I've been using Garmin watches to track lap swimming for several years now. I use the detail stats in the web browser (and also the app, but browser has more of course) to track improvement over time. I look at individual workouts as well as the Report function to track progress over time. I also upload my workouts to swim.com, where they take the .fit data and make it more useful (at least until they stopped supporting the web browser.
I find that a lot of the Garmin lap swimming stats don't seem like they were developed by swimmers. As an aside, I also use swim.com, which uploads the .fit data and presents it differently - they do some very useful things with Garmin's data that Garmin would be smart to emulate. So below is my punch list of things that IMO should be fixed in the Web reporting (also applies to apps in many cases) to make it more swimmer friendly.
- Average Pace: All pace stats for reporting should be same as what you get in the single workout summary - i.e. avg moving pace per 100 (excluding drills). Today, the aggregated report swim stats use different definitions...either pace/km that includes rest and is different with no way to convert, or (confusingly) reports calculate an average pace per 100m that *includes* rest time. Why???? These other stats are not nearly as useful, and without consistency there is no real way to measure progress long term (e.g. progress summary reports).
- fwiw, I like how you guys take drills out of average pace. Swim.com includes them in its calc, which incents me not to do drills, which I don't like. Points for Garmin here.
- Swim.com shows me average pace per month/year, even in the app versions. I know I can get this in the Progress Summary (at least I could if the definitions were consistent/meaningful), but its such an important / useful stat it would be great to see it available in other reporting and also in the phone apps.
- Personal Records: Need to include 200 yards / m, also 400m as these are key distances for swimmers. No swimmer I've ever met needs 750m (perhaps change to 800m which is a relevant distance). 50m would be nice too.
- Individual workout stats.
- "Best Pace" per interval/workout in details not really useful at all because its almost always an error with how the watch is tracking. Fine if you guys really want to keep it, but I think it just makes you look bad by constantly reminding us that these watches are error prone, when it is average times that really matter.
- Add "Stroke Rate" in the interval detail, broken down by length It can be calculated with existing data (swim.com does it with Garmin data). This is a biggie.
- Show times to two decimal places, not one, as the watch data comes in this way. (swim.com also does this with garmin data). Why round to one when the watch captures two? Two decimal places are the norm for competitive swimmers, it just looks so 1970s to round to one decimal place.
- Average strokes/length needs another decimal place. Both for single workout stats and for report averages. Rounding to whole number makes it hard to measure progress over time. It takes a swimmer a long time, often years, to Improve enough to take a single stroke off the average. Seeing the average go down by a few tenths from month to month is a meaningful improvement.
Again, I think these can be easily done with no changes from the watch, only how the .fit data is crunched and displayed in Garmin Connect.
