After a little bit of delivery drama, my new Apple Watch Series 2 arrived just in time for the weekend, and so naturally, I headed out to test out the one thing I’ve been looking forward to since it was announced - swim tracking!

I had previously spotted a handful of people talking about swimming with their original watches, so I followed suit, but it was merely a matter of setting an “Other” workout and hoping you didn’t do too much damage to a watch that wasn’t designed for lengthy exposure to chlorine. Also, there was the occasional issue with the touchscreen surface interacting with the water when you didn’t intend it to.

For the most part, my watch survived its ordeal perfectly, but upgrading to the new official swim tracking system has been worth every penny and I’ve only been for one swim. Apple have included swimming as an actual workout option, and have managed to include measurements that can not only track your laps but can also magically know what stroke you are doing!

If nothing else, it is worth it to have the watch counting the lengths. It’s accurate, I checked a few times through my swim, and that’s something I’ve struggled with through my relatively short swimming career. Keeping track has always been difficult but now I can just swim without even thinking about it. You set the length of your pool so it can count the laps and calculate how far you’ve gone, and not only that, it tracks your 100 metre splits as well!

This is information that isn’t useful to me at the moment as I’m just trying to stick to a routine rather than concentrate on going as fast as possible, but I can see myself using this data in the future to improve speed and lap times.

The watch also has a lockdown setting when you start a swim workout so that you can’t get touchscreen interference, and it has a cute little speaker spit-out to make sure no water is sticking around where it’s not wanted.

If you had ever thought about indulging in the Apple Watch and wanted to know if it was useful for swimmers - then I can categorically state that IT IS NOW.