AppleWatch Ultra and heart rate while swimmimg

Wrist based optical heart rate devices are inherently a problem in water. I probably pick up 3/4th of the HR information when I rely solely on the Apple Watch. Your best best is to get a Polar OH1 that clips to your goggle strap on the temple and sync it with your watch. Even still the blue tooth signal can be intermittent due to the water. The gold standard will be to use that Polar OH1 in memory mode and download to the Polar Beat app. This probably not want you want to hear, but I have messed with this for years.

I talked with a Senior Apple support advisor, and told to strap the Apple Watch Ultra two finger widths above the wrist bone. I did this for swim workouts and the heart rate is now very accurate.

Hi vdefranco,

We appreciate you reaching out to us. We understand that you are experiencing inaccurate heart rate reading when swimming with your Apple Watch Ultra.

We’d like to gather additional details that may help us be in a better position to assist you.

Have had the chance to try the steps under the "Get better results" in the article below?

Swim with your Apple Watch - Apple Support

If yes, we recommend that you try the steps in the article below.

Get the most accurate measurements using your Apple Watch – Apple Support

If the behavior persists, reach out to Apple directly using: Apple Support

Take care!

Hi Vdefranco

im finding a similar issue and I have a feeling it’s nothing to do with swimming. I’m a runner and I’m getting very similar results for heart rate not reading at all times. Workout while walking is perfectly fine (so it’s like a software bug). I’m currently trialing something. Before your next swim can you set your heart rate zone in workout app as manual not auto and also crank up the zone 5 to something like 220. I did that on a run and they seemed to fix it but I haven’t run enough to say it’s a workaround

With my swimming workouts my Apple Watch has had problems measuring the first 5 to 10 minutes of a workout. After that it seemed to always dial itself in somehow and would start recording accurate HR readings (well, not sure if they are accurate but they would start to make sense and correspond with my exercise effort).

This has been consistently the case with my series 5 watch which I’ve used a lot for swimming. Today I swam with my new Ultra for the first time and lo and behold it showed a very similar pattern. In fact where the series 5 would not show measurement for the first minutes, the Ultra also showed measurements which were way too high (>160 bmp). After 10 minutes or so it suddenly dropped to ‘normal’ values for my particular exercise (120-130 bpm)

This behavior has led me to simply ignore the HR readings for the first 5 or 10 minutes.

I have experienced the same reoccurring issue with my Apple Watch Ultra while lap swimming. There are a number of heart rate drops during the first few minutes of my swim workout. After a few laps, I adjust the Ultra on my wrist, and it seems to consistently track my heart rate. My Garmin Epix 2 tracks my heart rate throughout the entire swim workout. I contacted Apple and told that water between sensors and skin may be an issue obtaining an accurate heart rate with the Ultra. They don’t offer a fix or any advice. If this is true, how can the Ultra calculate heart zones and recovery data accurately? The Ultra does many things well, such as accurate stroke type and lap count; however, the Garmin Epix 2 provides custom swim workout capability and accurate heart rate metrics. I was told by Apple support that engineers are collecting data to evaluate future software updates. updates.

vdefranco,

Based on the troubleshooting that has been completed up to this point, your best bet will be to Get Support directly from Apple from here on out. You can use the link here to get started.

Kind regards.

I looked at my HR history for this morning's swim w/my Ultra and I get decent data with backstroke compared with freestyle.

Just a datapoint.

i been always wearing that way (behind wrist bone) . Also area where Watch sits has minimal hair and my wrist is 8.27 inches so no issues from a wearable point of view