New to Strava?  Welcome!  Our mission is to help people live their best active life.

Our Getting Started with Strava series is designed to help you get the most of your Strava membership and Subscription. In this article, we'll talk about recording and uploading swimming activities to Strava.  

How to Record:

The Strava Mobile Phone Apps do not support swimming, but many swim and multi-sport devices are compatible with Strava. 

Visit this link for a list of some compatible devices

Additionally, the Strava app for Apple Watch can record swimming activities but without GPS (distance and pace will not be reflected on the activity.)  For Athletes using Android watches running the Wear OS3 App, the Strava Wear OS3 App can record outdoor, GPS based swims. It doesn't support indoor swimming.  

Insider Tips:

• GPS/Outdoor swimming:
  
  
  
  • It is important to note that water can impact the ability for your device to connect and record GPS because the water can cause physical interference. Even having your device a few inches under the water can impact the device’s ability to maintain a strong GPS connection. It's important to keep in mind where you position your recording device on your body matters.   We recommend ensuring that it's worn on the body in the way that it's either above or as close to the surface of the water most of the time and also making sure that your body is not between the your recording device and the line of sight to the sky.
  
  
  
  

• Indoor Swimming:
  
  
  
  • Unless you are recording with a device that includes paused time in the activity file when it is synced to Strava, you will only see elapsed time for your swim.
  
  
  • Some watches/devices can only record distance for swimming if autolaps are enabled since the distance is calculated using your pool length settings and autolaps. 
  
  
  • Make sure that the Pool length is set up correctly in your device settings so that way your distance will reflect accordingly when your activity syncs to Strava. 
  
  
  • If your device uses the number of laps to calculate and record your distance to your activity file make sure to double check that all autolap settings are correctly enabled, otherwise you can have issues with the file failing to sync to Strava as it will appear to have no recorded data after the starting time stamp. 
  
  
  
  

Questions?  Drop us a reply below or submit a support ticket, and we'll be happy to help you out.  

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