HOW TO USE YOUR SPORTS WATCH FOR SWIMMING – THE ESSENTIAL MEASUREMENTS IN THE WATER

1. Can a sports watch improve your swimming practice? Absolutely. Not only can your watch provide you with information on metrics such as gaps, swimming frequency and pace, but it also recognizes your swimming style and tracks your course (if you’re venturing into open water).

Here are the essential steps and benefits of using your sports watch for swimming. Don’t forget to sync your Polar device with  Flow  to get a detailed visual representation of your swimming data.

ESSENTIAL PARAMETERS FOR POOL SWIMMING

Just put on your swimming goggles and go! Don’t forget to wear your sports watch in the pool, as there are plenty of swim metrics that will help you understand your laps and give you pointers for improvement.

SWIMMING STYLE

One of the main advantages of using a high-end multisport watch for swimming, such as the  Polar Vantage V2 , is that it can detect your type of movement. This extremely intelligent function can differentiate between four types of movements:

• Freestyle  (also known as crawl)
• Backstroke
• breaststroke
• Butterfly

If you’ve ever watched Olympic swimming (or taken lessons yourself), you know about these different types of swimming. As you can imagine, it takes very advanced technology for your sports watch to be able to tell the difference between freestyle and backstroke swimming, for example.

ATTACK RATE

1. Your sports watch can recognize the style of swimming you are doing, but it can also calculate your swimming pace for each style. It’s a fundamental measure of swimming, and when you start to understand your swimming rhythm, you can figure out how to improve your efficiency.

Your Polar sports watch will provide you with two measurements:

• Average Stroke Rate: As the name suggests, this is the average number of strokes made per minute throughout your swimming session.
• Maximum beat rate: the most beats you have made in a given minute.

SWIMMING TIME

Now that we’ve looked at how you move your arms in the water, let’s look at some other key metrics.

Time is probably the first thing that comes to mind when you think of swimming metrics. It conjures up images of college coaches standing poolside with a stopwatch. Luckily, you don’t need a trainer to time you when using your sports watch for swimming.

The primary time-based metric is the split (see below), but there’s also swim duration. So if you plan to swim lengths for say 30 minutes, but don’t want to set any specific goals, you can easily track your total time as you go.

Your Polar watch also tracks your rest times. So if you stop to take a break mid-swim, you can see how long it lasted. It will also tell you the swim time for each heart rate zone (see below) to determine what kind of training you did during your swim day.

SPLITS

Everyone who runs knows the idea of ​​swerving. Think less about gymnastics and more about breaking your record in the pool. Gaps measure how fast you have covered a given distance (i.e. one lap of the pool). This is why it is essential to confirm the length of the pool before you start your swimming session (see above). It’s also important because once you have the data on how fast you’re swimming, you can try to improve your speed.

Whether you’re trying to beat your best time or do a specific workout like variable speed, splits will help you target your goals. For example, if you want to do 200m breaststroke in a 50m pool in a specific time, you would divide that goal by four to target your particular time for each lap split.

Most sports watches for swimming automatically track your pool laps. With Polar, you also have the option of grabbing the red Ok/Start button on the right side of the watch face to mark a lap. Using buttons instead of the touchscreen helps avoid “ghost touches,” so your data is always perfectly accurate.

DISTANCE

Distance is another reason why setting the correct pool length is important. Your Polar watch adds an extra lap to your total distance each time you turn.

As a measure of swimming, distance can be an interesting goal, but trying to cover a certain distance won’t necessarily make you a faster swimmer. It is best to focus on splits or rhythm (see below) as a measure of improvement. Distance is best suited for long-term goals, like swimming a certain number of miles in a month or a year.

If you challenge yourself to increase your distance, it is recommended to follow the 10% rule. Do not increase your distance by more than 10% each time you decide to pass. If you do too much too soon and too often, you risk injuring yourself and it will be difficult for you to keep swimming.

PACE

Like distance, pace also depends on the correct setting of the pool length. So what exactly is allure? This is your movement speed, which is calculated using two of the swim metrics above: your distance divided by your time.

Most sports watches for swimming will give you two pace scores. The first is your average pace for the entire swim session, and the second is your best pace for a particular lap.

SWOLF

Much like  running economy , the oddly titled SWOLF measures the efficiency of your swimming. It works the same way as a golf handicap, because the lower your score, the better a swimmer you are. The name is therefore a mixture of “swimming” and “golf”.

It is calculated by adding your split time to your stroke count. So a 40-second lap plus the 15 arm strokes that got you there will give you a SWOLF score of 55. This is one of the essential swimming metrics for improvement, and it’s worth so worth following. Remember that you will have a different score for different strokes, so do not compare your backstroke SWOLF score with the butterfly score.

CARDIAC FREQUENCY

Whether heart rate is a good metric for swimming has been debated, simply because some sports watches lack the technology to ensure your data is accurate in the water. Thankfully, with Polar Precision Prime sensor fusion technology  , you can count on the precision you need.

Focusing on  heart rate zones  while swimming is a great way to get a complete aerobic and anaerobic workout. For example, try swimming in a specific heart rate zone for one lap, then switch to a different (or lower) zone for the next lap.

ESSENTIAL PARAMETERS FOR OPEN WATER SWIMMING

Whether you’re swimming inland or braving a stretch of ocean, there’s a  specific attractivesport profile  for open water swimming. Indeed, the conditions being different from those of a swimming pool, your measurements are slightly different.

SWIMMING STYLE AND MOVEMENT SPEED

Since you’re unlikely to butterfly lake laps, Polar sports watches only recognize freestyle swimming when you’re in open water.

For your swimming pace, your watch records the average number of strokes and the maximum number of strokes you have completed in one minute over the duration of your swim.

PACE AND DISTANCE

This is where your GPS functionality comes in handy. Pace and distance are tracked this way for open water swimming so you can always have the information you need for every session.

ITINERARY

Forget endless laps – swimming in open water allows you to go far. Your Polar sports watch will record your entire swim with GPS tracking, which means you’ll be able to see a map of where you went afterwards in  Polar Flow .

Interestingly, GPS tracking does not work when the hand wearing the watch is in water. Rather, it simply picks up data when your hand is out of the water (or very close to the surface). You may notice that the data for the same course may vary slightly from day to day. This is due to factors such as water conditions or satellite positions, which can affect the accuracy of GPS data.

CARDIAC FREQUENCY

Watch your heart rate hit zones 3 or 4 when you jump into the cold ocean for an outdoor swim. Tracking your heart rate in these conditions can be very interesting – and again, you need to keep your watch securely in place (for accuracy, not because it might come loose and end up at the bottom of the pocket). sea).