Endless pool swimming workout type

This is an interesting post that deserves to be bumped up... It should not be very hard to find parameters with the main manufacturers on the market, and estimate the lenght of the swim by the number of strokes. 

One could even cross reference and infer from the data of known swims by consistent swimmers recording both indoor pool laps and open water (no or low current, so bar the sea/ocean ones).

Is something like this in the works?

darktears said:

- Strokes
- Time
- Heart rate data if you pair a heart sensor for swimming
- Calories estimation

• Stroke - are already counted by the device having a Swim activity (assuming you own a device supporting swimming)
• Time - all Garmin devices will record the time of the activity
• Heart rate data - newer Garmin models offer HRM even for swimming. An external HRM chest belt can be used with the majority of Garmin devices
• Calories estimation - in the moment you have the HR data, calories are being calculated automatically

In other words, it means, you can use Garmin devices for endless pool swimming with any standard Garmin watch supporting swim activities.

I don't think you read the OP post carefully, trux. He said he wanted an activity type only measuring those items, not that it can't already. His issue was about the fact that you don't get distance/laps while swiming in an endless pool.

Exactly  this, sorry if I was not very clear.

My point is that in theory you could have a dedicated activity type that requires input of a set of data such as type of pool, speed/volume of the current you are swimming against, etc...

These could lead to an approximation of the "distance" covered during the stationary swim.

olni65 said:

I don't think you read the OP post carefully, trux.

Hm, I am not sure whether it was me or you, who did not read it carefully. In the OP, darktears tells:

"I wish we had a separate mode where it would track only Strokes, Time, Heart rate, Calories and not distance at all"

So to me it sounds like the exact opposite of what you claim 

However, looking now at the opening post again, I see that it is in fact just a shameless spam promoting the seller of endless pools, so that explains why his message makes no sense.

What are you saying? I did not promote anything, just send a link for reference (not everybody live in US and know what is an endless pool, even today I have to explain to people what it is). Did I say go buy, discount is amazing, I recommend or anything like that? I don't even have that product (I have another brand). You should keep your rude bold comment to yourself. You had googled my nickname you would see that I'm not interested in promoting a seller of endless pool, do you research before claiming things. Ask questions instead of saying that I make no sense (a good etiquette is to ask to clarify). I personally feel more offended by your comment than what you felt by seeing a "supposedly" "shameless" spam on the forum which triggered you to report me! You should feel better now that we removed the link...

Now back to my original message, I'm totally aware that it can record strokes, time, heart rate data (I have the HRM Tri) and calorie estimation (or am I some shameless retard as well?). Now it comes with the pace, distance and so forth which are all buggy data in an endless swimming pool (like it would misread laps, or telling me I swam 15 feet during 30min). The indoor algorithm of Garmin is quite simple, it uses the pool length you setup and detect laps, then simple math computes the total distance and from that you can derive other stats like pace. Problem is that on an endless swimming pool I do not lap so the entire computation falls apart. And often the jets streams would trigger lap change. Finally there is no way to say "compute the distance just based on the strokes". It expects you to lap at some point (even manually, even if you set the pool length to be the longest one possible).

There is no workout type (even custom) where I can disable distance/pace fields. So when I record my swims then I get buggy data in, buggy stats, buggy records, and it conflicts with my actual true swimming pool trainings (I mean for the distance...) where it should not.

Ideally a full support would be great, like being able to calculate the distance based on the volume of water pushed by the jets (which I could set up just like pool length). The brand I quoted originally do sell an accessory that estimate your pace based on the intensity you set on the jets (not endorsing here!!!!, before you report me again) so it's doable (and no I don't have that accessory). An intermediate solution would be to enter an estimate of your stroke length and then use the number of stroke during the session to compute the total distance.

But at this point the easiest for Garmin to implement is just to let me swim without saving or trying to estimate the distance (and therefore to not put it into the .fit file) by adding an Endless Pool workout type (as a derived version of the indoor swimming workout so no GPS since I'm stationary, no distance estimation, no lap detection...). Whenever they deem needed and want to implement a better support by adding distance calculation sure they can make the workout type better.

Another benefit of a separate workout type is that I can compare them together rather than being mixed up with regular swimming pool workouts (just like outdoor swimming vs indoor swimming).

Back to the topic - perhaps you could try using the Open Water Swim activity profile. It is what I use all the time, though not in an endless pool. Just, you can turn off the GPS. It will do exactly what you are asking for - it will record the strokes, it will record the HR (since you have the HRM Tri), it will record the time of the swim, and it will make the Calories estimation as well, while not forcing you to do any laps, or limiting you to any pool lenght. And as a bonus, you can edit the activity and enter the total distance that the app of your pool reports. So you will not only have the four values you asked for, but also the fifth one you did not care of.

I'll try that. Good idea. Actually I could measure my stroke length (roughly) then post workout edit the distance by multiplying the stroke length with the # of stroke.

Yes, re-reading my comment I can see that it could be interpreted in other ways than intended (as so much today can be). When I said

olni65 said:

His issue was about the fact that you don't get distance/laps while swiming in an endless pool.

I meant that he referred to the fact that you do not get distance while swimming in an end-less pool since the watch is stationary and there are no laps with a given distance, so no using in having that metric in the wished-for activity type. While I read your comment which mentioned that all the other metrics all can be measured and registered already and thought "yes, we already knew that - the OP just said that these were the only metrics he cared about from the existing app".

I should stop commenting while at work, tends to be brief comments which sometimes leads to confusion.

Good idea about Openwater without GPS on. Hopefully it will do the trick for the OP.