This week we released Swimtraxx Recovery in Swimtraxx Hub. It is free for every swimmer and coach, on iPhone, Android and the web.
Training is only half the story. How you slept, how tired and sore you are and how you feel decide how well you absorb the next session. Swimtraxx Hub already records the training. Now it keeps track of the other half too.
What it is
Every morning you rate five things from 1 to 7: sleep quality, fatigue, stress, muscle soreness and mood. 1 is always the best, 7 the worst. It takes about 10 seconds. You also enter when you went to bed and when you got up.
Once a week you answer four questions about the past 7 days: injury, illness, pain or anything else that reduced your normal full health. A week without problems is a single tap, about 20 seconds otherwise.
Built on research with swimmers
Asking athletes how they feel is one of the best-tested tools in sports science. A systematic review of 56 studies across sports found that what athletes report themselves reflects their training load with more sensitivity and consistency than blood markers or heart rate (Saw, Main and Gastin, 2016).
Swimming has its own long record. From 1975 to 1986, Morgan and colleagues monitored 400 competitive swimmers, 200 women and 200 men, every two to four weeks through the season. Their mood got worse step by step as training went up, and returned to baseline when the load came down (Morgan et al., 1987).
The questions themselves come from research with elite swimmers: sleep quality, fatigue, stress and muscle soreness, each rated from 1 to 7 (Hooper et al., 1995). Swimtraxx Recovery asks those four, plus mood, every morning. The weekly questions about injury, illness and other health problems follow the OSTRC questionnaire used in sports medicine research (Clarsen et al., 2020).
Connected to your swims
This is what makes it different. Swimtraxx Hub already knows your training: every session recorded with Swimtraxx One, every planned workout, your Load Balance. My Recovery puts your morning answers next to that training load, over 4 or 12 weeks. A hard week shows up as training bars, and you see what it did to your sleep, fatigue and soreness right beside them.
Your sleep is drawn as one bar per night, from bedtime to wake-up. You see how long you slept and how regular your nights are.
Compared with your own usual range, not with anyone else
After 7 check-ins, every answer is compared with your own usual range. Anything outside it shows in amber, and your card says “Unusual for you” instead of “As usual”. There are no population averages, no ranking between swimmers, and no score that tells you what to do. Just your data, visualised.
Sleep from your ring or band
Wear a sleep tracker? On your phone, Swimtraxx Hub can read your bedtime, wake-up time and time asleep from Apple Health or Health Connect, so the check-in comes pre-filled. Reading only, never writing. It is off until you connect it in My Recovery settings, and you can switch it off there again. We read the sleep times only, never another app’s score.
No tracker? Enter your bedtime and wake-up time yourself. Everything else works the same.
For coaches
Your team page gets a Readiness tab: who checked in this morning, what is unusual for each swimmer today, their weekly health check and their training load. Amber means unusual for that swimmer, never a ranking.
You only see what a swimmer shares with you. Each swimmer sets this per team, Shared or Hidden. Hidden means hidden.
One number from the research: across sports, athletes whose team supported the self-reports filled in 84% of them. Athletes left on their own, 8% (Saw et al., 2015). So mention it at the pool.
Your data
Your answers are health data and we treat them that way. You turn My Recovery on yourself, you choose per team what your coaches see, and you can turn it off or delete your recovery data at any time. The details are in our privacy policy.
My Recovery is not a medical tool. It does not diagnose illness, injury or sleep disorders. If you are worried about your health, talk to a doctor.
Get started
Update Swimtraxx Hub, open the settings gear on the Home tab and turn on My Recovery. Your first check-in is tomorrow morning. Swimtraxx Hub now speaks 21 languages, so the questions read in yours.
100% Free. No subscription.
Get the app on the App Store or Google Play, or open Swimtraxx Hub on the web.
Sources: Hooper SL et al. (1995) Med Sci Sports Exerc 27:106-112. Saw AE, Main LC, Gastin PB (2016) Br J Sports Med 50:281-291. Morgan WP et al. (1987) Br J Sports Med 21:107-114. Saw AE, Main LC, Gastin PB (2015) J Sports Sci Med 14:732. Clarsen B et al. (2020) Br J Sports Med 54:390-396.
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