[aarona]

I've only had a chance to swim with my Ambit2 once in the pool. The watch recorded complete junk. Strokes dropped, miscategorized (breast instead of freestyle, or lots of other), laps all over the place, even measuring laps with short length (in a 25 yard pool I get a 7 yard lap. WTF? I enter the pool length, how does it come up with 7 yards). With Garmin and Swimsense, I just hopped in the pool and swam, hit the lap when I wanted to start/end sets.

When I look at other people's pool workouts (since all Movescount workouts are public) - they also look like junk.

So what's up? Does the watch not actually work for pool swim? As advertised?

Can anyone point me to a workout on Movescount showing me a properly recorded pool workout - with correct stroke types, stroke rates, pool lengths and sets?

 

[pjc3]

I find the indoor swimming reasonable. I had to teach the ambit the strokes a few times. I recommend teaching strokes after you are a bit tired.....seems to be more accurate then!

Not all moves are public. Depends on your privacy settings.


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[aarona]

I find the indoor swimming reasonable. I had to teach the ambit the strokes a few times. I recommend teaching strokes after you are a bit tired.....seems to be more accurate then!

Hi pjc3. Thanks for your quick reply.

Good to hear.

Aha!! When I google "teach ambit2 strokes", in fact the full product manual comes up (apologies I didn't read all 157 pages), and there it is on page 86 - Teaching swimming styles to Suunto Ambit2. Cool.

So I'll head to the pool today and have a teaching session with my watch and let you know how it goes.

Pity my watch didn't learn this at the factory like other vendors do. Maybe it was a bad student. I do wonder if this is a common problem, since everyones Moves I looked at were wonky.

Not all moves are public. Depends on your privacy settings.

True. Your Moves are either -ALL- public, or -ALL- private. Is there a way to change just one? I couldn't find it. And Suunto decides by default all your workouts are public. And doesn't advertise that well or indicate it prominently. Which means you can just google thousands of people' workouts (example search "profile member site:movescount.com") likely unbeknownst to them. And to follow a person you need to make your entire profile and all workouts public. So we're back to the same problems.

I find all these unacceptable which is why I refuse to use the website. (I also find it terribly confusing to do even simple things). But I think this is a much longer topic.

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[aarona]

As a quick follow up before I head to the pool, here is what I am talking about. A typical pool workout: triathleta's 1:35 h Pool swimming Move

It's so bad I can't even tell what happened here.

But with a Garmin 910XT I get this (sporttracks.mobi):

I can't tell if the watch has a problem or it's just the confusing website.

I'll get to the bottom of it today!!

 

[morey000]

I don't spend much time looking at movescount afterwards, but yeah, it doesn't get the strokes right all the time. However, as far as counting laps goes, and giving me set times (all without pushing a button), it's been flawless.

I think the issue is how moves count choses to display the results- lap by lap rather than giving you set info. I'd rather see how I was hitting my 100's 200's and 500's rather than the time for each lap and then some 'other' time for the rest times.

but- during the swim, my watch has been perfect. Even seems to get the lap when I miss my flip turn and my legs push helplessly against nothing but water, a foot from the wall.

 

[wydim]

After seeing your screenshot with all the details of a swim moves, I must admit that I don't even use half of the Ambit2 capabilities. I don't check out my training swiming moves on movescount.

the only thing I can be sure of is that it calcultes the distance flawlessly (only 1 time, it recorded 975 m when it was in fact 1000 m. And it was because I had to stop midway into my length because a smartass decided to do a length with only his feet (hands on a foam paddle) in the fast lanes.

Also, I didn't know I could teach my Ambit swiming styles. but again, I never checked to see if it knows I'm doing freestyle (crawl ??) all the time

 

[cleanton]

You can ask to [email protected]

 

[GregBoys]

I have found it accurate in a 25m and a 33m pool. However I did need to get the watch to learn my stroke, after which it worked great. Note I tend to favour 1 long swim rather than sets, on my last swim it recorded 60 lengths of a 25m pool without an issue, and it was a busy lane with quite a few overtakes.

I do try to follow some tips on how to get the best out of a swim watch. The excellent DC Rainmaker has these on his review of the Ambit 2s :-
Suunto Ambit 2 and 2S In-Depth Review | DC Rainmaker
(Look for the Troubleshooting Pool Swim Data section)

Hope this helps.

 

[aarona]

Thanks GregBoys. I've read the excellent DC Rainmaker post. I'm not terribly inclined to change my swimming to suit the software defects of a watch. I used the Finis Swimsense watch for years and would find it perfectly accurate for 19 of 20 swims, dropping maybe a length on 1/20th of workouts. So it's possible to get this right. It's a $300 watch, it should just work.

I had a chance to test the watch this weekend, after training it on my freestyle stroke.

My original question: Ambit2 - does it actually work for pool swimming?

Short answer:

NO. Not for me, not with the movescount.com app. It's completely useless.

I can however import to sporttracks.mobi and the data is fixed up and corrected so it's pretty much usable.

If you're interested... read on about my experience. Hopefully this will help you use your Ambit 2 more effectively.

The Plan

I set out to test the watch on freestyle swimming (the only stroke I can do) in a 25 yard pool. I used the first length to train the watch, then did the following:

225y free (back to short end of pool) [hit lap button]

(1 minute rest) [hit lap button]

200y free [hit lap button]

(1 minute rest) [hit lap button]

75y free [hit lap button]
------
Total distance: 500 yards.

I'm an amateur swimmer, I don't push off the wall very hard, but I'm not flailing around in the pool by any means. NOTE: I used the technique promoted by DC Rainmaker hitting [LAP] at each set, however I didn't hit the stop/start on the rest laps - hitting two buttons every set seems obnoxious (and actually, the Ambit2 handled this fine).

Movescount.com fails... big time

Below is what I see in movescount.com. You can see right off it dropped quite a lot of turns, which throws off distance, which throws off pace, and SWOLF, and pretty much everything.

Time and pace also include rests, making the app somewhat useless (even assuming it detected turns correctly). On the plus side it detected all my strokes perfectly (after I trained it).

Where did this happen? Lets look at the charts to get a clue:

The swim starts out good, but goes downhill quickly. You can see 3 lengths where it's missed one turn (doubling pace), one where it missed 3 turns and detected a turn after a few seconds (showing me at world record pace for a few seconds, LOL), and the last set it's dropped two turns.

I'm not sure why this is jumping around but all the high values are wrong. I breathe every 3 strokes... it seems to be confusing it.

The lengths table gives a better view. I've circled all the wrong turn detections. OUCH. I've also added the interval breaks, which should add to 225, 200, 75.

SportTracks does much better

It's not a complete loss. I uploaded this to sporttracks.mobi - the data fix algorithms kicked in, added turns where needed and accounted for rest time.

The same pace/stroke charts look much cleaner:

You can see one length where it's tried to fix a missed turn and misplaced it. Still very close.

The intervals table looks perfect:

And the lengths looks good, again showing exactly where the turn/length couldn't be fixed:

Conclusion

If pool swimming with the Ambit 2 is working for you... AWESOME! For myself, I needed to fix a lot of data problems:
* Missed turns: 5 of 20 turns were missed. Total distance (and pace and SWOLF) wrong.
* Extra turns: 1 turn after 2 seconds. I'm not Michael Phelps - this should be easy to detect in the watch.
* Website doesn't exclude rest laps
* Stroke rate may be incorrect (need to look at data, possibly adding extra stroke every time I breathe)

Pros:
* Stroke detection seemed fine after "training"

I think Suunto can do much better on their swim algorithms and hope this improves in a future firmware update.

 

[morey000]

1. I don't have much use for Movescount after my swim. I just use the Ambit2 to let me know, in real time, how many laps I've done, what my total distance and set distance is, and my set times. It very successfully gives me that information while i'm swimming.

2. I never touch the 'lap' button. The watch figures out after about 5 seconds that I've stopped swimming, and will then display my set time, or rest time for me. --subtracting off those 5 seconds, automatically.

3. it didn't miss a lap for the last couple months, and then last week I had a 2Kyd swim where it missed 3 laps. not sure why. Maybe I'll re-train it.

 

[Martin1385]

which options do I have to correct the swim/lap data of my Ambit2 XML file?

I mean, it is somewhat pointless that ST.mobi has all those fancy analyses, if half of my data is wrong, isn't it?
I also hit the lap button after every interval, which includes pause. Out of the movescount lap data and my swim plan, I can correct wrong intervals, but I have no tool to do this…


The pool plugin for ST3 of OMB's is also no big help because I can only change, combine and split laps but I can’t for example edit a break time which is displayed as 0:00 but should be (accoding to my lap button pushes and to the movescount data) 0:00'58.7.
Or if a lap is lost, I have no option to add an additional lap to fix the intervall distance AND time.


Any ideas?

Or should I just import the swim data, edit total time and distance if I need to and forget all the rest?

 

[aarona]

Suunto Ambit2 S 1.5.16
---------------------------------
Bug fixes:
- Indoor swimming has been causing extra distance in some cases.

 

[Ballas]

Hi aarona,

First of all thanks for the detailed description of the problem.
I have the same experience with Ambit2 S and I am really disappointed. This was the main feature why I bought it
One question? How can you import the indoor swimming file into sporttracks.mobi from Movescount.com? I can export it in xlsx format only but it can't be imported to this app...

BR

 

[morey000]

...
I also hit the lap button after every interval, which includes pause. ...

just a note. you don't need to hit the lap button to indicate the end of a swim set/interval. the watch figures out that you've stopped. it takes about 5 seconds before it realizes you've stopped swimming... but then it removes those 5 seconds from that final lap/set time.