How does the heart rate feature work in the water when you exercise or swim laps?

Hi

Apple has not yet stated whether or not, for Apple Watch Series 2 models, the Workout app will monitor your heart rate during swimming workouts.

Apple has stated that the watch can count laps, track average lap pace and automatically detect your stroke type, which enables it to accurately measure your Active Calories burned during a swimming workout.

today did my first lap swimming exercise with watch2

kept the band tight around the wist and after the swim average heart rate was given. But this was AFTER the swim and I was very interested to see the heart rate during the work out. The watch face only gave the calories and that is (for me) only interesting AFTER the swim and not during the work out

I was happy it recorded heart rate and counted laps.

HOWEVER

As an avid swimmer doing serious work outs in the pool the watch is pretty useless: it is not able to take lap times and you can not use it for swimming sets like 20 x 100m departure every 1:45 or so while recording the true 100 m time for example by pressing one of the buttons (like with the Garmin Swim watch)

Also I was not able to set the interface to view the heart rate (calories burned is not that interesting when exercising...)

I hope third party software will be available soon that will address the deficiencies of the watch to make it useful For swim training

You can have the heart rate displayed while swimming. Open the watch app on your phone, touch workout, then workout view, then pool swim, then edit. You can choose up to five of the metrics to be displayed while you swim.