Engearment

FORM Goggles Review

I’m a lifelong swimmer and am generally old school when it comes to swim tech.  I use the pace clock on the wall, write my workouts on a sticky note, and stick it on my pool buoy. When FORM Goggles came out, I admit, I was skeptical.  $200 for a pair of goggles?  I can barely hang on to a pair of goggles for a summer, much less a few years to justify the price.  Last November, I was swayed by their Black Friday deal (and generous trial period) and got a pair.  And to my surprise, I actually love them.

Features: FORM goggles are goggles that have a computer and display built in the lens.  It connects to a variety of of training platforms to sync workouts (I use Training Peaks and FORM will load my workouts from there and then post the finished workout back out).  The FORM app also has a wide variety of workouts and drill suggestions, based on your needs and preferences.  The goggles offer swim technique feedback in real time (called Head Coach) along with stroke count and a timer.  And for open water, the goggles have a compass bearing display in the lens to make sighting buoys a breeze.

Fit: They come with several nose bridge pieces and admittedly, it took far too long to figure out which nose piece worked for me.  After a few weeks of trial and error, I finally figured out what worked for me.  The computer piece is a bit bulky (it’s on the outside side of one of the lenses, and honestly, I feel a bit like a Borg).  It’s big enough where you feel the weight of the extra technology and I find that if I don’t tuck my head *just right* off the wall, the hardware will catch and cause my goggles to leak. 

Pool Use: If you want to use a 3^rd party app sync for your workout, this does require a bit of pre-planning.  The night before I swim, I go into the FORM app and review the synched workout and approve it.  I work in IT and I think that FORM has done a remarkable job taking written workouts from other sources and distilling it into their app and then into a form that will load seamlessly into the goggle lens display. Seriously. A LOT of development work went into this. Then, before I enter the pool, I turn on my goggles, then I sync my goggles to the FORM app to load my workout.  Once the workout is loaded on the goggles, then I navigate through the menu on the goggles to pick my workout and begin my swim.  This is honestly a bit more laborious than I’d prefer (remember, my previous system was a handwritten workout on a sticky note), but the payoff is having your workout display in your goggle lens. 

There are many features and metrics you can choose to display in your goggle lens.  I like to show a pace clock, strokes per minute, and one of the Head Coach form metrics.  The Head Coach feature is really pretty amazing as well, as it monitors your head movement relative to your body and makes recommendations to optimize your stroke.  I’m a swim coach and have been in the pool for 20+ years.  These goggles identified left/right form imbalances that no one else has been able to detect.  Cool stuff. The form metrics also gives me something to focus on during long swim sets, keeping things from getting boring. 

I also really like having the pace clock and stroke count visible as I swim because there’s nothing more motivating during a hard 100 free than having that clock count away in your eyeball. 

Open Water: This is the feature that really won me over. Normally I wouldn’t wear a $200 pair of goggles in a triathlon (too many bad things can happen to them), but in a recent race, I decided to give them a whirl. FORM offers an open water swim metric called Swim Straight, which, after a simple calibration, gives you a compass bearing in the lens display.  All you need to do is sight once to get the bearing of your turn buoy and then swim to that bearing. You only need to sight to avoid other swimmers or to see how close you are to the buoy. It’s an open-water racing game-changer. I also have my stroke per minute (as a relative gauge for effort/pace) and my total time in the lens display to help me judge how my swim is going in real time. I’ve raced twice in them and was really impressed with how effortless navigation is with FORM. 

Take-aways: FORM does require that you get the premium subscription to utilize a lot of the features (like synching to Training Peaks, Head Coach, OWS Swim Straight).  The cost is $8.25/month, which honestly, after investing a LOT of money (like 6x the cost of analog goggles), having a subscription to also access most of the technology is a bit irritating.  However, I do really love these features and I’ll probably get the subscription.  I’m not sure I can go back to my low-tech swim ways of sticky notes and wall pace clocks. 

I’ve been using these goggles for 9 months and have found them to be fairly fog free and have held up to my three times per week swim schedule (most other goggles don’t last this long). FORM does offer a 2 year warranty, which is pretty amazing and was one of the reasons why I gave them a shot.  Only time will tell if the ROI holds up on these goggles and how much use I can get from them.

Erin Trail