The Best Strength Training App for a Garmin Forerunner
Most lifting-app roundups are written for the Fenix or the Apple Watch. This one is only about the Forerunner: which models, from the 165 to the 970, can run a lifting app on the watch, what changes on a running watch built around five buttons, how many sets it holds with the phone in a locker, and the two cases where Garmin’s own strength activity is honestly enough.
Most Forerunner owners bought the watch for running. Then the program says two days a week in the gym, and the question becomes what to lift with. Search for it and you get roundups written for the Fenix, the Apple Watch, or no watch in particular. This one is only about the Forerunner: which models can run a proper lifting app, what changes on a watch built around five buttons, and when Garmin’s own strength activity is honestly enough.
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 Forerunner 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 currently offers the watch app to these Forerunners:
- Forerunner 970, 965, 955 and 570 (both sizes)
- Forerunner 265 and 265S
- Forerunner 255, 255S and the Music versions
- Forerunner 165 and 170, including Music
The older generation, the 945, 745 and 245, does 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
Forerunners ship with a native strength activity. Start it, lift, and the watch counts reps from wrist motion, and you press a button between sets. For a runner doing a short circuit of lunges, planks and band work, 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 enter by hand, on the watch or afterwards in Connect, if you bother at all. On long sessions it can also quietly stop recording, which I took apart in why your Garmin stops logging mid-squat-day. 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 Forerunner asks of a lifting app
A Forerunner is a running watch first. That shapes what a good lifting app on it looks like, and it is the part generic roundups skip.
It has to work on buttons alone. Not every Forerunner has a touchscreen, and on the ones that do, nobody wants to swipe a sweaty screen with chalk on their fingers. Rack is driven entirely from the physical buttons, and the layout was measured on a Forerunner 955:
- 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.
On the touchscreen models, taps and swipes work too, and each one can be turned off per screen from the watch menu. If your towel keeps skipping exercises, turn the swipe off and keep the buttons.
The phone should be allowed to stay in the bag. Runners are used to leaving the phone behind. 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. How many sets the watch holds while disconnected depends on how much memory the model has free: 200 on the 955, 965 and 970 class, 50 on the 265, and fewer on the smallest memory class. A normal gym session fits comfortably in all of them.
The session has to come back as a real activity.This is why you bought a Garmin. 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 mapping in the file rather than a column of generic sets. If you already use a Forerunner to balance running against the gym, that is the whole point, 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. It is the same rhythm as a run with laps.
When you should not bother
Two honest cases. If your gym work is fifteen minutes of accessory circuits around a running plan, the native strength activity is fine and one less app to learn. And if you own a 945, 745 or 245, 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 running 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.