The summer is heating up, and June was no exception for MySwimPro. We hit the coasts, and made a lot of progress building our community. You can see our highlights from May here.
Without further adieu, here is a behind the scenes look at what we were up to in June 2018!
Launched A New App: Triathlon Tracker
Triathlon Tracker is a new app that lets you record multi-sport races or workouts from start to finish without ever needing to touch the screen on the Apple Watch! Just tap the side buttons when starting and ending each transition.
This new app is available for Apple Watch in the Apple App Store. Triathlon Tracker can record and display a number of different analytics which are listed below:
- Total time
- Heart rate
- Time in discipline
- Distance in discipline
- Pace in discipline
New Training Plans
Training Plans are the most popular feature of the MySwimPro platform and from what we’ve seen the biggest impact to our community. Swimming without a training plan is a bit like trying to drive in a foreign country without a map: you’ll always get somewhere, but the place you arrive may not be where you actually want to be. Checkout the three new plans below:
8 Week Get Fit (IM)
The Get Fit IM is designed for swimmers looking to take their swim training to the next level by incorporating more stroke work. IM is short for Individual Medley – all four competitive strokes in order: Butterfly, Backstroke, Breaststroke, Freestyle.
8 Week Beginner Freestyle Fundamentals
The Beginner Freestyle Fundamentals Plan is designed for swimmers looking to improve their technical efficiency in the water. It’s a fantastic plan to be first introduced to structured training.
10 Week IMX Pro Challenge
The IMX Pro Challenge is designed for swimmers looking to take their training to the next level with a healthy injection of stroke work. The phrase IM Xtreme comes from the competitive swimming world signifying a focus on being a well rounded swimmer by training and competing in the Individual Medley (IM) events.
New Advanced Analytics
We recently launched new analytics tools for our community members who swim with an Apple Watch! Introducing new features focused on lap splits, heart rate, and SWOLF score! After you save a workout, you can see your data graphed over the course of the swim, and easily see your intensity on the graph for each set. Check it out below:
NYC Community Meetup
The MySwimPro team headed to New York, New York last week and hosted another amazing Meetup for our Community Members! Check out the highlight video below!
We loved traveling to New York City! It might be a huge city, but the swimming community sure feels small. We had a blast getting drinks and appetizers at Treadwell Park in the Upper East Side. It was a beautiful evening to sit on the patio, and talk all things swimming with our friends. We even got to take some fun photos!
Apple World Wide Developer Conference
Adam had an awesome time at the Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Jose – met some awesome developers, some old friends from the conference, and came away with some great ideas and learnings to help make MySwimPro even more awesome! We’re looking forward to implementing some powerful workout enhancements new Siri Suggestions that Apple announced in iOS 12/watchOS 5!
Team Polish-a-thon
A Hackathon is an opportunity to stimulate creative problem solving and put ideas into action. For our fourth internal hackathon, we decided to run this as a one-day polish-a-thon. At a fast-paced startup, we spend most of our time designing new experiences and creating new features that sometimes we ignore polishing up what we already have.
We paused our normal work and focused on improving some of MySwimPro’s most under appreciated experiences and flows. I was inspired to do this after reading about how Gusto managed a two-day off-site with their design team. You can read more about our last three hackathons listed below:
- 1st Hackathon: Apple Watch App (2015)
- 2nd Hackathon: Social Engagement (2016)
- 3rd Hackathon: Fitbit Ionic App (2017)
Motor City Mile
The MySwimPro Team recently competed in the 19th Annual Motor City Mile open water swim race!
The Motor City Mile is an annual open water swim and charity event hosted by Different Strokes Swim Shop. It continues to be one of the largest open water swim events in the Midwest. We are excited to see this race grow, as next year it will be an official Swim Across America event!
The #AskASwimPro Show
In June I had the opportunity to speak with industry leaders across the country. If you’re interested in being a part of this weekly show, please let me know!!
7/03/2018: Rob Butcher, CEO of Swim Across America
– About Swim Across America
– Impact of the organization
– 2019 SAA Motor City Mile
6/19/2018: Rasmus Barfred, Co-Founder of TheMagic5
– The Magic5 founding story
– How the innovative goggles work
– Perspective on the intersection of technology and swimming
– What it’s like to start a company in the swimming industry
6/12/2018: U.S. Olympian Connor Jaeger
– Connor’s swimming story
– Favorite memories from swimming at University of Michigan
– Outlook on where the sport is going
– Advice for the aspirational fitness swimmer
6/8/2018: The Best Swimming Race
– What is your favorite swimming event? Why?
– Comparing the 100 Free and 100 IM
– Why you should focus on 2-3 events
– How to prevent burning out
Whiteboard Wednesdays
What is SWOLF?
Your SWOLF score is a rough measure of efficiency, and it’s calculated per-length as the sum of the time it took you to swim the lap, and the number of strokes it took you to swim it.
SWOLF isn’t perfect, but it’s a solid way to measure improvements in stroke efficiency over time. Sometimes it’s hard to compare stroke count and time if you swim in different pool lengths. Efficiency fixes this problem, so you can compare apples-to-apples in different pool lengths. If you sometimes swim in a 25 yard pool, and sometimes in a 50 meter pool this is what you’ll want to look at.
Test Sets
To continuously improve in swimming, it’s important to routinely measure your performance in training. Test sets are a fantastic way to track your progress because after all, what gets measured, gets improved!
Early Vertical Forearm (EVF)
EVF is one of the most commonly referenced concepts in the technical swimming and coaching world, yet most are unsure what exactly Early Vertical Forearm (EVF) is. To learn more, check out this week’s Whiteboard Wednesday!
Long Axis vs Short Axis Strokes
This Whiteboard Wednesday dives into the stroke mechanics of short axis and long axis strokes. These two types of strokes are fundamentally different and in this lesson, we’ll look at how to train both of them!
Workouts of the Week
- Early Vertical Forearm Focus – 1,200 yards
- Get Fit (IM) Workout – 1,900 yards
Are you looking to learn more about MySwimPro, join the team, help us grow? Feel free to shoot me an email at fares@myswimpro.com!