Becoming the Best Swimmer You Can Be With eo SwimBETTER

Triathlon has no shortage of gear, tech and gadgets. With three sports to train for, there will always be another product you feel you have to get, but there comes a point when you need to ask yourself, “Will this actually help me get better?” Every triathlete has a device or two that they bought in the hopes it would revolutionize their training, only to realize it really isn’t all that great. Every now and then, however, you stumble upon something that truly lives up to the hype. For me, that is the eo SwimBETTER handset — a swimming tool that will change your stroke for the better, no matter what level of swimmer you are.

Creating eo SwimBETTER

The eo SwimBETTER story started in Australia with the company’s founder, Jaimie Fuller. Fuller acquired the patent to a device that “sort of went around the hand that had a wire going up the arm under a sleeve to an external hard drive sitting strapped to your bicep.”

This device measured a swimmer’s hand path and movements in the water and saved it to the hard drive. Fuller says he knew this could be a big deal in the swimming world, but he had to find the right team to back it. He linked up with Kenneth Graham, who was then principal scientist for the New South Wales Institute of Sport, and former Adidas CFO Dean Hawkins, marking the start of eo SwimBETTER.

Graham introduced Fuller to Neil Baker, a former collegiate swimmer with a PhD in physics who also writes software and codes. For a company looking to develop a device that can track every move swimmers make, an elite swimmer with that kind of academic and professional resume is pretty much the perfect person to team up with for the project.

Fuller, Baker and the team got started on the handsets in 2020, and it didn’t take long to get a working model that they soon passed out to elite swimmers. Swimmers like Pan Zhanle of China, Australia’s Kyle Chalmers and American Paige Madden used the handsets in training leading up to the 2024 Paris Olympics, and they all left the Games with medals. (In addition to winning gold, Zhanle set the 100-metre freestyle world record in Paris, swimming 46.40).

While the first step was to work with the elite swimmers, Fuller says he always viewed triathlon as the key to making eo SwimBETTER a broader success.

“You will always find triathletes speaking to pure swimmers and asking for advice,” Fuller says. “We had to establish our credibility and validation with pure swimmers first.”

Fuller says they are seeing “unbelievable results” with triathletes who are “literally saving minutes” thanks to the eo handsets. And why?

“Triathletes’ technique is, 99 percent of the time, really, really shit,” Fuller says with a laugh.

That might sting to hear as a triathlete, but anyone in the sport knows it’s quite an accurate statement. So many new triathletes have no swimming background whatsoever, so it only makes sense that they will have poor technique. Now, with eo handsets, triathletes can see exactly what they’re doing wrong in the water and learn how to fix it.

Using the Sensors

I thought I was a good swimmer before using the eo handset. Not great, but solid. After one swim with eo SwimBETTER, I realized I’m actually not all that great. Sure, I’m clocking OK pace times, but one look at the eo data and I saw that my stroke was far from pretty. My high elbow is not so high, my left arm is way weaker than my right, I create significant drag in the glide phase of each stroke. In short, I’m a mess in the water.

This revelation bothered me for about five minutes, but the whole purpose of the handsets and the eo app and website (where you access all of your data) is to help you pinpoint every part of your stroke that needs tweaking. After locating areas that need improvement, the website’s AI data analysis system — which is called eo Intelligence, or eoi — will generate a report in less than 30 seconds, telling you how you can go about fixing those issues.

In addition to getting unlimited eoi reports, Fuller offers to talk all eo SwimBETTER users through their data hauls on video calls. I had a call with him after a week of swimming with the handset, and I found it very helpful to have him break down what all of the data and graphs meant.

Looking at the Data

The only negative I have experienced with the eo SwimBETTER system is the sheer amount of data that is thrown at you. When you first get the handsets and sign up in the system, you’ll receive a package that breaks down all of the different datasets and what they mean, but it can be tough to know which is the most important to pay attention to and how to analyze the data when it’s on your phone or computer screen.

That’s why the chat with Fuller is so helpful. The eoi reports are great, but everything became much clearer after he took me through several swims and pointed out the areas in which I need to improve and why a dip on a graph in one section is bad and a spike on another graph is good.

Fuller also acknowledged that there is a lot of data to comb through, so he pointed out the most important sections for triathletes: Stroke Rate and Power (SRP), Force Field and Consistency.

“Stroke Rate and Power is for balance,” he says. “Force Field is for direction. Consistency is for giving us an idea of what our hand’s path looks like.”

Let’s take a look at my data from two different swims. The first was my first day with the handsets, when I had no clue just how much I needed to fix.

Looking first at SRP, it’s clear that my left arm is significantly weaker than my right. In my first-ever eoi report, the system said a snorkel may come in handy to identify why there is an imbalance here and if it comes down to breathing patterns. The report also said to simply focus on putting the same effort and power into each stroke, which may seem obvious, but I never would have known of the discrepancy without the handset.

Next up is Force Field. The key numbers to focus on here are Propulsive, Downward and Hand Drag. Propulsive data is essentially your power reading. As shown here, that first swim had a propulsion rating of just under 45 percent. For distance swimmers, this is not great, as Fuller says the number triathletes should be shooting for is 70 to 75 percent.

When it comes to my hand drag, that 2.3 percent is also far from ideal. This datapoint refers to how much drag your hand creates when it first goes into the water at the top of your stroke. Many triathletes will be like me, as I consistently put my hand in the water at too weak of an angle, which causes it to tilt upward and cause drag in my glide phase. In a perfect world, that number would be at or close to zero percent.

Lastly in this section is my downward rating, which is at a very high 44.7 percent. Fuller says distance swimmers should aim to get that number between 17 and 22 percent. This number tracks how much you’re pulling down with each stroke rather than backward. The more downward force, the less propulsion. This is why the high elbow is so important, as it sets you up to pull more than you push down.

Finally, let’s look at Consistency. As shown above, you get three angles of your stroke. This shows all of my strokes from both arms for the 50-metre lap, but you can opt to look at only one arm and also individual strokes.

The big revelation with this section after my first swim was how deep my stroke was — especially with my left arm (which is another reason for my lower power in the left). This highlighted just how much I need to focus on a high elbow, which will fix the excessive downward motion (which is also illustrated in these charts).

Now let’s take a look at my fifth swim with the handsets (and my first after my one-on-one data analysis call with Fuller).

As shown in this screenshot, my left arm is still weaker than my right, but fixing this gap will take some time as I both focus on matching the power with my left and work on improving my breathing pattern to allow my left to pull just as hard.

The Force Field section is where the numbers really changed after just a few swims. Propulsive is up considerably from 45 percent to 52. My hand drag also dropped, getting very close to the zero percent every swimmer should be chasing. Finally, my time spent pushing downward dropped 16 points to 28.5 percent, which contributed to the overall propulsion.

I achieved these changes with a single tweak in my stroke. As mentioned earlier, I was putting my hand in the water at too weak of an angle, creating hand drag while also setting me up for a poor high elbow. Making this small change and starting my glide at a slightly sharper angle reduced the drag and made it so my hand was lower than my elbow in the water, which promoted better high elbow and a better pull overall.

Finally, looking at my consistency, you can see that I still have some work to do. Despite the better high elbow, my arms still dip too deep at times — especially when I get tired and sloppy — and my left arm (the orange lines) doesn’t deliver as straight of a stroke as my right. However, this is only five swims in with only one adjustment made, so there is definitely a lot of promise for future improvements.

The Cost

One thing some people may scoff at is the cost of the handsets. There are two versions available: the eo SwimBETTER15 and the eo SwimBETTER90. The first can record up to 15 minutes of swim time and retails for US$799. The second records up to 90 minutes and goes for US$999.

There is also a membership available for US$140 annually. A membership allows users to see all of their data and access their eoi reports. The handsets still work without a membership, but users will only be able to see SRP.

Fuller is quick to acknowledge that this is far from cheap (even if you opt to go without a membership), but he makes a valid point on that note.

“Triathletes will spend well over $1,000 on a power meter for their bike,” he says, pointing out that those devices only provide a single piece of data to users. It’s easy to say $1,000 is too much for a swimming tool, but when you consider the money spent on other gadgets and devices in the sport and how much info they give athletes compared to what the eo handsets offer, it’s really not that bad of a deal.

The Verdict

This is without a doubt the most game-changing piece of tech I’ve ever used in triathlon.

I have used power meters on the bike. I have used some of the best GPS watches available. I have tried goggles that show you your pace. Some of these gadgets were great, others not so much. None of them compare to the eo SwimBETTER handset and what they can do for you as a swimmer.

Triathletes are always looking for ways to improve. This is by no means a quick fix — you are going to have to work to make the appropriate changes in the pool — but the eo SwimBETTER is, in my opinion, the best way to, well, swim better.

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