Zurich - Review of Garmin Forerunner 735 XT for Swimming

Partial Snapshot of Garmin Report on a Day's Swim

Well, I’ve managed to have a few swims now using my new Garmin Forerunner 735 XT; it’s still early days and I’m not sure I really know how to use all the features yet.

Overall, I am really pleased with it. I’ve been complimented on its appearance twice (without people knowing it’s a swimming watch). I did try to upload a more traditional watch face for it but I haven’t quite fathomed out how to do it at this point.

It’s recording my laps well. There have been a few occasions where I’ve not started a new length obviously enough (you need to stretch your arms out as you kick off for the watch to understand that you’ve just turned round) and sometimes two lengths have been counted as only one. These mistakes are easy to spot, because when you look, you can see that you’ve taken twice as long as normal to swim one  length, so you just need to split that length into two.  Garmin doesn't have an editing facility, but I’ve since found a free program that does it for me (http://www.swimmingwatchtools.com/index), which I can highly recommend.

I’m now swimming about 2.5km/hour max compared to my previous 2.3 km/hour max and I’m hoping this is a function of me having improved over time and not anything due to Garmin measuring differently from Suunto! I think it is my improvement, because when it compares me to the general population, on the Garmin site I’m in the top 65% (I swim better than 35%), whereas on the Suunto site I was in the top 70% (better than 30%), so those stats seem comparable given my increase in speed. I don’t know yet whether the percentages go up in 1% or 5% increments; on the Suunto it was 10% increments, I think, so if it’s 5% on Garmn, that will be more motivating.

Although the Garmin records most of the things I want, I find the website a bit frustrating on some levels. It seems a bit arbitrary as to which metric it will use for which part of the site. To view progress, I have to go to reports and then select swimming. There, average pace for each undertaken swim is minutes it takes me to do 1km swimming. Since I usually swim 1250m, I’m not sure if it’s taking my average or my fastest or the first 1km. I’d rather it gave either average pace (mins:seconds) per 100m (which seems to be the standard swimming measure) or average km/hr. Even better, I’d prefer that you could choose. They have all of these metrics at their disposal, after all.

However, at least average pace allows you to see your progress over time (you can select over last week, 4 weeks, 6 months, 12 months) for all your swims. What’s more frustrating is that this is the sole metric you can use for all swims. For instance, it tells you your average number of strokes per length to measure progress, whereas average strokes per minute may make more sense as that applies to all swims. If you sometimes swim in 50m pools and sometimes in 25m pools, you’ll have more strokes per length for longer lengths and so you can’t compare your two swims. Average SWOLF has a similar problem because SWOLF, too, differs according to pool length.

In addition, the scale on the graph depicting your progress could be better; my progress will no doubt be slow, so it would be clearer and more motivating if the scale could make the differences more obvious. They are all just dots on the same line at the moment (you can see a little difference, but it doesn’t leap out at you).

The progress summary section simply provides total distance swum, average speed (km/hr in this instance), and total calories. I’d rather it told me how I’d done compared with the previous week/month (eg, you swum 2 sec faster per 100m this week as compared with last month, but you’ve swum less often and less far). The progress section was better on the Suunto (although it did not provide those latter statistics either).

Garmin has a Trophy Case which gives you your personal bests and the dates. It provides total time taken in minutes for each distance (100m, 400m 750m, 1000m, 1500m, longest distance). I wish it would at least show the average speed or pace for the personal bests, or again, that you could choose yourself what information to look at. Since I never swim just 400m, for example, I have no idea how fast that time taken to swim it is compared with my usual swim or how much slower my current swim was vs that personal best. I also can't easily see how much slower I'm swimming over the longer distances vs the shorter distances, which would help me see when I start to wilt during my swims. Since the program has presumably gone to the effort of calculating the quickest sections for each swim, it may as well provide you, the user, with the details (such as the pace)!

The statistics for the individual swims give me all the information I want (snapshot provided at the top of this blog). The watch provides total calories, distance and duration of swim, average and best pace in mins:secs per 100m, speed in 100m/hr (km/hr would have been more intuitive, but it’s OK!), average number of strokes per length and average stroke rate per minute, average SWOLF. For individual lengths, you can see time, pace (mins:secs per 100m), number of strokes, SWOLF. It’s clear from my statistics that I slow down towards the end of a swim when I’m feeling tired, so that’s something to work on. In the snapshot above, my average speed declined from exactly the time that I looked at the watch to see how I was doing, so I'm now forewarned not to reduce my effort when I see how far I am.

You can join groups, but I can’t really see that they serve much purpose. There’s a leaderboard in each group, but the only option for swimming groups is to compete on total distance swum over the current week to date. It would be nice to have average speed and other metrics as well. There’s a challenges section, but those are also limited to distance and I’ve found only one swimming group (the over 50’s swimmers group) that uses the challenges.

I miss the ability that I had on the Suunto to create tags and then analyse my swims by tags. For instance, I had tags for 50m, 25m, sea, and lake, so that I could analyse my data by pool length and by open water type, as I suspect my times may differ between these.

However, despite all this, generally I’m happier with the Garmin than with the Suunto. The watch face is clearer and it provides me with my key metrics (time and distance and pace) while swimming and it’s very easy to read. It was always a struggle to read the Suunto. I’ve currently got the watch set to a 25m pool which was easy to set up, and now it seems to start almost automatically on that, so that saves a lot of faffing about before starting. Overall, I found the Garmin more intuitive to use than the Suunto. It automatically classified my swimming as freestyle and I didn’t have to “train” the watch, as I did with the Suunto. That also makes things a lot easier.

Astonishingly, no review of the Garmin told me that swimmers can set the watch to buzz when you're on the last lap of your target distance (or target time, or alert you if you're not going to your target speed). Swimmo and Swimovate plug this feature as if they are the only ones to have this function and then there it was on my Garmin! I've only used the alert for distance so far and actually I’m too impatient and still look at my watch part-way through to see if I'm anywhere near finished, but maybe I’ll have the occasional day where I’m not wondering when I can allow myself to stop! I’ve yet to use it for speed (that’s a bit scary because it’s quite challenging!) or time, but I assume they work just as well.

My absolute favorite feature is that when I save my swim at the end of my session, it buzzes me to let me know if I’ve achieved any personal bests in that session and then shows them to me on my watch. I’m always holding my breath at the end to see if I’ll get that little buzz. It’s a kick if I do, and a disappointment if I don’t! I would now add that to my list of desired features.