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Garmin watches are great for running, but are a bit tricky to work with when you’re trying to track strength training in the gym. (I have some tips here on how to make the most of that strange experience.) But an app called LiftTrack makes up for Garmin’s shortcomings, giving you the Garmin-based strength experience that maybe Garmin should have given you in the first place.
Workout creation makes more sense with LiftTrack
Credit: Beth Skwarecki
LiftTrack is an app (available for iOS and Android) that helps you to create workouts, schedule workouts, and view your history of workouts and lifts. If you’ve used an app like Hevy or Strong to track strength training, you’ll be familiar with the idea.
Create a workout in LiftTrack, and the experience is similar to those strength training apps: you’ll choose exercises, say how many sets and reps you plan to do, and arrange them into the order you’d like, supersetting pairs of them if you like.
In Garmin’s own app, the process is backwards: you arrange blocks of work and rest, assigning exercises to them afterward. You can’t change weight or reps from one set to another unless you break the exercise out of its little repeat loop and create a new block. It’s an interface that makes sense for HIIT but not so much for a traditional gym workout of squats and curls.
LiftTrack has some built-in strength programs (as does Garmin) and an AI routine builder (which Garmin does not). After creating a workout, you can sync it to your calendar for a given day, or set up a repeating schedule so that your bench press workout will appear every Monday.
Your Garmin watch will pick up on the routine
LiftTrack’s underlying features, like the ability to sync a workout to your calendar, are features Garmin has had all along. Garmin just doesn’t connect them to each other well. For example, there’s no simple way to tell Garmin that you want to bench every Monday. But Garmin does have a calendar that will automatically offer you a bench press workout if you set it up that way.
So to do the workout, you just show up to the gym, select Strength Training on your Garmin watch, and the day’s workout will pop up asking if you’re ready to start. As you go through the workout, your watch will record your reps and let you indicate the weight you used. Once the workout is finished, the data syncs back to LiftTrack.
LiftTrack lets you view your history and progress
Viewing a strength workout after the fact has never been super easy in the Garmin app. You can view today’s workout, yes, but you can’t easily get a big-picture view of things like how the weight you can squat has trended up over time.
LiftTrack, once again, provides what Garmin does not. I can see my strength training history on a calendar (without any runs or other workouts cluttering it up), view my most recent workouts, and see charts of my progress on each lift.
Based on that history, LiftTrack can then update your next workout, recommending that you go a little heavier if you were able to lift more than expected last week. In short, it’s everything that Garmin should have included in their strength training feature, but didn’t.
