Structured pool swimming workouts on Garmin

Pool length comes first

Nothing works in swimming without declaring the pool length: it is what lets the watch count lengths from wrist movement, and therefore measure distance and pace. Twenty-five metres, fifty metres, or yards depending on the country.

A wrongly declared length does not produce a visible error: it produces wrong distances, silently. It is the first thing to check when the numbers look odd.

Swimming's own targets

Swimming vocabulary has almost nothing in common with running. It is the discipline where mechanically transposing another sport fails fastest.

• — The pace zone, expressed as a speed range. In practice you think in time per hundred metres.
• — An offset from critical swim speed, in seconds: an instruction like "CSS plus five seconds" translates directly.
• — An intensity instruction on a one-to-ten scale, for qualitative cues: recovery, build, all out.
• — Stroke type, drill and equipment — paddles, pull buoy, fins — attached to the step and shown at the wall.

That richness is what lets you write a real club session, with its drill sets and equipment changes, rather than a string of undifferentiated lengths.

What SWOLF tells you about your stroke

SWOLF adds the time for a length to the number of strokes it took. The lower it is, the more efficient the swimming: you go fast while spending few movements.

• — A falling SWOLF at the same speed signals a real technical gain.
• — A stable SWOLF with rising speed signals a physical gain.
• — A SWOLF that climbs late in a session signals technical fatigue, often before the clock shows it.
• — It only compares against yourself, in the same pool length: between two swimmers it means nothing.

Read length by length rather than as an average, it is the most honest indicator of what degrades across a set.

Writing a swim session without losing the evening

Typing a swim session into an app by hand is particularly tedious: the sets are many, short, and each carries its stroke, equipment and cue. This is where describing it in plain language saves the most time.

One sentence is enough to get the full session, drills and pace zones included, placed on the right day of the Garmin calendar and ready at the poolside.

Frequently asked questions