Garmin Coach strength training plan not showing animations on watch

What do you mean by "animations turned on and they do show up if I create a workout and send it to the watch"?

As far I know, when I create Strength, Pilates or Yoga workout from scratch, I am not able to have it with animation.

Unless I pick one of those with animations, which Garmin has prepared, and edit it.

Speaking of Garmin Coach. At this moment I am following Training plan for 10k run with supplemental Strength

And each exercise has this tiny icon next to its name, which tells me there will be animation. And there is one.

As far I know (again) those workouts are actually "generated" on the watch not sent from the cloud. Could you be more specific what is wrong on your side?

What I mean is that I have the "workout videos" switch activated for under strength settings and I've tested that they work for manually created exercises. Here's an example of a workout that has a Dumbbell Bench Press that was created by Garmin Coach:

Compare this to a workout I created that has the same exercise:

The icon is there and the animation plays.

It sounds like it's working as expected for you. Is your watch a 955 and what firmware are you on?

OK. This video icon means that workout can play animations / videos.

I am still not sure if I understand correctly how you were able to create workout with animations and the manually upload it to your watch. And this is irrelevant to my watch FW which is 22.24, because what I observe is constant since months.

On the Watch under Strength settings this option

 only allow to play videos / animations if they are "coded" inside workout.

The only difference between workout capable to play animations is one field value, which you can see eg with this page:

fit File Viewer 

And I have said that with neither Garmin Connect Web nor Mobile I am able to create from scratch such workouts which would show those animations. But I can edit existing workouts with animation and change exercises.

Or I can use my tiny java program to add that missing field value and have animations :-)

This is why I am a bit confused when you say that self created Garmin Coach workouts do not have videos / animations but your manually created has. For me this is quite opposite.

If by luck you are on Windows can you connect your watch to computer and navigate to this folder

This PC\Forerunner 955 Solar\Internal Storage\GARMIN\Workouts

You should have all your uploaded workouts there. There should be also another subfolder called Guided.

On the webpage I have mentioned earlier you should be able to view those files.

In the first section of workout message you should see something like this:

 if there is no animation field "enabler" or

something like this if videos will be "available"

Do you see difference? How it is in your case?

Thanks for the explanation. It looks like the workout with a video on my watch was perhaps included in a previous firmware update and not manually created. However, it does show that the exercise in the Garmin Coach plan would normally have an animation but does not.

I'll take a look at the .fit file to see if there's an extra field.

After more testing I found that under "Garmin Coach/Gain Strength" only the "Get Fit" plan provide me animations. Neither "Increase Max Strength" nor "Build Muscle Mass" do.

Basically, what I'm seeing is that Garmin Coach provided plans may or may not show animated videos even if video is supported for the particular exercise.

Then i suggest to contact Support and let them know. It is definitely bug, as those strength workouts i use to supplement running plan have animations. You can see this in me previous post.

I though your plan was 10K prep with strength. Can you pleas provide the steps you used to create your plan and I'll test it on my watch.

Sure, nothing special.

In the GC Web or Mobile app in the Training & Planning I have added few races / events.

One of those is 10k race scheduled for late May. It doesn't matter if you look for it in the Garmin database or create your own one. During creation program should ask you if this your Primary, Supporting or No Priority event. I always specify some Goal Time.

If you miss that for some reason, you can edit this after clicking tiny cog wheel in the top right corner

  <-- this is my Supporting run, created myself.

After that you should see your Race / Event in the same Training & Planning section under Garmin Coach Plans. It should be also visible in Calendar.

When you open that Garmin Coach Plans in the bottom left corner there should be panel with Preferences.

  When you edit it you should have option to declare if you want Strength Workouts and if you want to go to Gym or just use your Bodyweight as resistance.

Then in Garmin Coach glance on the watch on some days you will have two workouts scheduled for a day.

  Today is Friday hence I have rest day ;-)

Interesting fact. Strength workouts are always scheduled after run, except one category called Pre-Run Activation

  This one is always before Run and intended as structured Warm-up. And is linked to Run workout. This is another thing we are not able to create ourselves in Workouts menu in GC. I mean we can create such workout manually (but by default without animations, unless edit one as mentioned earlier) but cannot link this to Run. Not big deal, just observation of another inconsistency of Garmin.

Hope that helps you

And two more things.

1. You cannot have two training plans active at the same time.

2. You can do Bike equivalent for your Base runs. Not for Tempo, Sprint or Long runs. Just Base. In my case it will setup Power as workout target.

Enjoy and Beat your PB next time.

Thank you for that helpful walk-through. I was able to create a duplicate setup and the videos work. I think this means that this is an issue with creating strength workouts using Garmin Coach. Only the "Get Fit" option seems to provide videos. Hopefully this will be fixed in the future.

Good to hear. I do not want to interfere with my current running plan, but after my 10k in May I might come back to this topic and check what you observe.

In the meantime I suggest you contact Garmin Support and provide them this information. Posts here are not necessary monitored by Garmin Staff and might not bring improvements. I am quite convinced that Garmin wanted to have videos / animations for their plans as this is feature which boost sales.