Hevy to Rack to Strava: The Hybrid-Athlete Data Pipeline

If you lift and you also run, ride, or row, your training data is almost certainly split across two worlds that don’t talk to each other. Your strength history lives in Hevy: years of sets, weights, and PRs, locked inside one app. Your endurance life lives on your Garmin and flows to Strava. Neither side sees the whole athlete. Your watch thinks you only run. Your lifting app thinks you only lift. And Strava, where your training actually gets seen, shows half of what you do.

One disclosure up front: I build Rack, so I’m obviously not neutral here. But the pipeline I’m about to describe is concrete and checkable, and I’ll be honest about who shouldn’t bother with it. The short version: import your full Hevy history into Rack in about 60 seconds, lift with Rack on your phone or your Garmin watch, and every workout lands on Strava automatically with the correct activity type. Three steps, and the two silos become one training log.

Step 1: Get your history out of Hevy

Your lifting history is the part most people assume they’ll lose when switching apps, and it’s the reason most people never switch. Hevy makes the export easy, to their credit. In the Hevy app, open Settings (the gear icon), tap Export Data, and choose Export as CSV. That file is your entire lifting history.

Then upload it at rackstrength.com/import. The import preview is instant and requires no account, so you can see exactly what comes across before committing to anything. The full migration takes about 60 seconds. Nothing is lost: exercises, sets, weights, and dates all come across. Rack also imports Strong, FitBod, and generic spreadsheets (.csv or .xlsx), so if your history is scattered across more than one app, you can consolidate all of it.

This matters more than it sounds. Your imported history isn’t a static archive sitting in a folder. It becomes the baseline for everything Rack computes: your PRs, your progression suggestions, your volume trends. You start with years of context instead of starting from zero.

Step 2: Lift with Rack

Rack works on an iPhone alone. You get the program builder, plate math, rest timers, and full history without any extra hardware. If that’s your setup, the pipeline still works end to end.

A Garmin watch is where it gets interesting for hybrid athletes. Rack’s watch app puts the session on your wrist: exercises, target sets and reps, last session’s weights. At the end of the workout, Rack writes a single standard FIT activity into Garmin Connect through the same import path Garmin’s partners use. That’s the load-bearing detail. Because it’s a real FIT activity arriving through the standard partner channel, Training Load, Body Battery, and readiness all behave normally. Garmin treats your deadlift session with the same seriousness as your tempo run. The mechanism is detailed at how Rack writes real Garmin activities.

Either way, phone alone or phone plus watch, the workout ends up in one place with full set-by-set detail, sitting on top of the history you imported in step 1.

Step 3: Strava, automatically

Finish the workout and you’re done. Rack posts the session to Stravawith the correct WeightTraining activity type: exercises, sets, PRs, and volume, zero extra taps. No screenshotting a summary, no manually creating an activity, no generic “Workout” entries that confuse your training log. Strava auto-upload is free for all Rack users, not a paid add-on.

There’s one detail here that took real engineering effort and that most people only appreciate after they’ve been burned: duplicates. If you already have Garmin syncing to Strava, a naive integration would post the workout twice, once from Garmin and once from the lifting app. Rack detects the existing Garmin activity on Strava and enriches it instead of creating a duplicate. Your followers see one clean entry with the full strength detail attached.

Why the pipeline matters if you’re a hybrid athlete

Each step is convenient on its own. Together they fix the actual problem: your training finally lives in one system. Your runs are recorded natively by Garmin. Your lifts are recorded by Rack. Both feed the same training load, so your watch finally knows about your deadlifts when it estimates recovery and readiness. Anyone who has done a heavy lower-body session the day before a long run knows those two things are not independent, and now your watch knows it too.

And because your full lifting history came across in step 1, including the imported Hevy years, your PRs and progression are computed against everything you’ve ever done, not just what you’ve logged since switching. Day one in Rack looks like year three.

The honest part: what Hevy does well, and who should stay

Hevy is a genuinely good lifting app. The logging UI is polished and fast, the exercise library is big, and the social feed is real: plenty of lifters keep each other accountable there. None of that is being disputed, and switching away from a tool that works for you purely on principle is a bad trade.

So here’s the dividing line. If you don’t own a Garmin, don’t use Strava, and you’re happy living in one app, stay on Hevy. The pipeline argument only wins if you actually live in the Garmin and Strava ecosystem, because the pipeline is the product. Rack’s case isn’t “better logging screen.” It’s that no single app covers history migration plus watch-native lifting plus Garmin training load plus Strava sharing, and if you’re a hybrid athlete, the gaps between those four things are where your training data has been quietly falling for years.

Try the pipeline

The whole thing takes a few minutes to set up: export from Hevy, upload at rackstrength.com/import, and connect Strava. If you train with a Garmin, Rack is on the Connect IQ store.

Questions about migrating your specific history or how the Strava enrichment behaves with your setup? Send me a message. I’m the dev, and I read everything.