Coros Just Added Strength Mode. Here's How It Compares to Garmin + Rack

For years the watch conversation among lifters was effectively a Garmin conversation. Coros owned the ultra-distance and trail-running crowd, the people who wanted a four-week battery and a featherweight case, and largely left strength training as an afterthought. That changed in 2026 when Coros rolled out a dedicated Strength Mode across its lineup.

If you lift and you’re weighing a Coros against a Garmin, the new mode reframes the question. So here is an honest breakdown of what Coros Strength Mode does, where it lands relative to Garmin’s native strength tracking, and how the Garmin-plus-Rack combination compares. One disclosure up front: Rack is a Garmin Connect IQ app. It does not run on Coros. This comparison is between Coros’s built-in mode and a Garmin watch running Rack.

What Coros Strength Mode actually does

Coros Strength Mode, as shipped, is a competent first-party logging experience built around the watch and the Coros app. You start a strength activity, the watch tracks duration and heart rate, and the accelerometer attempts automatic rep detection between sets. You can tag exercises and review the session afterward in the Coros app. For a feature in its first generation, it covers the basics cleanly.

The limitations are the ones you’d expect from any watch-native strength logger. Automatic rep detection is approximate and works best on classic barbell and dumbbell movements with a clear set-down between attempts. Editing and correcting a session happens after the fact in the app. And the data lives inside the Coros ecosystem, which is smaller and less integrated with third-party training tools than Garmin’s.

Specifics of Coros Strength Mode are evolving release to release, so treat the capability notes here as a snapshot rather than a permanent spec. Check Coros’s current documentation for the exact behavior on your firmware.

Where Garmin’s native mode lands

Garmin’s built-in Strength activity is older and broadly similar in shape: a timer, accelerometer-based rep counting, exercise tagging, and post-session editing in Garmin Connect. It shares the same fundamental constraints as Coros’s mode, approximate rep detection and manual cleanup, plus a memory cap that can silently stop logging long sessions. We covered that cap in detail in why your Garmin stops logging mid-squat-day.

On native modes alone, Coros and Garmin are close. Both are timer-plus-rough-rep-count loggers. Neither was scoped for programmed lifters running 5/3/1 or PHAT for 75 to 90 minutes. If native strength logging is your only criterion, the choice comes down to the rest of the watch: battery, weight, maps, and price.

What changes when you add Rack to a Garmin

The reason a Garmin pulls ahead for serious lifting isn’t the native mode. It’s that Garmin runs Connect IQ, and Connect IQ lets a purpose-built app like Rack do things neither native mode can.

A real workout, not a timer.Rack’s watch app holds your program on your wrist, the exercises, target sets, target reps, and last session’s weights, so the watch drives the session instead of passively timing it. You confirm the weight and reps you actually did rather than trusting accelerometer guesses.

A FIT activity written through the standard channel. At the end of the session Rack emits a single standard FIT activity into Garmin Connect, the same import path Wahoo, Suunto, and other partners use. Training Load, Body Battery, and readiness all behave normally, with the rep counts and weights you actually lifted. The mechanism is detailed at how Rack writes real Garmin activities.

BLE set-by-set sync to a full phone app. The watch and the iPhone or Android companion stay in sync over Bluetooth as you train. The phone holds the deep history, PRs, plate math, and the program builder, while the watch stays a clean input device.

Per-exercise heart rate that survives the session. Because Rack writes a structured activity, your heart rate data is attributed to the work you did rather than flattened into a generic block.

Battery and weight: where Coros still wins

None of this erases the reasons people buy Coros in the first place. If you’re an ultra runner, a multi-day adventure athlete, or you simply hate charging things, Coros’s battery life and low weight are genuinely best in class, and the new Strength Mode means you no longer have to leave lifting completely untracked between your long efforts.

The honest framing is this: Coros Strength Mode closes the gap that used to make Coros a non-starter for hybrid athletes. It does not match a Garmin running a dedicated CIQ strength app, because that’s a different category of tool. If lifting is a side dish to a lot of endurance volume, Coros is now a reasonable single-watch answer. If lifting is a main course and you want it tracked with the same fidelity as your runs, a Garmin plus Rack is the stronger setup.

How to choose

• Endurance-first, lift occasionally: Coros, and use Strength Mode for the rough log. The battery and weight advantages outweigh the strength-tracking ceiling.
• Genuine hybrid, both matter:Garmin plus Rack. You keep Garmin’s endurance ecosystem and get FIT-native strength logging that Coros’s mode can’t match today.
• Lifting-first:Garmin plus Rack, without much debate. The native mode on either brand isn’t built for programmed training; the CIQ app is.

Rack is on the Connect IQ store. If you’re on a Coros and want the same kind of strength logging, the honest answer is that Garmin is the ecosystem that supports it right now, and I’d rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.

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