We hope you enjoyed our first three posts in our new FAQ series, which has been addressing the most frequent questions we have been receiving from our users! If you missed them, here are links to all three:
- When will the AndroidWear app have the same features as the Apple Watch app? http://sw.im/suwwetbar
- Do I need to water lock the Apple Watch before I use Swim.com in the pool? http://sw.im/sohvigxun
- Why isn’t my Apple Watch swim syncing to my iOS app? http://sw.im/muthemwyr
We are hoping to continue adding more answers to top questions in the next few weeks, so if you have something you’re unsure about just send us a note at support@swim.com and we may end up featuring it in our blog!
Hi! I love the app and the blog… go ahead!
One question is, why the app, doesn’t count calories?
When I go to the Activity in my iPhone, I can see the “Pool Swim” entry with the distance, Time, Avg rate, pool lenght, avg pace, but the active calories and total calories are zero… why?
Thanks for you help!
Hi Hilario-
The 0 calories report on the workout summary in Activity is happening because we don’t actually support the calorie metric yet on Swim.com. Apple has the calorie metric API open to us in Activity – so it’s definitely possible to add it, and we will be investigating it for a future app update. However, there are currently inaccuracy issues with the HR data coming from the Apple Watch (too high on average), which can affect the accuracy of calories burned while swimming.
You can usually get a ballpark estimate of calories burned using height, weight, age, and gender, but in order to get it within an acceptable rate of accuracy you also need to include fitness level. Heart rate data is really the only way to put a quantitative measure on fitness level (aside from V02 max, which likely isn’t coming to swim tracking devices soon). The Apple Watch is the first device we’ve supported the HR metric on, mostly because it’s one of the only devices that works in water without requiring a special swimming HR chest strap and hasn’t had WHR disabled while swimming. Because the HR data coming from the Apple Watch is not to our accuracy standards yet, we likely won’t include calorie count until it does.
While you are getting a 0 calories burned result for the Swim.com workout in Activity, you may notice that you ARE getting calorie count in Activity’s “Move” ring, though. This is happening because Activity is adding estimated calories burned from the data it is taking from your Apple Watch. The Apple Watch has auto-detection algorithms for swimming, so even if you do not start a native apple watch workout and you go swimming, it will pick up these strokes and add them to your data. This happens simultaneously while recording a swim workout with the Swim.com app. This breakdown is available if you open the Health app and then navigate to Activity>Swimming Distance and then tap on the graph. There you will be given a list of dates and you can further break it down on each day. Here you can see Health is pulling data sourced from Swim.com AND from Apple Watch’s auto detection algorithms at the same time. Health is taking that data sourced from the Apple Watch auto algorithms and then adding that to your calorie total (the Move ring in Activity). When you view the workout itself though (sourced from Swim.com) on Activity, you’ll get a 0 calorie because we’re not writing that data.
I downloaded the app – I set in workouts and explore my pool yards and yardage range but it is not displaying workouts to choose from? How do I use the app to give me structured workouts? Am I missing something?
Hi Greg-
Structured workouts is a relatively new feature to our app, and so there is not a huge library of them quite yet. It’s possible that your search/filter parameters are not matching with what we have uploaded already. What distance/ability/stroke type workouts are you trying to look for? Once we know we’ll check and see what’s available.
Hi! I’ve just started using the swim.com app on my Apple Watch 2 and love it – so many more features than the native app. My only small disappointment is that my swim is not logged as a workout in the activity app. Is this right or is my phone not syncing things correctly? All the data from the swim.com app is syncing to the health app, so I wasn’t sure if it’s supposed to appear under workouts in activity or not? Thank you in advance for any clarification on this!
Hi Alex-
Workouts from Swim.com should be populating in Apple Activity as “pool swim” workouts as long as you have all your settings set up correctly. Apple’s Health and Activity work hand-in-hand, so there are no settings to set up in Activity itself. It’s all done through the Health and Swim.com app settings.
To start, go into the Swim.com iOS app settings and select “account”. There you should see a box to check next to “Connect With Health”.
After you have selected and saved that, please go into the Apple Health app and navigate to the “Sources” tab. Swim.com should be in the list of apps that you can source data from. Select it and then you can choose which data sets from Swim.com you want to sync with Apple Health.
Selecting all of these options under read and write will also allow Swim.com workouts to be registered on the Apple Activity app. Apple Health may not pull workout data from Swim.com that was completed prior to connecting Swim.com to Apple Health.
So frustrating, used to work perfectly. Now just says ‘unfortunately swim.com has stopped’ every week for a month now!
Hi Steve-
Uninstalling the Swim.com app from your phone and Sony Smartwatch 3, shutting down and restarting both devices, and then re-installing Swim.com from the Google Play store may help clear up this issue.
Please be advised that when doing a fresh install of the Swim.com app on your phone, it may take a few hours for the app to appear on your watch due to the speed of Bluetooth transfer and the file size of the app. My best advice is to do the install at some point when you are going to be sitting for a period of time and can leave the watch and phone connected to each other and charging.
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