Just started to create a guided workout for my trainer ride and noticed that you can now choose “swimming” when creating a workout on Garmin Connect.
Anyone else notice this? I haven’t tried it out, and it didn’t look like it had support for “yards” as a distance option, but this could be great for following a specific open water workout where you can’t easily keep a sheet with the workout at the end of the lane.
The web GC is pretty buggy for swim workouts, with paces in min/km (just like an other workout), and decimal distances (km only) being rounded to nearest km.
Created, and saved workout and pushed it to the device (f3). On the device (running 6.52b firmware) it is shown as a workout of type “other”; and I cannot use any of my swim profiles with it…
Hmmm, that’s interesting. I’d also spotted a day or so ago, whilst creating some workouts for my TrainerRoad sessions but haven’t given it a try yet. So it’s not possible to actually run it on the Fenix 3 yet? I imagine it’ll get sorted out sooner or later. I wonder if this means some new swim-specific Garmin products are in the pipeline? From my recollection, Garmin tend to tie in new hardware releases with increased software support so it looks like you’re getting a good all-round package.
No doubt the swimming purists will come along in a minute and bemoan the death of swimmers using the pool clock and being able to do multiples of 43.5 seconds in their head, but I’m all for it!
While this feature would be great, the watches still have no clue when you get to the end of the lane…they typically record a “length” halfway down the pool. This would mean you’d still have to hit the “lap” button to initiate and end intervals.
For those looking to be able to see their workouts on their watch (I used to bring my phone in a waterproof case to the pool, or write it on paper and put it in a zip lock)…
Someone made an amazing Data Field that you can download on Connect IQ called “NoteField”. It allows you to type your workout into your phone then have it display as any other Data Field would. Then you can simply flip to that field when you’re resting to see what the next set is.
Im all about the yards in my pool but i still will give this a shot.
interesting they added heart rate too - even though my garmin swim strap works - it’s only after i have my upper body out of the water does the heart rate register.
I got a 920xt last month and now get swim splits. Too bad I can’t see them on that little screen without my reading glasses. So, with all this technology, I’m still just hitting the button after each set.
Garmin is making a ton of improvements on their Garmin Connect, I’m sure it’s just not complete at this point. The only thing that bugs me is my finis swim watch auto pauses and this one doesn’t. I don’t get why auto pause is so hard to figure out for the swim.
I used the wrong tense…meant to say that it has been working great for my hotel stationary swimming. It’s great to make a workout by time for that sort of workout, as you can’t really figure out how many yards/meters you’ve swam unless you count all of your strokes! I know my stroke count very well by effort, so this works, but it gets complicated; aka not worth it.
I also wish my fenix 2 could utilize it’s “pool” swim as one of the steps in multi-sport mode rather that either open water swim, or having to use a custom sport, basically using it as a timer and nothing else
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Interesting! It’s looking a lot more polished now, as though it’s actually designed for swimming rather than a badly-ported version of the bike/run workout creator.
Which device do you have? I’d be very interested if you can report back on your experiences.
In particular I’d be keen to know if/how well it can detect the end of a length at the end of an interval and auto-lap for you (i.e. does it start your rest interval promptly upon touching the wall).
T have a Fenix 3, I’ll definitely report back tomorrow after the swim. I’m hoping it can detect the end of a length so I can just swim and forget about the watch and just listen for the “beep” countdown like I do during programmed runs.
Yeah, it’s gone for me too now Hopefully it’ll be back soon.
So how does it work when swimming the workout? For example, if you program a set of 10x 100m with 10s rest, does it automatically lap for you at the end of the last length of each 100m to put it on the rest timer and then automatically lap again after 10s rest to start the next set?
It shows which number of a set you are in (6/10 etc). There are three options for rest. Button press, fixed time and one other I forget.
It seems you should always include some rest or it will go right to the next work step.
I tried a fixed rest period but I don’t think I understand how it works yet. I just somehow made it skip to the next session by hitting the lap button so didn’t get a good trial of it.
It does buzz and beep the last length to let you know you finishing an interval.