I lift four days a week and record every session as a strength activity on my Garmin. Connect keeps all of it, every set, reps and weight per exercise, and as far as I can tell it's accurate.
Then the same session comes round the following week and none of it comes back into the workout. To find out what I benched last Tuesday I'm getting my phone out mid-session and digging through history. Then again for the next exercise.
The gap is never dramatic either. It's whether last week's top set was 80 or 82.5, which is exactly what nobody remembers between sets.
The builder only runs one direction as far as I can see. You can prescribe sets, reps and a target weight and push that to the watch. Nothing fills in from your own history, so the target is a number you typed once, and three weeks later it's still that number unless you go and change it.
Two things that sound like the answer and aren't. Personal Records do track your best strength weight for the main movements, but that's your all-time best, not what you did last Tuesday, and last Tuesday is the number that decides today's load. And Reports, Strength Training, pick an exercise will chart reps and weight over time, which is genuinely useful, but it's a chart on a phone, not a number on my wrist between sets.
The closest thing to an answer I've seen suggested is putting the numbers in the step note, since the builder won't let you name a step yourself. From what I gather the note isn't on screen by default and you press to read it, which would at least beat the phone. Has anyone actually run a training block that way? I'd want to know whether reading a note mid-set is realistic before I rebuild all my workouts around it, and whether it even renders the same on every device.
I might be missing something obvious. I haven't opened every screen in Connect web and someone here probably knows a setting I've never touched.
So, how are you handling this?
What I'm after specifically is a workflow where last week's number is on the watch while you're standing at the rack, no phone. If you've got one that survived a real training block, I'd like to hear how it's built.
And if you're on a device where the weight does carry forward into the next session, tell me which one and which firmware. A couple of people have described that as something they used to have and lost, and I'd like to know whether that's real.
Noah
(Disclosure: I build a third-party strength app for Garmin watches — I don't work for Garmin. Asking because I've never solved this cleanly, not to sell anyone anything.)
