A swim tech coaching course I finished on a plane
I took the SwimTech Coach (STC) Certification on Udemy during a flight. It promises data-driven swim coaching with wearables. It stays very basic and repeats itself, and I learned nothing new.
I finished the SwimTech Coach (STC) Certification on Udemy during one flight. That was easy. Udemy lists 1 hour 11 minutes in 9 sections and 31 lectures, but only 41 minutes of it is video. The rest is 25 short text articles, one practice test and a few assignments. I landed with nothing new in my notes.
Why I took it
The topic is exactly my world. The course promises to teach coaches how to use wearable technology, analyse swim data, prevent injuries with tech and design data-driven training programs. I build Vimo Swim, a small device that gives swimmers a tempo and a signal in the water. So I wanted to see how a course for coaches explains swim tech, and what it says a coach should do with the data.
What I got
The course stays at a very basic level. The same media and the same texts come back again and again, so a good part of the hour is repetition, not new material. The sections have the right names, from wearables to data analysis to injury prevention, but each one gets only 5 to 14 minutes. That is enough to name a topic, not to teach it.
What I missed most was anything you can apply on Monday. No real data from a real swimmer. No example of a stroke rate chart and what a coach should change after reading it. No set built around a tempo trainer with a reason behind it. For a course with "data-driven" in its headline, there was very little data.
This is my opinion as someone who builds swim tech and works with coaches, not as a certified coach. At the time of writing the course has a 4.7 rating from 10 ratings and 28 students, so other people liked it more than I did.
Who it is for
If you are completely new to swimming or to sports tech and want a short overview of the words, this course can be a start. It costs you about an hour. If you already work in the swim industry, as a coach, a club organiser or someone building products for swimmers, I would skip it. You will recognise almost everything.
Before you buy a course with "certification" in its name, check the total length and the length of each section on the course page. Forty minutes of video split across nine topics tells you how deep it can go.
What I take from it
The gap this course leaves is the same gap I see at the pool. Coaches hear a lot about wearables and data in general, but nobody shows them the one chart that matters and the one change it leads to. That is the part worth teaching, and it is the part I want Vimo Swim to make obvious without a course at all.
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