Garmin FR945 - Pool Swimming Review

In this section, I review the pool swimming accuracy of the new Garmin FR945. To test the new watch, I went to a local pool with my old Garmin Swim watch on my right wrist and my new Garmin FR945 on my left wrist.

As with the Garmin Swim, before your first swim, you need to insert the pool size in the swimming settings.

It was a normal training day and I was lucky not to have any "traffic" in my lane. As you are probably aware of, both watches use an internal accelerometer to detect when you reach the pool wall, if you find traffic in the pool and suddenly have to stop, slow down, or speed up your swim the watch might end up showing that you reached the pool wall before you really do. To have a clean tracking of your pool swims always make sure in each turn you strongly push up/turn of from the wall gaining speed which will allow the internal acceleremoter to detect a turn.

I went for a continuous session that consisted of 34 pool lengths, in a 50m pool (hence, 1700m), always alternating style between crawl and breaststroke.

Here are the final results of each watch.

Garmin Swim

Garmin FR945

The new FR945 recorded 100 meters more than the Garmin Swim which was on track with my swim.

 Here, are the intervals recorded by the Garmin Swim. The watch perfectly tracked each interval.

The FR945 was not perfect in tracking my swim. Here are the intervals as tracked by the FR945.

Unfortunately, the new Garmin FR945 shows a split in two of my intervals (#17 and #18 and #24 and #25 should be aggregated). The last interval (#36) was also tracked incorrectly by the FR945 showing free instead of breast in the stroke type.

To sum up, regarding the tracking of pool swims, the new FR945 does a good job but it's not as accurate as the old pool swimming dedicated watch - the Garmin Swim. Somehow, the FR945 failed and inserted splits in two of my lengths while the Garmin Swim was able to accurately track those lengths. The new FR945 also failed in detecting the correct stroke type in one of the 34 lengths I actually swam. So, given this test, I rate the old Garmin Swim with 5 stars and the new 945 with 4 stars.