Garmin Workouts

Create workouts and workout schedules for Garmin devices using an Excel spreadsheet to define them.

What's the benefit? Why use this rather than Garmin Connect?

Garmin Connect allows you to build workouts and schedule them, however it's quite tedious to use it to build a long training programme, say the sort you would to train for a marathon. It's also not possible to take a programme that you've created and then reuse it to train for the next race.

The idea with this application is to allow the definition of workouts (using a simple text format) and a schedule which can then be transferred to a Garmin watch. This definition is created in Microsoft Excel, so the application simply translates the spreadsheet into a set of Garmin FIT files that can then be copied over to the watch.

The application produces a number of files in the output directory, with one FIT file per workout and another FIT file for the schedule. Copy all of these files to Garmin/NEWFILES on your watch. You can either do this by setting the output directory directly to this directory on the watch (on Windows only) or copying them (Windows or Mac). Modern Garmin watches don't appear as a mount on the Mac so you need to use something like Android File Transfer or MacDroid

NOTE: there is a Garmin limit to how many workouts can be loaded onto the watch, which I think is either 4 weeks or 20 workouts. If you have a schedule that's longer than this then the only workaround I've found is to re-upload the schedule every month as the app will not upload anything scheduled in the past, meaning you get the next 4 weeks loaded.

The app can also create an iCal file that you can load into a calendar application. This is handy for viewing a complete schedule.

Workouts are defined as a series of steps, where a step is either a period of time, a distance or "Open" which means that the step end when the lap button is pressed. For example 10 minutes or 400 metres. A step can also have a target such as a pace or a heart rate. Steps are written as text, for example:

Steps can also be strung together with a + character, repeated using *n and grouped using brackets, for example:

Steps can be marked with an intensity. This changes how the step is displayed on the watch but other than that has no impact. The intensity is a suffix on the step using a pipe character |.

For example: 1mi|Warmup + (400m@7:00-8:30/mi|Active + 200m@10:00-12:00/mi|Recovery) * 4 + 1mi|Cooldown

More examples can be found in ExampleWorkoutSchedule.xls

Valid values for the intensity are:

• Active
• Rest
• Warmup
• Cooldown
• Recovery

A pace is just the time, in minutes and seconds per distance unit, e.g. 9:00/mi is a 9 minute mile; 4:30/km is a 4:30 minute kilometre.

These are more useful and are used to set a target range for a workout with a minimum and maximum time per distance unit. During a workout the watch alerts you if you are too fast or too slow. Examples:

Paces can be given names in the Pace sheet of the workbook. This is optional but can be useful for two reasons:

1. less to type if you regularly use a term like "TEMPO" or "FAST" in your workouts
2. less to update if you want to change the pace for all workouts (e.g. you are getting faster through training and want to increase the pace on all workouts)

There are two ways to express this, either as beats per minute (bpm) or as a zone (Z1 - Z5). The HR zones are defined inside the watch based on measurements it has made. Examples:

These are similar to heart rate ranges where the units are watts (W) and the zones use a "PZ" prefix and a number between 1 and 7.

Examples:

The app expects the input workbook to have specific named sheets and specific column headers within these. Any additional sheets or columns are ignored.

The sport type case be specified as a value in the spreadsheet under the Sport heading. The values supported are: