Swim GURU by Swim Smooth 4+

Motivating if you like data

I really like this app. It has a few quirks but overall I get a lot of useful feedback from it. I swim on my own so without a coach and can’t see what I might be doing wrong. But my watch and this app can. Since using it I have corrected crossing my center line, improved catch, better rotation, and most exiting- dropped times.

Some quirks. It always misses the 25 of my first warmup, whether I swim a 50, 100, or 200. It will always read 25 less. Ok, fine.

If you do a plan the events you can select are limited and in meters. I swim yards and the training plan will be in yards but the event is only available to select as meters.

On the progress page you do have to pull it down so it refreshes and reflects your most recent swim.

The app seems to haphazardly record personal bests. These past two swims I have had PBs per the swim lot breakout but the PBs are not reflected in the PB lists. Not sure why. I tried to refresh and delete/reinstall but the PB records didn’t update.

I wish I could add my own photo for the swims recorded. The one photo there is nice but not for every single swim. Not really a quirk but a wish item for a future update.

Minor quirks but overall a really help app!

First Look at Stroke Insights: Wow!

My first thought was:
How could you possibly extract and then properly analyze data at such a fine granular level.
After a couple of workouts I am really surprised how well it has been executed and visualized in the app. I like how the results are directly linked to the tutorial videos showing how to fix or what to optimize.
Once I’ve done more workouts, I’ll see how reliable the stroke insight is and will update this review if it doesn’t hold up to the first impressions.

Minor quirk: during the swim it happened twice that the app didn’t properly count my laps. However it seems to correct itself once I finish the work out and analysis begins.

Want to like this new version of the guru

But I can’t like it because it’s not functional. It doesn’t accurately track your swims. Over the last month I’ve done two more swims than it gives me credit for. Today it said “treading water” for my “progress”. Yesterday it said “building strength”. I swam both days, and today did 5100. Yet today, I’m supposedly only “treading water” ? They tried to automate this but they haven’t got it right.

Other problems - you have less flexibility with how you enter non swim smooth workouts. You can’t break it out into CSS, Red Mist etc.

You can’t easily log workouts on the ap. For some reason it only works on the pc or the iPad.

The print out versions of the workouts sometimes only let you see “drill” and don’t explain what it is.

These are the things off my head. I find when you give them feedback they ... listen? Sometimes being in love with your own ideas is limiting in the ultimate execution. I sooooo want this to be great as I love SwimSmooth. But this version of the ap is not as good as the swim smooth guru.

Developer Response ,

Hi kurtcobaincrush, sorry you've had a bad experience there. Could you contact us at customerservice@swimsmooth.com and let us know what device you are swimming with and when you lost those swims? We're working on updates all the time so please also expand on the printing / logging and we'll address those. Best wishes!