Moving From Strong to a Garmin: What Actually Carries Over
Strong is a good lifting log. It just logs somewhere your Garmin cannot see, because Garmin only scores effort it has an activity file for. Here is exactly what is inside a Strong CSV export and which of its eleven columns survive the move, the one thing the file cannot tell anyone, what changes the first time the session runs on your wrist instead of your phone, and the two cases where staying on Strong is the better call.
You have a few years of lifting in Strong. Then you buy a Garmin, and the two halves of your training stop talking. Your runs and rides build a picture of your week. Your lifting sits in a different app and the watch never hears about it.
This is about what actually carries over when you move that history onto a Garmin, and what changes the first time you lift. I build Rack, so read the Rack parts as a pitch and check them on your own wrist. Everything I say about Strong comes from what Strong publishes.
The gap is not the log, it is the watch
Strong is a good lifting log. That was never the problem. The problem is that Garmin scores your week from activity files, and a workout logged on your phone does not write one.
Strong’s own site lists its integrations as Apple Health, a warm-up calculator, Siri Shortcuts, and third-party integrations. Garmin is not named among them. So the honest summary is that Strong does not advertise a Garmin path, and if you have found one it is not something they are selling you on.
The mechanism underneath is worth knowing because it explains every symptom. Garmin can only score effort it has a file for. A run writes an activity file, so it moves Training Load and drains Body Battery. A set you typed into a phone writes nothing, so the watch decides your hardest leg day never happened. I took that apart in does Garmin underrate strength training load.
Getting your history out
Strong exports your workouts as a CSV, which is more than a lot of apps do. Rack’s importer at rackstrength.com/import reads that file directly. It recognises the Strong format from the columns, shows you a parsed preview before you commit to anything, and it does this before you make an account. The export steps are on that page. Hevy exports, FitBod exports, and a plain spreadsheet with the right columns go through the same door.
The file has eleven columns: Date, Workout Name, Duration, Exercise Name, Set Order, Weight, Reps, Distance, Seconds, Notes, and Workout Number. I know the list exactly because Rack’s parser reads all of them.
What comes across: every workout with its name and date, every exercise in the order you did it, and every set with its weight, reps, and set order, plus seconds and distance for timed or loaded-carry work. Notes come too. Strong exports in pounds and Rack converts to whichever unit you have set.
One honest gap. Strong’s export has no set-type column, so every set arrives as a working set. Warm-ups and drop sets come across as ordinary sets because there is nothing in the file to tell them apart. If you lean on warm-up ramps, expect to see them counted.
A smaller thing worth knowing. Strong writes dates as a bare wall-clock time with no time zone attached. Rack reads them in your device’s zone, on purpose, because the file records when you trained where you trained and carries nothing else. Import from home and a 6pm session stays a 6pm session. Import from a hotel three zones over and it shifts, and no parser can do better with what the file contains.
Look at the preview before you trust it. That is what it is for.
What the import does not do is backfill Garmin Connect. Your old Strong sessions land in Rack and become the baseline for PRs, progression, and volume trends. They do not retroactively appear on your watch calendar or move a Training Load number from last March. Only sessions you log from here on become Garmin activities.
What changes the first time you lift
Rack is a Connect IQ app, which means 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 carries target reps, the prescribed weight, your effort target as RPE or RIR, and your own notes for that movement. You read your program between sets instead of a timer with a name on it.
You confirm the set. Every set ends on a screen where you adjust weight and reps and accept them. Nothing is inferred from your wrist moving. The weight increment comes from your phone settings, so a 1.25 kg step stays a 1.25 kg step. Timed work swaps the rep stepper for a duration, which matters for carries, planks, and holds.
The phone can stay in the locker. Watch and phone sync over Bluetooth while you train, but when the phone is away or dead the watch keeps going. It stores each completed set under its own key and keeps its own heart-rate series, then hands the 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 an exercise name is not text, it is a pair of numbers Garmin looks up on its own servers. That is why so many strength uploads render every set as the same wrong movement. Rack ships a generated table covering all 375 exercises in its catalog. When nothing in that chain has real evidence, it sends the unknown code on purpose so Connect offers you a “Choose an Exercise” link instead of a confident wrong name. Your sets, reps, and load land either way. The mechanism is 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. If you want that pipeline in detail, it is in Hevy to Rack to Strava.
Where Strong is still the better answer
Two honest cases. If you do not own a Garmin, none of this applies and Strong is a better lifting log than a watch app you cannot run. And if your Garmin is old 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 you plan a migration around it.
Price, plainly. Rack is $8.99 a month or $54.99 a year. The free tier keeps 90 days of history and 3 routines, and the watch app itself is free on the Connect IQ store, so you can run a full session and look at what lands in Connect before deciding anything.
The short version
Strong logs your lifting well. It just logs it somewhere your watch cannot see. If the reason you bought a Garmin was to have one honest picture of your training, the session has to happen where the watch is.
Questions about your export, or whether your specific watch can run it? Send me a message. I’m the dev, and I read everything.