FORM Swim Goggles add guided, structured workout support

Must Read: Form Swimming Goggles Review

FORM has just announced a new subscription service for swim training. This training service fully integrates with their swimming goggles as you are guided LIVE through the workouts beamed directly into your goggles!!

Who is the subscription service For?

The service is geared at the more serious improver swimmers and performance swimmers, perhaps also appealing to triathletes. That said, there are workouts to cover a wide range of abilities with short workouts of 600m/15 minutes.

If you are already paying for digital training services elsewhere then perhaps yet another subscription might be a plan too far.

However, if you are simply fed up with reading your next set from a soggy, poolside piece of paper or being shouted out by your lovely poolside swim coach then FORM’s guided workouts are another option for you to consider.

What Does the Tech Deliver?

The subscription service gives you a library of guided swim workouts comprising multiple components that include drills.

You can have 5 workouts at any one time synced to your goggles and your progress through each one is shown live alongside all the other swim metrics that FORM already supports.

FORM Goggles have existing integrations with Garmin watches, some Polar HRMs and the Apple Watch that enable a good variety of stats to be beamed directly into your field of vision as you swim either Open Water or in the Pool.

How Much?

The annual membership is $179.99 USD ($14.99/month) or $19.99 USD/month.

You buy that from within the FORM app.

Opinion

The guided workouts represent a narrow but well-executed feature for the FORM swimming goggles.

FORM Goggles are also a well-executed piece of hardware with great integrations to other sources of live training data. FORM is certainly a unique product and that uniqueness by definition sets it apart from anything else available on the market.

However, there are a series of negatives that FORM will need to overcome with their new guided workouts.

• Market size – I’m just not sure how many swimmers will want guided workouts. From my experience with runners and cyclists, the number who take paid-for training plans are significantly more limited than you might think.
• Cost – the cost is expensive and significantly more than the equivalent power running plans from STRYD (a comparable product from a different sector)
• Swimming Plans – At this stage, there are no calendarised swimming plans on offer, all you get are self-selected, proprietary guided workouts.  It’s up to you to determine what workouts you need to execute for your race distance, race date and current ability level.

The current state of leading-edge, digital training platforms is of plans that are adaptive to your ability level and which integrate seamlessly into the Garmin training environment and/or with a unique Apple-based proprietary training infrastructure. Other platforms also let you create your own workouts.

Some comparisons to Stryd –  which is a unique running sensor and their recent Training ecosystem is a reasonable analogy to that offered today by FORM.

• Stryd is $120 a year for a complete, multi-platform  training environment – Form wants $180 for a small but growing number of pre-defined structured workouts
• Stryd has over 55,000 downloads of its Connect IQ data field and a total user base of at least double that, only 4,000 have downloaded the CIQ app for FORM – those stats give you some idea of the relative size of the user base.

My opinion is that FORM should have created an open infrastructure that integrated seamlessly with swim workouts from the major swim/triathlon training platforms. Perhaps that integration would come at a cost and perhaps that cost could have also included access to workouts and plans created in the future by FORM. I could see the uniqueness of FORM justifying the current cost but would not be at all surprised if swimmers baulk at the cost…triathletes most likely will especially if they are paying training fees elsewhere.

More Info: FORM Goggles Review

FORM Swim Goggles Discount, Price & Availability

They are available at Amazon worldwide and direct from the manufacturer.

Get it here: FORM Goggles Direct & at Amazon