Hevy vs Strong vs Fitbod for Garmin Users: What Each Export Carries
Feature tables compare Hevy, Strong, and Fitbod on price and charts. A Garmin owner needs a different comparison: which history is worth bringing, and where the next session runs. Here is what each CSV export carries onto a Garmin setup, side by side, what none of the three bring across, and when switching buys you nothing.
Search “Hevy vs Strong vs Fitbod” and you get feature tables: price, exercise library, charts, AI programming. All fair questions. None of them is the question a Garmin owner ends up asking six months in, which is why the watch thinks leg day was a rest day.
So this comparison is narrower. I build Rack, a Connect IQ strength app, and our importer reads all three exports. That means I can tell you exactly what each file carries onto a Garmin setup, because I can read the code that parses it. What I will not do is tell you what Hevy, Strong, or Fitbod do or do not do on a Garmin watch. Those apps change, and I cannot check them on your wrist. Look in their settings for that. Everything below is about the files and about our side of them.
The thing none of the three phone logs can fix
Garmin scores training from activity files. A run writes one, so it moves Training Load and Body Battery. A set you tap into a phone app writes nothing the watch reads. I took the mechanism apart in does Garmin underrate strength training load. The short version: whichever app you pick, if the session lives on the phone, the watch only sees what gets sent to it afterwards.
That makes the real comparison two questions. Which history is worth bringing with you, and where does the next session run.
Hevy vs Strong vs Fitbod: what each export carries
All three export a CSV. Rack’s web importer at rackstrength.com/import tells them apart by their column headers and shows a parsed preview before anything is saved. Here is what comes through, side by side.
- Workout names:Hevy yes. Strong yes. Fitbod no, every session arrives titled “FitBod Workout” because the export has no name column.
- Dates: all three. Hevy also gives an end time. Strong gives a duration, which Rack turns into one. Fitbod gives neither.
- Warm-ups kept apart from working sets: Hevy yes, and drop sets and failure sets keep their labels too. Fitbod yes, from its own warm-up column. Strong no, every set comes in as a working set.
- Notes: Hevy brings the workout description and each exercise note. Strong brings at most one note per session. Fitbod notes are not imported.
- Units: Hevy and Fitbod say kg or lbs in their column headers, so Rack reads it. The Strong file gives us nothing to read it from, so the preview starts on lbs and you switch it to kg if that is what you logged. Check this one. It is the easiest mistake in the whole move.
- Every exercise, in order, with weight and reps on every set: all three.
Hevy’s export is the richest of the three, and it has one trap of its own: it writes dates in your phone’s language. Rack reads month names in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Polish. If your phone runs another language and the preview comes back empty, that is the reason, and I want to hear about it.
What none of the three bring across
Same gaps for everyone, so nobody is surprised later.
RPE, time, and distance.Hevy’s RPE column gets read, and so do the time and distance columns in all three files. The web importer then stores history as weight and reps only. Planks, carries, and rower sessions arrive as sets without their seconds or metres.
Supersets. Hevy marks them. The imported history does not keep the pairing.
Your Garmin calendar.Imported sessions become the baseline for PRs, progression, and volume in Rack. They do not backfill Garmin Connect or move last spring’s Training Load. Only sessions you lift from here on become Garmin activities.
The preview also suggests routines, built from workouts you repeated under the same name. That is where the naming gap above bites: Hevy and Strong hand you your Push Day and your Pull Day, while every Fitbod session shares one name and folds into a single suggestion. You tick which routines to create.
Where the next session runs
This is the half that actually changes what your watch knows. Rack is a Connect IQ app, so the session runs on the watch rather than on your phone.
You confirm every set on the wrist. Each set ends on a screen where you adjust weight and reps and accept them. Nothing is guessed from your wrist moving.
The phone can stay in the locker. Watch and phone sync over Bluetooth while you train. If the phone is away, the watch stores each completed set with its own heart-rate reading for that set and hands them over when they reconnect.
Garmin Connect gets exercise names it can stand behind.In a FIT file an exercise is a pair of numbers, not text. Rack maps its catalog to those codes. When a name gives us nothing to match on, it sends Garmin’s unknown code on purpose, so Connect offers you a “Choose an Exercise” link instead of a confident wrong movement. More in why Garmin Connect doesn’t show the exercise you actually did.
The session becomes a Garmin activity. The Rack phone app builds a standard FIT file and sends it to Garmin Connect through the standard partner channel, the same kind of file every Garmin device writes. From there it counts like any other activity and can flow on to Strava. The full chain is in Hevy to Rack to Strava.
So which one should a Garmin owner use?
If you lift with the phone in your hand and do not care what the watch thinks, pick between Hevy, Strong, and Fitbod on their own merits. That is a real choice, and this post does not settle it.
If you want the watch to know you lifted, the logging app matters less than where the session runs. Keep your history, bring it over, and run the next session on the wrist. Of the three exports, Hevy carries the most and Fitbod the least, but all three bring the part progression needs: dates, exercises, weights, and reps.
Two honest cases where switching buys you nothing. If you do not own a Garmin, none of this applies. And if your Garmin cannot run Connect IQ apps, Rack cannot run on it either. Rack lists 60+ supported models and the bottom of the range is not on the list, so check yours first.
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 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.
Coming from one of the three and not sure what your file will do? Send me a message. I’m the dev, and I read everything.