How to Build a Swim Set on Your Garmin

I get asked this more than almost anything else, and the answer takes about two minutes.

You turn up to the pool, you have got a set from me, and it is either on your phone in a group chat, memorised badly, or written on a bit of paper that is already going soft on the pool deck. Then you are three reps in, you have lost count, and you are doing the session you remember rather than the session you were given.

Your watch can hold the whole thing. Steps, distances, rest, equipment, the lot. It beeps at you, it counts for you, and you just swim. Most people have never built one because nobody showed them, so here it is.

Build it in Garmin Connect, not on the watch

You can do this on the Garmin Connect app on your phone or on Garmin Connect in a browser on your laptop. Both work. If you are building anything longer than a warm-up and a main set, do it on the laptop. The screen is bigger, dragging steps around is less fiddly, and you will get it done faster.

1. Create the workout

In Garmin Connect, go to Training and then Workouts, and hit Create a Workout.

Pick Swim as the activity. Then set your pool size before you do anything else. This is the bit people skip and then wonder why their distances are wrong. If you are in a 25m pool, set 25m. If you are in a 50m pool, set 50m. If you train in both, build two versions or get into the habit of changing it on the watch before you start.

2. Write your steps

Each step gets a type, a distance and a target. For most sessions you only need a handful of step types:

• Warm-up for the opening
• Interval or Active for the work
• Rest for the recoveries
• Cool-down for the end

Add a step, set it to a distance, and move on. A simple session might be 400 warm-up, then 8 x 100, then 200 cool-down. That is three or four steps plus a repeat.

For anything you do more than once, use a repeat. Set the repeat to 8, put your 100 inside it along with its rest, and Garmin handles the counting.

3. Put your rest in

This is the part that makes the whole thing worth doing, and most people leave it out.

Add a Rest step inside your repeat, after the work step. You can set it as a fixed time, which is what I use, or as a lap button press if you would rather control it yourself.

I put every rest in. If the set is 8 x 100 off 20 seconds, that 20 seconds goes in. Then I do not have to look at the clock once in the entire session, which is the whole point. You are not doing mental arithmetic with wet goggles on.

4. Use the notes field for session tips

Each step has a notes box. Use it.

This is where "hold your stroke count" or "build through the last two" or "this should feel comfortably hard" goes. It comes up on your watch when the step starts, so you get the instruction at the moment you need it rather than trying to remember what I said three days ago.

Keep them short. You are reading this through fogged goggles with a four-second turnaround.

5. Add your equipment

There is an equipment field on each step. You can set:

• Kickboard
• Pull buoy
• Paddles
• Fins
• Snorkel

Set it on the steps that need it and leave it off the ones that do not. It shows up on the watch, so you know what to pick up before you push off.

One annoying limitation: you can only pick one piece of equipment per step. So if your set is pull buoy and paddles together, which is a very normal thing to be doing, you cannot have both. Pick whichever one you are more likely to forget and put that in, then put the other one in the notes field for that step. It is a workaround, but it works.

What Garmin cannot do, and what to do instead

Garmin's workout builder is a list of fixed steps. That is great for most of what you will do and genuinely limiting for a few things.

Ascending and descending sets. You cannot loop a repeat where the distance changes each time. So a 100, 200, 300, 400 ladder cannot be built as a repeat. You can still build it, you just have to write each rep out as its own step. For a four-step ladder that is fine. For something with twelve different distances it gets tedious and the workout turns into a very long list.

Anything with a decision in it. If the set says "go harder if you are feeling good" or "drop to 200s if the 300s fall apart", the watch cannot do that. Put the rule in the notes field and make the call yourself.

My take on drills. You can add drill steps, but I usually do not bother. Building out every drill as its own step turns a five-minute job into a twenty-minute one, and drills are the part of the session where you want to be thinking about the drill rather than watching a screen. I build the full session as normal steps and keep the drill detail in the notes.

For anything genuinely too complicated for the builder, do not fight it. Either simplify the session so it fits, or use the backup below.

The backup: whiteboards, screens and paper

Some sessions are just not watch-shaped. For those:

• A mini whiteboard. Write the set on in dry-wipe marker, prop it at the end of the lane, wipe it clean and use it again next week. It does not go soggy, it costs very little, and you can change it mid-session if you need to. Use a proper dry-wipe marker rather than a permanent one, unless you fancy doing that set forever.
• Electronic paper. An e-ink reader or tablet is matte rather than glossy, so it stays readable with the pool lights and the sun on it, and the battery goes for weeks rather than hours. A few are water-resistant, but none of them enjoy chlorine, so keep it in a dry bag or a clear sleeve.
• Your phone at the end of the lane. Set is on the screen, you glance at it on the turnaround. Works fine, assuming you trust your pool and are not precious about your phone being near water.
• Written on paper, tied to your water bottle. Unglamorous and completely effective. Your bottle is already at the end of the lane. The set is right there with it. This is what I did for years and still do when a session is messy.

None of these is a failure. They are just the right tool for a set that does not fit the builder.

Getting it onto your watch, which is the bit people miss

You have built the workout and saved it. It is not on your watch yet. This is where everyone gets stuck.

Schedule it on your calendar. In Garmin Connect, find your saved workout and add it to your calendar for today, or for whichever day you are doing it.

That is it. Your watch syncs, the workout lands on the device, and on the day it is sitting there waiting for you.

To do it on the watch: start a Pool Swim activity, and before you hit go, look for Training or Workouts. Your scheduled session will be there under today. Select it, press start, swim.

The exact menu wording varies a bit between models, so have a poke around if yours looks different. The pattern is the same on all of them: pool swim, then training or workouts, then today's session.

If you would rather not use the calendar, there is usually a Send to Device option on a saved workout. I use the calendar because it means I do not have to remember to send anything. I build the week, it sits in the calendar, and the right session is on my watch every day without me thinking about it.

That is genuinely all of it

Create workout, pick swim, set the pool length, write your steps, put your rest in, add your equipment, schedule it to today. Two minutes once you have done it a couple of times.

The reason I push this is not that it is clever. It is that the alternative is you swimming a slightly worse version of your session every week because you half-remembered it, and over a few months that adds up to a lot of training that was not quite what it was supposed to be.

Get it on the watch. Then just swim.