Garmin Strength Training Not Saving Your Weights? Here Is Why

You put 100 kg on the bar. You typed 100 into the watch after the set. Five sets later you open Garmin Connect and the squat says “Bodyweight.” Or the weight column is empty. Or half the sets kept the number and half did not.

If that is why you are here, you are not doing it wrong. It is one of the most repeated complaints on Garmin’s own forums, across Fenix, Forerunner and vivoactive threads, and it has been for years. Here is what is actually going on, what you can do about it inside Garmin’s native mode, and what changes when a lifting app writes the file instead.

Where the weight gets lost

Garmin’s native Strength activity does two jobs at once. It counts reps from wrist motion, and it tries to recognise which exercise you did. The weight you type is a third thing, attached to a set the watch has already guessed at.

That is where it breaks. When the watch labels your set as a movement it treats as bodyweight, the entered load does not survive. The classic report is a Fenix 7 owner who logged a barbell back squat with the weight entered, and Connect showed a Squat at “Bodyweight.” Garmin staff pointed the thread at a wider issue with exercise detection, and it was locked without a fix.

There are other ways to lose it too. Edits made in a rush between sets do not always stick. A Connect app release once stopped saving entered weights until the next version fixed it. And long sessions have their own problem, covered in why your Garmin stops logging mid-squat-day.

None of this means your watch is broken. It means the weight is the least protected field in a mode built around guessing.

What you can do in Garmin’s native mode

If you want to stay native, these are the habits Garmin users settle on:

• Check the set on the watch, not later. Look at the confirm screen after each set. If the weight reads zero or body, fix it there, while you still remember the number.
• Take a rest between exercises. Editing is easier on the watch when a rest period sits between sets rather than one long run of work.
• Correct it in Connect afterwards. Open the activity, go to the Exercises tab, and edit the rows. Tedious, but it is the only fix that always works.
• Use a Garmin Connect workout.Building the session in Connect first gives the watch the exercise names, so there is less for detection to get wrong. You still log the weight on Garmin’s screen.

Plenty of lifters stop there, and some forum regulars just leave the watch alone and fix everything on the phone at the end. That works. It also means the watch on your wrist never really knew what you lifted.

What changes when the app writes the file

Rack is a Connect IQ app, so the session runs inside Rack on the watch instead of inside Garmin’s Strength mode. The difference for your weights is simple: nothing guesses.

The weight is already there. Each set opens with a working weight your phone worked out from your history for that exercise, your last session and your best at that rep count. You are confirming a number, not typing one from scratch with chalk on your hands.

You confirm it, the watch does not infer it. Every set ends on a confirm screen with weight and reps. You adjust, you accept. There is no rep counter and no exercise detection sitting between your input and the log, so nothing can relabel a back squat as bodyweight. A weight you change by hand stays changed.

The phone writes the Garmin activity.When you finish, the Rack phone app builds the FIT file and sends it to Garmin Connect through the standard partner channel. Every set in that file carries its own reps and weight, plus the exercise code, so the Exercises tab in Connect shows what you logged. The watch’s own recording is thrown away on purpose, so you do not get a second, emptier copy of the same session.

No phone, no problem. If the phone is in a locker, the watch keeps each confirmed set and hands the whole session over on the next connect. The weights come across with it.

How to check any setup in one workout

Whatever you use, native mode, a Connect workout, or an app, the test is the same. Do one session with a barbell squat, a weighted pull-up or dip, and something unusual. Enter real loads. Then open the activity in Garmin Connect and read the Exercises tab row by row.

• Does every set show the weight you entered?
• Is the squat still a loaded squat, not bodyweight?
• Are the rep counts the ones you did, or estimates?

Weighted bodyweight movements are the sharpest test, because they are exactly where a system that guesses has to pick between your number and its label.

When native is fine

If you mostly do machines and dumbbells, you rarely check Connect, and you only care that the session counts toward training load, native Strength mode is fine. It costs nothing and it is already on the watch.

If the number on the bar is the point, if you are running a program and next week’s weight depends on this week’s, you want the weight to be something you confirmed, not something that survived a guess. That is the gap Rack was built for. Rack is on the Connect IQ store, and your existing history can come with you through the importer at rackstrength.com/import.

Still seeing a weight go missing, in Rack or anywhere else? Send me a message with the exercise and your watch model. I’m the dev, and I read everything.