Pool Mate – The New Way To Monitor Your Swimming

When training most of us have used the traditional monitoring systems such as heart rate monitors, pedometers and possibly accelerometers. All these work great on land but what about something that will help monitor your swimming performance. Swimovate has identified this gap and has brought out the Pool mate. The pool mate is essentially a swimming computer that will track things such as laps, time, average strokes per lap, speed, distance, calories, set times and your efficiency index. On top of this it acts as a digital watch with alarm function while being waterproof to 50m.

The pool mate is essentially a state of the art  accelerometer that has been merged with a digital watch. It detects the movement of your wrist and using a complex set of algorithms and digital processing techniques it converst these movements into data of what ever you would like to monitor. The watch is calibrated to keep track of the four main strokes namely freestyle, breastroke, backstroke and butterfly. This watch also provides the flexibility of training in different sized pools without the need for calibration as long as the pool has a distance of more than 15m.

If you are one to compare each training session to monitor your training and fitness status this watch may aid by keeping up to 400 logs of all the statistics produced by each session. It even goes as far as to compare each set through out your training program as well as monitoring your rest intervals.

The Pool mate is a very comprehensive training aid that will help monitor your sessions and provide valuable information that a lot of systems dont. If you are looking to get a greater view into your training then this could be the piece of equipment that you need.

Pros:

• Compact.
• Feature packed.
• Feels like a quality product when handled.
• Logs all important info for training sessions.

Cons:

• No heart rate monitoring.
• Lacks pc dowload of information which requires the pro version.
• Small screen to review training data.

If you are convinced head over to SA's Stockist:  www.theswimshop.co.za to place your order.

A review by
Nicholas Hitchins