Swim goggles are one of the essential pieces of swim gear you need to conquer the water. Here’s a detailed look at the best swim goggles for laps, open water, racing, and more.

Swimming is one of the best activities you can do for your health.

Whether we are talking about using it as a recovery tool, or its unparalleled cardiovascular and pulmonary benefits, you don’t need to be Michael Phelps to enjoy the perks of lap swimming.

And one of the essential tools when you hit the pool is a good set of swim goggles.

They keep water out of your eyes, help you see other swimmers and the wall, and also keep your eyes from getting all red and itchy from chloramines (which is a combo of chlorine and human… well… waster. Yuck.).

But which ones should you get?

Last time I checked Amazon, there were more swim goggles than I could count.

No worries—I got you covered. Hack my twenty years of competitive swimming experience to sift through the cloudy water and find the right goggles for you.

In this roundup of the best swimming goggles, we will look at the top choices for every kind of lap swimmer.

Whether you are a beginner, an experienced swimmer, or have designs on going to the Olympics, we got you covered.

Let’s get right to it.

FINIS Smart Goggles

🏊 Best smart swim goggles

Nowadays just about everything comes with some sort of tech onboard. Wearables, your refrigerator, and yes, now even your swim goggles!

While FINIS wasn’t the first to market with swim goggles that had a heads-up-display (HUD), with that honor going to the similarly excellent FORM Swim Goggles, I prefer these ones for a couple of reasons.

For starters, the heads-up-display isn’t in your face the whole time. A simple look to the left means you can quickly glance at your stats—time elapsed, splits, pace, etc—and then go back to focusing on swimming with great technique and hitting your flip-turns like they owe you money.

Additionally, as time goes on, and the goggles wear out, all you have to do is pop out the HUD and purchase a new set of swim goggles (around $35) instead of having to shell out another $200 for a whole brand new unit (as is the case with the FORM goggles, which has the HUD built into the frame of the goggles).

The HUD works with a FINIS swim app that is absolutely awesome, and is one of the most accurate swim trackers I’ve ever used in the pool.

It “gets” what you are doing, whether you are doing random laps of backstroke, or stopping at the wall, or counting your strokes. (The only thing it won’t do is get the smell of chlorine off your skin…)

As for the goggles themselves, they come in either smoke or blue and have almost all of the features you expect from a high-quality goggle, including silicone head straps and a silicone gasket around the lens that “sinks” into the skin on your face for a leak-free fit.

The price point is up there for a pair of swim goggles, but when you consider that the HUD is a one-off purchase, and that you have an almost endless number of metrics that you can use to keep yourself motivated at the pool, that $200 price tag all of a sudden doesn’t seem too terrible.

Swim Outlet carries both the full goggle set and replacement goggles, which vary from $21-35 depending on what kind of sales they are running.

Click here for up-to-date pricing on these bad boys.

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