Garmin Swim Watch with Garmin Connect

I swim 3 times a week on a masters swim team. I pre-ordered the Garmin Swim ("GS") and received it around August 1. I have logged 6 workouts with the GS, and overall, I am impressed. It is easy to set up (most importantly, to tell it how long your pool is), and easy to sync to your computer. The reports are pretty exhaustive and provide tons of information about what you did and how efficiently you did it. (By the way, the GS is not a heart-rate monitor, although it does tell you how many calories you''ve burned.) I am writing this review because I''ve discovered a couple of things about the product that I didn''t understand before I started using it.

1. The GS tracks your distance by noting turns/flips and a strong glide after the turn. If you start your stroke too early after a turn, it will sometimes miss the fact that you completed a length, and your total length swum for that interval will be off. Thus, it is a good idea to keep track of the length of each set as you go--in effect, counting with the help of the GS rather than believing everything it tells you.

2. If you do your strokes correctly, the GS is quite good at recognizing whether you are doing fly, back, breast, or free. If you are sloppy, the GS can get confused. Unlike some other reviewers, I have not had any significant problems with the GS accurately tracking my progress as long as I swim carefully around turns. Once, on a swim of 5525 yards, it missed 50 yards (2 lengths)--which I figured was better than I would''ve done if counting in my head. :-)

3. You can set the GS for drills, but I don''t think there''s a way to set it for kicking. While understandable considering the way the GS tracks your distance, this is also frustrating, since normally when I kick I don''t do flip turns--so the GS doesn''t log this mileage. I have to mentally add in any kicking sets after the workout to get an accurate total distance for the swim. Which brings up my next point--

4. I wish there were a way to override the total distance logged by the device, via the GS website!!! I really *love* the fact that the GS tells you how far you''ve swum in each week (right on the watch face--very motivating!), but it would be so, so, SO much better if that number were accurate.

I would strongly recommend the GS for any swimmers who want info about their workouts and the motivation of "workout reports" for each swim. The GS is easy to use, times your swimming and rest intervals, and does lots more. I hope that if Garmin comes up with fixes for the issues mentioned above, they will provide them free of charge to those of us who believed from the get-go and pre-ordered the cool Garmin Swim!

Awesome! IMO this is the best watch out there for lap swimmers. I swam competitively in high school and recently got back into the pool to boost my cardio. This watch does everything that it says it does, very well. Of course, it isn''t perfect. For example, an auto pause feature during rest periods would be great...maybe in a future firmware upgrade? Regardless, I would highly recommend this product for the lap/competitive swimmer.

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I was worried this unit wouldn''t pick up my turns, but instead it''s adding laps at random at the rate of 1 in 5. Over 2000 meters in a 25 meter pool (80 lengths) it counted about an extra 16 lengths. It also misidentified my stroke on many occasions. I can''t see how to edit the data post swim so I can at least see afterwards what I did.

I am prepared to believe my technique isn''t perfect but if it only works for triatheletes and olympic swimmers they should have mentioned that in the blurb.

I only wanted it to do one thing and it doesn''t. Useless. Emailed garmin and no response. I''ve wasted $155.

Update: To their credit garmin have issued a full refund.

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I bought the Garmin Swim since I constantly lost track when trying to count lengths in the pool and figured there had to be a better way. The Garmin Swim is certainly better and it works very well. For the first many swims, I checked the watch at the end of each length and I noted that it sometimes counted an extra length. It would have been easy to see at least part of that since it sometimes ended up with the wrong number at my start point (e.g. 825 when I had completed an even number of 25 yard lengths). I uploaded the data to Garmin Connect and things got even more strange since I could see the watch thought some of my lengths were back stroke, for instance, and I had not done any. So, it is somewhat flawed but after many weeks of using and checking it, I finally decided the small errors were certainly nothing to worry about and I use the watch all the time now when I swim.

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I did a considerable amount of research before choosing this watch... And have to say it paid out. I am swimming at least an hour every day and that accounts for MANY laps in a 20meter pool, and counting gets tedious after a while... This watch solved the problem beautifully. Counts laps ( all the times i counted with the watch was 100% accurate) detects swim style (free, butterfly, etc), runs detailed analysis on your swim, and via garmin connect! Allows you to integrate it to other sports, creates goals, analyzes swim efficiency... Net, a great tool! 2 things to make it perfect... Light, and a more versatile chronograph.... Note, pools need to be at least 20meters for accurate readings... If you are a frequent, long distance swimmer you will love the watch!