The Apple Watch 2 could change the way you swim
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Swimmers no longer have to worry about getting their Apple Watches wet.
The Apple Watch Series 2, which was launched last month, is water resistant to 50 meters. It can also count laps, track an athlete’s average lap pace and detect which stroke the swimmer is using in order to measure the number of calories burned.
To go along with this new swimmer’s toy are the apps for MySwimPro, a program that syncs swim workouts from the user’s iPhone to the Apple Watch, and also Swim.com, a tracker that allows the user to record the stroke count, stroke type, workout pace and more.
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Between the two apps, swimmers are now able to access hundreds of different pool and open-water workouts as well as track their workouts.
“We’re thrilled to launch the first swimming app for Apple Watch,” MySwimPro co-founder and CEO Fares Ksebati said in a statement. “This new experience [is] one way we’re helping athletes around the world achieve their swimming goals like never before and is the first of several wearable integrations that we’re launching over the next few months.”
The exercises on MySwimPro can be organized by skill level, swim stroke and length of the workout. Athletes can choose either the “Structured Workout,” “Pool Swim” or “Open Water Swim” programs. Biometric data, including heart rate, distance, and pace is logged in real-time and syncs with HealthKit. The Apple Watch Series 1 only offered a display of the swimmer’s profile stats on MySwimPro.
Meanwhile, Swim.com works to record workouts on Apple Watch that will automatically sync to the website so that swimmers can view their workouts statistics and track their progress.
“Swim.com already has tens of thousands of users tracking their swim workouts on Pebble and Android Wear and we’ve become the clear market leader in swim apps on wearables in both user volume and functionality,” Swim.com president Davis Wuolle said in a statement. “We fully expect that the introduction of the Apple Watch Series 2 will ignite an explosion of growth for the usage of swimming wearables.”
To obtain the MySwimPro app, users need to download or update to the new version of the MySwimPro iPhone app and then sync an Apple Watch with the iPhone. And according to Wuolle, the Swim.com app can be downloaded and also works with Apple Watch Series 1 as long as it has the latest version of watchOS and is used in a waterproof case.
The Apple Watch Series 2 is now available in more than 25 countries.
