Improve Your Pace By 13% With FORM Score
Swimming is a sport that relies on having great technique, so you need to improve your technique and efficiency, not just your fitness, to get faster in the water. However, measuring your technique is notoriously difficult in swimming.
There are a few ways that swimmers try to measure how good their technique is:
- Stroke Count where the fewer the number of strokes you take, the better your technique. This is an easy starting point, but can vary a lot depending on how hard you are trying and how far you push off the wall.
- Distance Per Stroke (DPS) is how far you move down the pool with every stroke you take. DPS can be a great measure for technique, but cannot be practically done by a swimmer while they are swimming.
- SWOLF is the sum of the number of strokes you took during a length and your time for that length in seconds (i.e. 40 Strokes + 45 Seconds = 85 SWOLF). A swimmer can measure this on their own, but differences in push-offs and pool lengths can make tracking your SWOLF very difficult, and hard to compare against consistently.
- Pace per 100 will measure how fast you are going, on average, over 100 metres. However, speed by itself, will not show you how your swimming changes because of your technique.
To solve this, we have developed FORM Score, which is a patented metric that will help you improve your technique and get faster in the water. FORM Score takes your Pace, DPS, and some additional factors to calculate how efficient you are in the water, and scores it from 1-100 to make it easier to understand and track.
You can find more information about how important FORM Score is and how you can use the goggles and the app to track your FORM Score HERE. In this blog, we will outline how to track your FORM Score in real-time while you are swimming and break down some tips on how to best use FORM Score to help you swim faster.
Tracking Your FORM Score While Swimming
- Set Up Your New FORM Goggles!
When you purchase and set up your FORM Goggles, you will, by default, see your FORM Score at the end of every interval. This means that every time you rest, you can see how efficient you were during the previous interval of your swim.
While this provides a good introduction to monitoring your performance throughout your workout, it only scratches the surface of how you can use FORM Score to improve your swimming.
- See your FORM Score on your Turn and Rest Screens
This will let you see your FORM Score at the end of EVERY Length of your swimming to give you immediate feedback on how well you’re holding your technique. Just by doing this, FORM Swimmers improve their swimming efficiency on average by 13%!
- Follow this guideline and follow the directions on how to change your dashboard.
- How to Track Your FORM Score
With your goggles set up to show your FORM Score on every length, it will be easier to recognize patterns in your swimming and when you are holding your technique the best. While everyone would like to improve their swimming and have the highest FORM Score possible, it is more important to see how your score changes while you swim. Here are a few patterns to look for:
Is your FORM Score consistent throughout your intervals?
This is the ideal state. If your FORM Score is staying within 4-5 points throughout your intervals, then you are doing a good job of holding your technique and staying consistent regardless of what the actual score is.
Does your FORM Score start high and then drop?
This is a sign that you are trying too hard at the start, and then your technique falls apart as you get tired. Learning to swim smoother at the start will help you hold your FORM Score, and your technique, throughout your intervals.
Is your FORM Score all over the place?
Having big swings in your FORM Score is a sign that your technique changes a lot from length to length and that you need to work on how reliable you are at holding your technique.
Improving Your Swimming Using FORM Score
By tracking your FORM Score from length to length, not only will you be able to recognize patterns in how you are swimming, but you will also be able to get immediate feedback when you make changes to improve your swimming.
Three things that FORM Score can help you improve are your overall technique, the reliability of your technique, and your pacing. Here are some tips for how you can use your FORM Score to help you improve your swimming overall.
Improving Your Technique Using FORM Score
FORM Score is a great tool to see how changes in your technique make an immediate impact on your swimming, whether it is from a personal coach, from insights in the FORM App or just how you feel in the water.
You can start with a simple set, let’s say 12 x 25 of easy Freestyle swimming on 30 Seconds Rest.
For each 25, you can watch your FORM Score as you make adjustments to your technique and see how high you can get your score. This will help you recognize which adjustments have the biggest impact on your FORM Score thereby improving your technique.
Then, you can make your set a little more challenging and see if you can maintain your FORM Score by holding on to your improved technique. You can do this by:
- Shortening your rest from 30 seconds to 20 seconds.
- Increasing the length of the set, from 12 x 25 to 16 x 25.
- Increasing the length of your intervals, from 12 x 25 to 6 x 50.
As you make your sets harder, you may find it more difficult to keep the same technique so it is important to notice how your swimming changes when you start to struggle. Here is a short list of common things to notice when you start to get tired:
Are you moving your head wildly to breathe?
Is your stroke shortening as you pull through?
Are your feet sinking in the water?
You will likely see a drop in FORM Score as you struggle to hold your technique on harder sets, so try to use that fatigue to remind yourself about the technique you are trying to change and hold a higher FORM Score as a result. These tips could help you as you start to struggle:
Breathe to the side with one goggle in/one goggle out of the water.
Finish your stroke past your hips.
Splash the surface of the water with your toes.
Making Your Technique More Reliable Using FORM Score
Ideally, you want to keep your technique consistent as you swim for longer distances. Learning to swim with consistency will make your technique more reliable whether you are preparing for a race or just trying to push yourself for longer.
Your FORM Score will immediately show you when you start to reach your breaking point and can no longer hold your technique. You never want to swim with compromised technique, so seeing if, and when, your technique breaks down is vital to getting the most out of every workout in the water.
To do this, let’s start by looking at someone doing 1 x 200 in a 25m pool and what their FORM Score might be for each 25.
The first thing you may notice is a drop between the first length and the rest of the interval. This is normal since you are much fresher at the start of the interval, resulting in better speed and technique than the rest of the interval.
What is more important to see is the drop in FORM Score on the last three lengths. This is a sign that the swimmer is swimming beyond their ability to hold their technique and likely needs to adjust what they are doing in the workout to hold their technique. Here are a few options they could do that will help them improve:
- Stay focused to the end. Sometimes the drop is the result of losing focus rather than fatigue. They can try again and see if they improve the next time around with better focus at the end of the interval.
- Take more rest before the interval. If they can’t hold their technique because they are getting tired in the set, then they could take more rest to gather themselves to do each interval better.
- Shorten the interval size. 200m may be too far for this swimmer to hold their technique effectively. Changing the interval size down from 200m to 125m or 150m will ensure that they are never swimming with compromised technique.
Swimming with compromised technique can have a negative impact on improving your technique. Tracking your FORM Score will help you recognize when your technique starts to fade and when you need to adjust your workout.
Improving Your Pacing Using FORM Score
Swimming at a consistent pace, regardless of your effort during the swim, will help you maintain long-term improvements in your swimming. Learning to evenly pace your swimming is a vital skill when preparing for longer races such as a Triathlon or Open Water event.
Your FORM Score will be able to show you how well you are holding your pace, and whether you are distributing your effort over the course of your intervals. Here, let’s look at another 200m interval in a 25m pool.
While it is normal to have a drop in your FORM Score after your first length, here the drop is much bigger. Then the FORM Score continues to drop throughout the rest of the interval. This is a sign that you are swimming too hard at the start of the interval and paying for it the longer you swim.
It is easy to get excited and push yourself when you are fresh at the start of your intervals, but this can reinforce bad habits that make it hard to hold your pace, and your technique, throughout your swimming. Here are some adjustments that can help:
- Slow down your first length. This may sound simple but can make all of the difference. Lowering your effort will lower your FORM Score on the first length, but may help you be more consistent on the rest of the interval.
- Build your effort. As you swim for longer, it is natural for your effort to feel harder to hold the same time and FORM Score. Planning your intervals so you feel like you're building up your effort to the end will help you stay consistent and strong.
- Shorten your intervals. If you are trying to keep your effort high, but you can’t hold your FORM Score, then you may need to shorten your intervals down to where your pace and FORM Score can be more consistent.
Using FORM to Improve Your FORM Score
To help you improve your swimming using FORM Score, FORM has a selection of training plans and workouts designed specifically to help you use, track and improve your FORM Score.
Our 'Improve Your FORM Score' plans will show you the ropes on how to use FORM Score to improve your technique while utilizing this unique metric.
You can also build a HeadCoach™ training plan focused on ‘Improving Your Technique’ which will generate a personalized training plan to help you improve your swimming efficiency.
We have also written a few workouts that will get you started on workouts that are ideal for using FORM Score.
With that, you can follow these steps so that you can start improving your technique right away using FORM Score.
- Set Up Your FORM Goggles.
- Update your dashboard to include 'FORM Score - Last Length'.
- Pick a FORM Score Training Plan, HeadCoach™ Training Plan or FORM Workout and start tracking your FORM Score.
- Evaluate and adjust your swimming to improve your FORM Score and become a better swimmer!
