Moving From Fitbod to a Garmin: What Your Export Actually Carries
Fitbod logs your lifting on the phone, and Garmin only scores effort it has an activity file for, so the watch never hears about leg day. Here is what is inside a Fitbod CSV export, which of its eleven columns survive the move and which do not, what changes the first time the session runs on your wrist, and the two cases where staying put is the better call.
You have months, maybe years, of lifting in Fitbod. Then you start running with a Garmin, and your week splits in two. The watch knows every run. It has no idea you squatted on Tuesday.
This post is about moving that history onto a Garmin setup: what is inside a Fitbod export, what survives the move, what does not, and what changes the first time you lift with the session running on your wrist. I build Rack, so read the Rack parts as a pitch and check them on your own watch. I am not going to tell you what Fitbod does or does not do with Garmin. Look in its settings for that. Everything below is about the file and about our side of it.
Why the watch never hears about your lifting
Garmin scores your training from activity files. A run writes one, so it moves Training Load and drains Body Battery. A set you log on your phone writes nothing the watch can read, so as far as Garmin is concerned your hardest leg day was a rest day. I took the mechanism apart in does Garmin underrate strength training load. The short version: if you want the watch to count your lifting, the lifting has to happen on the watch.
That is a forward-looking fix. Your old sessions are a separate problem, and the export is how you solve it.
What is inside a Fitbod export
Fitbod exports your workout history as a CSV from its settings screen (Export Workout Data). Rack’s importer at rackstrength.com/import reads that file directly, recognises it as Fitbod from the columns, and shows you a parsed preview before you commit to anything. You can do all of that before you make an account.
The file has eleven columns: Date, Exercise, Reps, Weight, Duration, Distance, Incline, Resistance, isWarmup, Note, and multiplier. Every row is one set. I know the list exactly because Rack’s parser reads it.
What comes across
Every session, on the right day. Fitbod gives sets from the same workout the same timestamp, so Rack groups them back into sessions. The timestamps in an export normally carry a UTC offset, which means a 7am session stays a 7am session wherever you run the import. That is better than some exports, which write a bare wall-clock time and leave the time zone to guesswork.
Every exercise, in the order you did it,with every set’s weight and reps.
Warm-ups stay warm-ups. Fitbod marks warm-up sets in their own column, and Rack keeps them as warm-up sets instead of counting them as working sets. Some exports have no way to tell the two apart. This one does.
Your units are read, not assumed. The weight column header says kg or lbs, and Rack converts from whichever one it finds into the unit you have set.
What does not come across
Four honest gaps, so none of them surprises you later.
Workout names.The export has no workout name column. Every imported session arrives titled “FitBod Workout.” The exercises and sets inside are yours, the label is generic.
Notes. The Note column is not imported today. If you wrote cues or pain notes into Fitbod, copy the ones you care about before you leave.
Time and distance. Through the web importer, history is stored as weight and reps. Timed holds, carries, and machine cardio come across as sets without their seconds or metres. Incline and resistance are not read at all.
Your Garmin calendar. The import does not backfill Garmin Connect. Your old Fitbod sessions land in Rack and become the baseline for PRs, progression, and volume trends. They will not appear on your watch calendar or move a Training Load number from last spring. Only sessions you lift from here on become Garmin activities.
Look at the preview before you trust any of it. That is what it is for.
What changes the first time you lift
Rack is a Connect IQ app, so the session runs on the watch rather than on your phone. Everything below follows from that.
Your program is on your wrist. The exercise screen shows target reps, the prescribed weight, your effort target as RPE or RIR, and your own notes for that movement. Between sets you read your program, not a timer with a name on it.
You confirm every set. Each set ends on a screen where you adjust weight and reps and accept them. Nothing is guessed from your wrist moving. The weight step comes from your phone settings, so a 1.25 kg step stays a 1.25 kg step.
The phone can stay in the locker. Watch and phone sync over Bluetooth while you train, but if the phone is away or dead the watch keeps going. It stores each completed set and its own heart-rate series, then hands the session over the next time they connect.
Garmin Connect gets real exercise names. In a FIT file an exercise is not text, it is a pair of numbers Garmin looks up on its own servers. That is why so many strength uploads show every set as the same wrong movement. Rack maps its catalog to those codes, and when it has no real match it sends the unknown code on purpose, so Connect lets you pick the exercise instead of showing a confident wrong one. The details are in why Garmin Connect doesn’t show the exercise you actually did.
The session becomes a real Garmin activity. Rack writes a standard FIT activity through the same partner channel every Garmin device uses. Training Load, Body Battery, and the rest of the ecosystem treat your lifting like any other activity, and it flows on to Strava from there. The whole chain is in Hevy to Rack to Strava, and it works the same when the history came from Fitbod.
When staying on Fitbod is the better call
Two honest cases. If you do not own a Garmin, none of this applies, and switching log apps buys you nothing. And if your Garmin is older or at the cheaper end of the lineup, it may not run Connect IQ apps at all. Rack lists 60+ supported models and the bottom of the range is not on it, so check yours before planning a move around it.
Price, plainly. Rack is $8.99 a month or $54.99 a year. The free tier shows 90 days of history and keeps 3 routines. That matters if you are bringing years of Fitbod sessions, because on the free tier you will only see the most recent 90 days of them. The watch app itself is free on the Connect IQ store, so you can lift a full session and see what lands in Connect before deciding anything.
The short version
Your Fitbod history is worth keeping, and the export carries the parts that matter for progression: dates, exercises, weights, reps, and which sets were warm-ups. What it cannot do is make your watch count lifting that happened on your phone. That only changes when the session runs where the watch is.
Questions about your export, or whether your watch can run it? Send me a message. I’m the dev, and I read everything.