After years of research and development, we’re proud to introduce HeadCoach™ - a world first in Digital swim Coaching.
HeadCoachâ„¢ revolutionizes your swim experience with in-goggle visual coaching coupled with comprehensive in-app analysis and educational resources.
“At FORM, we’ve reinvented how athletes train in the water by providing swimmers with real-time data through the FORM Smart Swim Goggles’ unique AR display. Today, with the launch of HeadCoach, we’re taking that innovation one step further by giving swimmers access to a digital swim coach in their goggles and on their phone,†said Dan Eisenhardt, CEO of FORM.
“HeadCoach marks a new chapter for FORM, providing unparalleled insights into swim performance and empowering swimmers of all levels to unlock new potential.â€
I noticed this today. I just received my goggles and this was my second swim. I didn’t know if it was new or what.
How does it work with imported workouts? Does it know the difference between speed intervals, warm ups, cool downs, recovery swim, etc? I’m not the greatest swimmer, so maybe there’s not supposed to a big difference between spm and distance per stroke, but for me spm is 12-15 difference between a slow warm up and a threshold interval. Does it adjust some how for these differences?
The HeadCoach scores you in different areas of your swim.
If you are doing a structured workout, whether it is an import or a FORM workout, you will be scored on your ability to consistently pace from interval to interval (set pacing), and within an interval (interval pacing). You will also be scored on your Head Pitch (the up and down movement of your head), your Head Roll (the head movement you do to breathe), and your Peak Head Roll (the time it takes you to return your head to a neutral position from the top of your breath).
There are in goggles modes you can use to get real time virtual coaching on these skills mentioned above. Simply pause a workout using the front button and then choose one of the skills to workout. It is like doing a drill.
There is also your FORM Score, which is measured for every length, workout, and your 5 swim average. This is an efficiency metric that measures how well you can swim freestyle (frontcrawl). It is a measure of your pace and stroke length.
The HeadCoach scores you in different areas of your swim.
If you are doing a structured workout, whether it is an import or a FORM workout, you will be scored on your ability to consistently pace from interval to interval (set pacing), and within an interval (interval pacing). You will also be scored on your Head Pitch (the up and down movement of your head), your Head Roll (the head movement you do to breathe), and your Peak Head Roll (the time it takes you to return your head to a neutral position from the top of your breath).
There are in goggles modes you can use to get real time virtual coaching on these skills mentioned above. Simply pause a workout using the front button and then choose one of the skills to workout. It is like doing a drill.
There is also your FORM Score, which is measured for every length, workout, and your 5 swim average. This is an efficiency metric that measures how well you can swim freestyle (frontcrawl). It is a measure of your pace and stroke length.
I both can’t wait to use this and I’m very scared to use this. I hope the FORM score is nicer to me than I am to myself when I’m thinking about my stroke!
It’s going to take me a while to ingest all this information and capabilities, that’s for sure.
In my swim yesterday I did get a score for form, set pacing and interval pacing, but not for head pitch, roll and time to neutral. Do I need to set something in the goggles to get these?
I’m only swimming once a week right now as I’m focused on a PR half marathon in Feb. So, I won’t be using them again until next week.
This seems like a great use of the existing hardware. There’s already an accelerometer in the goggles. I’ll be interested to test it out and see how precise it is. I’m thinking even if it’s off by a little bit that wouldn’t matter too much as long as it’s off by the same amount each time.
Just thinking of possibilities, if the accelerometer is already there a really interesting metric would be how much the swimmer accelerates and decelerates with each stroke. Like if you have a real long glide but great body position you may see a predictably smooth and gradual slow down with every stroke, likewise if you have little to no glide and poor body position you’d see the deceleration happen quickly and suddenly. Although I’d imagine there’s a ton of noise in that signal, especially with head movement for breathing and rotation.
Your scores for the HeadCoach Skills as it relates to Head Pitch, Head Roll, and Time to Neutral should all be scored on each swim regardless of using the in goggles virtual coaching modes. Try updating the app, or restarting the app.
Any updates as when you’ll be able to feed the workout to Garmin Connect (or is there already a way to do this and since I’m new with the goggles I don’t know how?)? I downloaded the FIT files on my two swims to get them to Connect.
Annoying but it’s not particularly in your control. However, what is even more frustrating is when I upload my FORM fit file to garmin and it then pushing the file to FORM and it double populates my feed. Can you parse duplicates to prevent this or prompt an accept option? I don’t have the same issue in Strava or TrainingPeaks, they see the fit file uploaded direct from FORM and ignore the duplicate from Garmin.
Def interested in this new feature and will check it out on my next swim. For the most part love my goggles and while there are things I’m hoping to see improve I don’t know that I’d want to train without em.
And since we have you as a captive responder a couple other things that would be cool to see in the future are the ability to sort custom workouts (recent, alpha and distance). I’ve got a lot and it’s a pain to scroll through hoping to find if I’ve already created that week’s workouts in the past. Also would love to see some sort of last 100 time in OWS when connected to my watch for GPS. It would be nice to see if I’m slowing down without doing all the math. Especially since you are now touting them as race approved (I always raced in them lol)
I tried the the new Head Coach today. I got some great info. I found my weakest Form score was set pacing. I watched the video from the great Canadian Brian Johns. I have a couple questions.
Are the googles smart enough to tell the difference between 25 drill/25swim?
Are the googles smart enough to tell difference in a set of 4x100 @ 3 fast, 1 easy?
Do these 2 effect swim pace?
thank you
Just a couple swims in and I am already seeing some interesting data about when & potentially why my form breaks down. Really promising stuff. Just a couple thoughts/questions.
I find myself taking screenshots and sending info to my coach. Is there a simpler way to share the data that I’m missing? If not, that would be a great feature.
You guys really should upload the FORM Score videos that I watched in the app to YouTube. The channel seems like it only has old content which isn’t great for new customers looking for an active brand presence, and also I think they would be a great selling point for the product.
And if you could share videos on the specific metrics, what their importance is, and even some drills to improve them that would be awesome. May already be in the works, and if so consider me interested.
I own a pair of these google. I would love for you to introduce another revolutionary feature. The ability to see where you are going while you are swimming. It’s so dark in there.
Set pacing looks at your ability to pace consistently from interval to interval. So 3 fast to 1 easy, the goggles pacing mode would not be able to recognize that as it would look at that as two separate sets. A set of 3 and a set of 1