Programming workouts into your Garmin device
If you are in a structured training program sometimes it’s easier to program your workout into your running watch. I have a Garmin 310XT. This is your basic Garmin device. It’s a bulked up version of the tried and true 205 and 305 series. It’s waterproof, has heart rate, has good GPS, good battery life and it just works for running without a lot of hassle.
Regardless of what Garmin device you have most will have the ability to use structured, pre-designed workouts. In this article I’m going to show you how to create and execute workouts.
Where do workouts live on your watch? The Garmin firmware on the watch is not the most intuitive or user friendly but it is functional once you get it figured out. On your watch there will be a mode button. When your watch is powered on, hit the mode button and you will get a menu. Select Training to get to the training sub-menu by using the arrow keys to select the option and hitting the enter button.
That’s the basic user flow. Mode to enter a menu. Arrow keys to highlight. Enter to select. If you want to go back up the menu structure, to back out so to speak, just keep hitting mode until you’re back to the main screen.
Once you have selected the training sub-menu you will see a ‘Workouts’ option. Select that and you will get two choices, interval and custom. Interval will let you enter a set of intervals on the fly, but I seldom use that feature. Custom workout is where you will find all the workouts that you have created.
In custom workouts it will list any workouts you have created and saved. Typically you will create the workouts on Garmin Connect – which is the website that Garmin stores all your results on when you sync. There is an option to create custom workouts on the watch itself but that will make you crazy trying to figure out which little buttons to push to get what you want.
It is much easier to create custom workouts on Garmin Connect and then send them to your watch. I’m going to walk you through how to do this and post a video of it. But let’s assume you have already created a workout.
To run your workout make your way through the menus like we just talked about training/workouts/custom workouts and you will see your created workout in the stored list. Select it with the arrow keys and hit enter. You will get a pop up on the watch with the default option of “Do Workout”. Select that.
Now you may think that you have told the watch that you want to do the workout. Yes, you have but, and this is the part that gets me all the time, you still have to tell the watch to start the workout. Hit your normal Start button on the watch and it will now walk you through the workout.
Now when you are doing a workout you can either have the watch automatically progress through the phases of the workout or program it to wait for you to start each phase. I usually just let the watch do it because the whole point of programming a workout is so that I don’t have to push buttons and I can focus on the workout.
Another important thing to remember is that when the watch finishes the workout, it’s done. It doesn’t care if you’re still out on the road, that workout is done as far as it’s concerned and it stops tracking.
Depending on what you have put as your target in a workout segment, for example pace or heart rate, the watch will now nag you to get you to stay in that zone. It will do this by buzzing and displaying some informative text like “Speed up” or “Slow Down” or “In Target Zone”. This sounds good in theory but many times when I’m deep in a workout I can’t read the text and it would be better to have some sort of simple icon like a plus sign and a minus sign, but nope, they don’t so you just have to get accustomed to where you are in relation to the workout and ignore most of the nagging.
You also want to set your target zones fairly wide if you’re using pace so the alarms aren’t so nervous. I usually do a plus or minus 10 seconds a mile buffer. For example if the target pace is 8 min/mile then set the low end at 7:50 and the top end at 8:10. This way the watch isn’t screaming at you all the time. In practice you can’t correct your pace that quickly and the watch can’t track it even if you could.
How do you program a workout on Garmin Connect?
At this point in the discussion I’m going to give you a link to a quick screen capture video I did on how to create these workouts in Garmin Connect because it’s easier to show you than to tell you.
In summary, it takes a little getting used to but when you have a structured workout to do it’s surprisingly simple to program it into your watch for guidance. It’s not perfect and there are nuances that you have to get used to, but it can be very helpful. I like it because it lets me focus on executing the workout instead of worrying about what I have to do when.
In some of these particularly challenging workouts my math skills and my ability to tell time get a bit funky. Having it pre-programmed into the watch keeps me from having to think about it.