Looking for a LiftTrack Alternative? It Comes Down to Where the Workout Runs
LiftTrack builds your session on the phone, sends it through Garmin Connect, and you lift in front of Garmin’s native strength screen. Rack is a Connect IQ app, so the session runs inside Rack on the watch instead. That single difference decides what your program looks like mid-set, what happens when the phone is in a locker, and whether Garmin Connect shows the exercise you actually did. Here is the honest comparison, including the two cases where the native route is the better answer.
If you own a Garmin and you lift, you have probably found LiftTrack. It ranks first for almost every version of “log weights on a Garmin watch,” and it does the job it says it does. So this is not a post about whether LiftTrack works. It is a post about the one design decision that separates it from Rack, because that decision is what you are actually choosing between.
Disclosure before anything else: I build Rack. I am going to describe LiftTrack only from what LiftTrack publishes about itself, and everything I say about Rack is checkable in the app on your own wrist.
What LiftTrack does, in its own words
From the LiftTrack site: you “build custom workouts in seconds, sync to your Garmin watch, and track your progress.” The workout reaches the watch through Garmin Connect, you follow it on the watch, and results sync back to LiftTrack. The App Store listing is explicit about where the session runs: you track your gym workout using Garmin’s native strength workout feature. Pricing is freemium, three workouts on the free tier, then $7.99 a month or $49.99 a year.
That is a clean architecture. The phone is the builder, Garmin Connect is the delivery pipe, and the watch screen you lift in front of is the one Garmin shipped. If you like Garmin’s strength screen, there is very little to argue with here.
The actual fork in the road
Rack makes the opposite call. Rack is a Connect IQ app, so the session runs inside Rack on the watch, not inside Garmin’s native strength activity. Everything below follows from that one difference, and it is the whole reason to consider a LiftTrack alternative at all.
Garmin’s native strength activity is a good general-purpose logger and a limited purpose-built one. It counts reps from the accelerometer, it wants you to fix things afterwards in Connect, and on long sessions it can quietly stop recording, which I took apart in why your Garmin stops logging mid-squat-day. None of that is LiftTrack’s doing. It is the ceiling of the screen their workouts run on.
What changes when the app runs on the watch
The program is on your wrist, not just the set list.Rack’s exercise screen carries the target reps, the prescribed weight, your effort target as RPE or RIR, and your own notes for that movement. You are reading your program, not a generic timer with a name attached.
You confirm the set, the watch does not guess it. Every set ends on a confirm screen with weight and reps you adjust and accept. The weight increment comes from your phone settings, so a 1.25 kg step stays a 1.25 kg step. Time-tracked work swaps the rep stepper for a duration, which matters if your program has carries, planks, or holds.
The phone stays out of the gym. Watch and phone stay in sync over Bluetooth while you train, but when the phone is in a locker or dead, Rack keeps going. The watch stores each completed set under its own key and keeps its own heart-rate series, then hands the whole session over on the next connect. Offline is a normal session, not a degraded one.
Garmin Connect gets the real exercise names.In a FIT file the exercise name is not text, it is a pair of numbers Garmin looks up on its own servers, which is why so many strength uploads render as “Burpee” for every set. Rack ships a generated table covering all 375 exercises in its catalog, plus a keyword and muscle-group chain for custom movements. When nothing in that chain has real evidence, Rack sends the unknown code on purpose, so Connect gives you a “Choose an Exercise” link instead of a confident wrong name. Your sets, reps, and load still land. The mechanism is in why Garmin Connect doesn’t show the exercise you did.
The session lands as a real Garmin activity. Rack writes a standard FIT activity through the same import channel every Garmin partner device uses, so 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.
Where LiftTrack’s approach is the better answer
Two honest cases. If your lifting is light programming around a lot of running, the native screen is one less thing to learn and Garmin’s rep counter is fine for a rough log. And if you have a Garmin that cannot run Connect IQ apps, the native route is the only route. Rack lists 60+ supported models, but the older and cheaper end of the lineup is not on it.
On price, Rack is the more expensive of the two: $8.99 a month or $54.99a year against LiftTrack’s $7.99 and $49.99. Rack’s free tier is 90 days of history and 3 routines, and the watch app itself is free from the Connect IQ store, so you can run a full session before deciding anything.
Moving your history over
Rack’s importer at rackstrength.com/import takes Hevy exports, Strong exports, or any spreadsheet with the right columns, and it previews the parse before you make an account. If you can get your training out as a CSV, it comes across.
Rack is on the Connect IQ store. If LiftTrack is already giving you what you need, keep it. The reason to switch is narrow and specific: you want the session driven by an app built for lifting rather than by Garmin’s general strength screen.
Questions about your specific watch or training setup? Send me a message. I’m the dev, and I read everything.