Garmin Swim


For my birthday, my mother got me a Garmin Swim watch. The watch uses an accelerameter and gyroscope to figure out how many laps I’m swimming and what strokes I’m swimming. It’s not perfect, but it works well enough that it was able to allow me to focus on my strokes instead of counting intervals on the first day I used it. I’m not sure what I am doing wrong with breaststroke, but it made it add 2 extra laps to my third set of 400 IM. Even with those issues, (and the fact that something I do with backstroke is so wrong, it thinks I’m doing breaststroke) I was able to confirm some things I’d supposed, but didn’t want to waste time confirming with a less feature-full stopwatch. For example, I confirmed that, on average, I swim 25 meters in 30 seconds with freestyle. I also confirmed that I do my 400s in slightly less than 10 minutes, but slower with each set as I get tired.

I couldn’t wait to get a chance to upload it and this was my default Garmin dashboard:

Garmin Connect Dashboard
Garmin Connect Dashboard

And here was my workout for the first day. I expect the second day will be more accurate since it’ll be all freestyle. I do a reverse IM and it’s no surprise to me that my freestyle laps were the best pace, strokes, and SWOLF – a measure of stroke efficiency.

1 Dec Swim Stats
1 Dec Swim Stats

One neat thing I was able to see on my export was that the device measures my rest time. That’s pretty awesome. I rested about 1.5 minutes in between sets. I’ll be more cognizant of that in the future to try and help make better use of my time at the pool.

Swim CSV File 20141201