I have owned two swim watches: a Swimovate Poolmate 2 and a Garmin 920 XT triathlon watch. Both measure SWOLF score among other metrics. I have been doing Master's Swimming for about a year and a half now and have seen a lot of improvement in my stamina, interval times, and yardage. My SWOLF score has dropped a lot during the same time - mostly because I'm faster. Does anyone find the SWOLF score useful or do you use your interval times to track progress? I mostly swim for general health but have competed in a few open water events and one swim meet in the last year
I don't find SWOLF useful at all. The Garmin Swim only counts strokes on one arm, a count of 8 could mean I took 15, 16, or 17 pulls. That's way too much variation to be meaningful for my purposes. I could see that someone who had a lot of technique to gain might see improvements in SWOLF over the course of a year, however, once solid technique has been established, the improvements made in stroke count are hardly going to be detected by the watch. It also averages in swolf for all strokes making it totally useless.
I use interval times on typical sets to track progress. Sometimes if I have a particularly high yardage or challenging workout, I'll sort my workouts by yardage and see how long it normally takes me to complete that many yards and I will usually see an improvement between months and seasons.
m2tall2: your answer was pretty much what I had thought. I was wondering if I was missing something since multiple manufacturers provide the SWOLF score feature.
