Structured Workout Plans

SportTracks provides the ability to set various types of intensity targets to your planned workouts. You can create structured workouts with warmup and interval steps, and export planned workouts to your Garmin devices. This article explains the details and how to start using these features...

Intensity target types

In addition to creating a goal time or distance, you can choose from seven different types of targets when planning a workout. They are: Pace, Pace Zone, Heart rate, Heart rate Zone, Power, Power Zone, or cadence:

For each of these goals you can pick a single target, or a range or zone to stay within. If you’re going to send your workout to your watch, and depend on target-alert vibrations, it probably makes sense to use a range or zone:

Multi-step workouts

You also have the ability to define workouts with multiple steps, each with a duration goal and target intensity. This is great for interval workouts with active/recovery phases, or to include warmups and/or cooldowns. If you’re a coach planning workouts for a client, now you can include this in the actual workout plan — rather than relying on the client to read your notes.

For a single workout you can even mix and match goal types. For example, you could start with a five minute heart-rate based warmup and then perform repeating distance intervals based on pace or power goals. This is something you won't find in competing platforms.

To define steps for a workout, switch to the Steps tab and pick a step type:

Total workout time and distance will be calculated only from active steps. If you choose a Warmup, Rest, or Cooldown type the time will be excluded. After you define your steps you can also edit the total calculated time or distance.

Click the step menu to add a new step:

Continue to add steps for your workout.

If you’re doing interval repeats, you can select a group of steps to repeat. When you send the workout to your watch, you’ll be guided through each repeat.

Auto-calculated training load

Planned workouts will auto-calculate intensity and training load effort based on your step type, duration, target goals, number of repeats, and your zone thresholds for the sport. This means more accurate training load prediction for complex structured workouts, and less work for you to estimate intensity. Of course, you can always manually override the calculated intensity.

Garmin custom workout export

And finally… we’ve integrated all these features with an export function that allows you to send your planned workouts to your Garmin watch. See our Garmin Custom Workouts blog post for full details.

Enjoy!