper week, no Saturday session”.
Used on the team board and the feed. Five to pick from rather than any colour you like — each one has been checked for contrast on this background, and a squad that cannot read its own numbers is a worse outcome than not matching your club kit exactly.
The Practice Log
What the form on the Team Log asks your squad for. Changes apply to the next practice anyone logs; nothing already logged is touched or re-read.
Sits at the top of the log for everyone. Good for “log the main set, not the warm-up”.
Session Types
Call them what your squad calls them, and switch off the ones you never use. Three spare slots are yours to name. A type you switch off stays readable on every practice already logged with it — turning it off only takes it off the form. Dryland is the one with a meaning the database enforces: a dryland session is stored with no distance.
What the Form Asks For
Distance, how hard it felt and the date are always asked — the leaderboard and the training-load number are built from them, so they are not optional. Everything else is yours. “Require it” holds the Save button until it is filled in, and is skipped on a dryland session where it cannot apply.
What the Form Starts On
Your Name on the Board
This is the only thing the team sees about you besides your practices. Your email is never shown.
A target above the team’s, if you want one. It cannot be set below the team goal.
Team Log
Log a practice to your squad’s board, and fix one you typed wrong. An edit keeps a record of what it said before — the thing the log this replaces could not do at all.
Log a Practice
Your Numbers
Daily Volume — Last 14 Days
Weekly Volume — Last 8 Weeks
My Practices
Everything you have logged to this team, newest first. Editing keeps a record of what it said before, so a correction is a correction and not a rewrite.
Team Feed
What everyone swam, newest first, and the notes left on it. You can withdraw your own practices; only a coach can hide somebody else’s, and nobody can change what you wrote.
Recent Practices
Everyone’s practices, by the day they were swum. You can withdraw your own; a coach can hide anyone’s, and that is recorded. Nobody can change what somebody else wrote.
Team Board
Total distance, ranked, for whatever window you pick — plus the week against your coach’s goal, main-set rankings for one day at one rep distance, and training cues built from your own past practices.
Total Distance
This Week
Main-Set Rankings
Everyone who logged times at one rep distance on one day, by their average. A swimmer only appears here if they typed their reps in.
Volume Over Time
Fourteen days, or eight Monday-to-Sunday weeks. A day with no training is an empty column, not a gap — that is the point of looking.
Your Own Training Cues
Compared against your own past practices at the same rep distance, never against the team. Three previous practices with both times and heart rate are needed before anything can be said.