Why Australia’s national swimming team is ‘thankful’ to the Apple Watch – Times of India

The Apple Watch may have played a key role in the success of the Australian national swimming team. Various swimmers in the team named ‘The Dolphins‘ have quite positive things to say about the smartwatch and have credited their success to the gadget, especially the Workout app which lets them see their metrics during the training sessions.
“Australia’s national swim team, The Dolphins, has been using Apple Watch, iPad, and a combination of apps to improve its performance outcomes, helping propel the team during its most successful period in history.”, said Apple in a newsroom post.
Apple says that the Apple Watch, the iPad and the custom apps together make a powerful ecosystem that “delivers real-time data and analysis, and a portable, powerful visual feedback tool for coaches to use when communicating with athletes in the pool.”
Jess Corones–Swimming Australia’s performance solutions manager–said in a statement made to Apple that the data they have on the athletes’ performance plays a major role when designing performance outcomes for them, quoted the report. As such, the Apple Watch gives them more data points to make coaching decisions.
The post quotes Zac Stubblety-Cook–World record holder and gold medallist swimmer–as saying that being able to accurately measure his heart rate in between training sets has been “a really valuable data point” for him and his coach to understand how well he is responding to training.
The upcoming watchOS 9 will come with new swimming features like kickboard detection as a stroke type for Pool Swim workouts. The Apple Watch will be able to automatically detect when swimmers are using a kickboard and classify the stroke type accordingly. There is a SWOLF score also coming with the watchOS 9. It will display the number of strokes a person swam with the time they took for that (in seconds) to swim one length of the pool.