“Performance is more than just times”.

At Trackaswim, we understand that there is a lot that goes into a race. It’s not just about physical preparation or mental readiness. There is so much more that needs to be understood. To help swimmers and coaches understand we have created a unique 5 Star rating system to help you identify weaknesses and stay focused on your goals. This feature is designed to give deeper insight into every race.  Now, lets go and dive straight into it!

After logging a race on Trackaswim, swimmers can rate their performance across five key components of their swim:

• Start

• Underwater

• Stroke

• Turn(s)

• Finish

Each element is scored out of 5 stars. Each element can also have a written description of what was good or bad. This creates a fast, intuitive overview of how the swimmer felt about their technical execution—not just the final time.

Times don’t always tell the full story.

A swimmer might beat their personal best but feel like the turn was sluggish. Or they might swim a slower time but execute a flawless finish. Very rarely is every aspect of the swim perfect so breaking it down will help understand and improve future swims.

The 5-star system allows swimmers to:

• Reflect on performance while it’s still fresh. Being honest and understanding what was good and bad is where progress starts.

• Pair subjective experience with hard data in Trackaswim. Having all of the information in 1 tool helps you be realistic about your swims.

• Recognize technical strengths and weaknesses over time. Its the only way to improve. Work with your coaches to review and adjust training programs if needed.

Its important that EVERY race is rated honestly, even the tough ones. Its always tempting to skip the rating of bad swims as we want to forget about them but, these swims will hold the biggest insights into your current techniques and progress as a swimmer.

Why it works: –

• Consistent rating creates a long term insight into your swimmer. You can only improve by knowing what is broken.
• Youll identify patterns that will affect your races. Knowing that your stats are not as sharp as they could be may help you focus more on the starting beep than worrying about the final sprint.
• It helps separating physical and mental blocks. Sometimes it can just be confidence thats needed and not technique and power. Not everything is rectified in the pool!

Giving the same reasons across multiple categories or for several races doesn’t help identify the problems. Take a moment to reflect on the swim and be honest, but critical of your performance.

Think about: –

• Was your start sluggish or powerful? Did you have your feet in the right place on the blocks? How was your reaction time to the starting beep?
• Did you maximise your distance and power underwater? Did you come up early? Your underwater work can make a massive difference.
• Did your stroke match the race correctly? Did you pace yourself or did you start off at too fast a pace and you couldn’t maintain it?
• Were your turns strong and powerful? Were you too close, or too far from the wall on your turns? Did you do your underwater work fully?
• Was your finish rushed, or did you nail the last stroke? Did you touch with a fully extended arm?

All of these, and many more can help generate a full action plan for your next race.

Using the rating system with your coach is a great way to get into a meaningful conversation about your training. If you have been honest about your race performances in the data you have given, your coach will be able to analyse this with you and determine some areas that you can work on, either in training or with your coach directly.

Questions you could explore with your coach: –

• My underwater work is consistently a low rating. why? If you have been able to upload video footage of your races too then you and your coach can review the races where your performances have been low. Having the ability to look back at videos will give your coach a huge insight into helping you improve.
• My turns are getting better, which drill should we continue doing? Your training programme will incorporate many drills so identifying which drills have helped will ensue you keep focussing hard when these drill come up.
• My starts are letting me down. – Not every club has the facilities to get swimmers doing racing dives on a regular basis. If your starts are a cause for concern then your coach may be able to get more sessions with blocks available.

Overall, using the full extent of Trackaswim’s capabilities will give you and your coach everything they need to identify issues and then put a plan in place to improve. The more you put into Trackaswim, the more it will give back!

Why You Should Use It Regularly

By taking 60 seconds to rate each race, you unlock:

• Deeper insights into technique.

• Better mental processing of races.

• Stronger performance trends over time.

• A more complete performance picture.

It’s like keeping a personal technical journal—with the added benefit of data visualisation to give you every insight you need to improve!

The unique 5-star race rating system from Trackaswim is more than just a feel-good feature. It’s a powerful, personal performance tracking tool—one that helps you reflect, improve, and connect your technique to your outcomes.

So next time you log a swim, take that extra minute to rate it. Your future self (and your coach) will thank you.