Make the most out of your swim workouts with Garmin
August 20, 2025
This is your guide to improving your swim fitness with Garmin heart rate monitors, smartwatches and more.
Whether you’re a recreational swimmer trying to stay in shape or a competitive triathlete aiming to maximize your swim performance, the right swimming gear can make all the difference.
Maybe you’ve already got the suit, swim cap and goggles, but you still need technology to track your performance and recovery. That’s where Garmin products — including heart rate monitors, swimming smartwatches and more — come in.
Why should you swim with a Garmin smartwatch?
Swimming with a Garmin smartwatch lets you keep track of your distances, times, paces and more. With pacing alerts, you can stick to your target pace. You can also use your watch to time your rests or guide you through a preloaded workout.
Want to know how efficiently you swim? Your Garmin smartwatch will deliver your SWOLF score. SWOLF, a measure of swimming efficiency, is a combination of the words swimming and golf. It’s measured in the pool by adding the number of strokes and the time it took you to swim that length. And like golf, you’re aiming for a lower score.
After your swim, review your data in the Garmin Connect™ app to track your progress and see your total distance this week, this month, or even this year.
Why should you swim with a Garmin heart rate monitor?
Swimming with HRM 600 ensures you can accurately and easily track your heart rate. It measures the electrical signals from your heart when it beats, enabling highly accurate heart rate recording.
Paired with your compatible Garmin smartwatch, you can stand up out of the water while you rest to see your real-time heart rate1, as well as the max and average heart rate values for your last interval. When you save your activity at the end of your swim, HRM 600 will forward all your heart rate data to your compatible smartwatch. Then you can view your heart rate alongside your swim metrics and how much time you spent in your five heart rate zones.
Don’t want to wear a watch while swimming? The HRM 600 can also work alone to record your workout and sync data — including heart rate and calories — directly to the Garmin Connect app. This durable device also offers up to 2 months of rechargeable battery life and a 5 ATM water rating. Oh, and it’s eligible for flexible spending account (FSA) or health savings account funds (HSA).
Why should you recover and cross-train with a Garmin smartwatch?
If you don’t wear a Garmin smartwatch after your swim workout, you’re missing out on a plethora of 24/7 health1, wellness and training data such as stress tracking, Body Battery™ energy monitoring, heart rate variability (HRV) status and more. These metrics can help you reach your training and fitness goals.
Take training readiness, for example. This feature on compatible Garmin smartwatches is designed to help you maximize training efficiency. Training readiness uses the previous night’s sleep tracking data1 and recovery demands of your recent activities as well as your acute training load, training status, sleep history and stress history to tell you how ready your body is for an intense workout.
Your training status — which could show you one of eight options, from peaking to unproductive — interprets your training and results so you can see the bigger picture. For example, if your smartwatch says you’re overreaching, it means your body is struggling to keep up with your training. And that means it may be time to slow down a bit.
Thinking of going for another strenuous swim in the afternoon after a high-intensity swim workout in the morning? Think again. You can check in on your recovery time, a feature that shows how many hours of recovery you have left to help you know when you’re ready for your next tough workout.
Outside of recovery, compatible Garmin smartwatches offer multisport profiles, including triathlons, duathlons, brick workouts, swimruns and even custom profiles, so you can automatically record splits.
You can also perform dryland workouts with Garmin. If you run or cycle regularly, a compatible Garmin smartwatch can provide daily suggested workouts to help support or improve your fitness level. Or you can download a variety of workouts such as yoga, Pilates, cardio, strength and more onto your Garmin smartwatch. Mix it up even more with high-intensity interval training, including custom, Tabata, every minute on the minute (EMOM) and more workouts available on your smartwatch.
Why should you track your sleep with the Index™ Sleep Monitor?
OK, you’ve got your HRM 600 for swim workouts and the smartwatch for your day-to-day, but when you’re recovering from two-a-days, it’s time to take your sleep tracking to a new level. Your compatible Garmin smartwatch also tracks your sleep, but…