The Best Strength Training App for a Garmin Fenix

A Fenix is the watch people buy when they want one device for everything: trail runs, long rides, hikes, and the gym. Search for the best strength training app for it and you get shop listings and roundups about running plans. Nobody answers the lifting question for the Fenix specifically. So here it is: which Fenix models can run a lifting app on the watch, what the native strength activity does and does not do, and when you honestly do not need anything else.

Disclosure: I build Rack, which is one of the options. Everything I say about Rack below is checkable on your own wrist, and I describe other apps only from what they publish.

Step one: which Fenix do you have?

A lifting app that runs on the watch is a Connect IQ app, and Garmin decides per model which Connect IQ apps a watch will install. For Rack, the Connect IQ store offers the watch app to these Fenix models:

• Fenix 9 and Fenix 9 Pro, including Solar, every size
• Fenix 8, AMOLED and Solar, 43, 47 and 51 mm, plus the Fenix 8 Pro
• Fenix E
• Fenix 7, 7S and 7X, including the Pro versions
• Fenix 6 Pro, 6S Pro and 6X Pro

The tactix and quatix editions of those generations ride on the same builds, and so do the Epix Gen 2, Epix Pro, Enduro 2 and Enduro 3. One honest note on the Fenix 6 Pro: it was added in August and has been tested in the simulator, not yet on a real wrist. If you own one, I would like to hear how it goes.

The plain Fenix 6 without Pro, and the whole Fenix 5 line, do not get the watch app. On those you can still log every workout from the phone and the session still lands in Garmin Connect, you just do not drive it from your wrist. If you are not sure which model you have, the compatibility checker takes the name printed on the back.

What Garmin gives you out of the box

Every Fenix ships with a native strength activity. Start it, lift, and the watch counts reps from wrist motion while you press a button between sets. Newer models add built-in strength workouts you can follow. For a short circuit after a run, that is often all you need, and it costs nothing.

The limits show up when the gym becomes a real program. The native activity does not know what you planned to do, it guesses what you did, and the weight is something you type in by hand, on the watch or afterwards in Connect. Plenty of lifters stop typing it, and then the history is a column of sets with no load. I took that apart in Garmin strength training not saving your weights. Apps like LiftTrack build the workout on your phone and send it to that same native screen, which fixes the planning half and keeps Garmin’s screen for the lifting half.

What a Fenix asks of a lifting app

A Fenix is built for long days far from a charger and a phone. A lifting app should respect that, and three things matter more than the feature list.

It has to work on buttons. Recent Fenix models have touchscreens, but a sweaty screen and chalky fingers do not mix, and the five buttons are the reason you picked a Fenix over a smartwatch. Rack is driven entirely from the physical buttons:

• START logs the set. Hold it to finish the workout.
• BACK undoes the last set. Hold it to get the option to discard the whole session, and you can switch that hold off.
• DOWN moves to the next exercise, UP to the previous one. Hold UP for the menu.

Touch input can be turned off per screen from the watch menu. If your sleeve keeps skipping exercises, turn it off and keep the buttons.

The phone should be allowed to stay in the locker. Rack keeps a session running on the watch when the phone drops out, stores each completed set, and hands everything over on the next connect. On the Fenix and Epix class the watch holds 200 completed sets while disconnected, which is more than any gym session I have seen. Smaller watches hold fewer, which is one quiet advantage of the big one on your wrist.

The session has to come back as a real activity.This is the reason to lift with the watch at all. Rack writes a standard FIT activity to Garmin Connect through the standard partner channel every Garmin partner device uses, so Training Load, Body Battery and your recovery numbers see the lifting the same way they see a run, with Rack’s exercise names in the file rather than a column of generic sets. If you train for trail races or ultras and lift twice a week, that is where the balance between the two gets decided, and it is what lifting and running in the same week is about.

What lifting on the watch actually looks like

You build the program on your phone. On the watch, each exercise screen shows the target reps, the prescribed weight, your effort target as RPE or RIR, and your own notes for that movement. Finish the set, press START, and a confirm screen shows weight and reps for you to adjust and accept. Timed work like planks and carries swaps the rep count for a duration.

Then the rest timer runs until the next set. Press, rest, press. And because you confirmed the weight on every set, your history carries the load you actually lifted, not a blank the watch hoped you would fill in later.

When you should not bother

Two honest cases. If your gym work is fifteen minutes of core and band work around a running block, the native strength activity is fine and one less app to learn. And if you own a plain Fenix 6 or anything older, Rack’s watch app will not install on it, so for Rack the phone is your logger.

Everyone else, the ones with a real program and a watch on the list above, will get more out of an app built for lifting than out of a multisport watch’s best guess.

Trying it costs nothing

The Rack watch app is free on the Connect IQ store, and the free tier keeps 90 days of history and 3 routines. Coming from Hevy or Strong? The importer at rackstrength.com/import takes your CSV export and shows you the parse before you make an account.

Rack is on the Connect IQ store.

Questions about your specific watch or training setup? Send me a message. I’m the dev, and I read everything.