Planning Workouts on FitnessSyncer

You plan workouts on the FitnessSyncer Calendar, the same calendar that shows what you recorded. The workouts you write, the ones your coach plans with your permission, and the ones you import each sit on their day beside your recorded activities, and once you have done one, FitnessSyncer shows how it went against the plan.

Calendar, in the navigation at the top of every page, opens the calendar. On the calendar, Plan a workout plans one for today, and More options opens the planning pages: Saved workouts and plans, Import workouts, Generate a training plan, Export calendar, Season plan and Planning settings. Each of these is a page of its own, and most also have an icon in the calendar’s toolbar. Use Items to show on the calendar to choose whether planned workouts are shown, or to see only them.

• Planning a workout
• Building the steps
• Done, missed or skipped
• How it went against the plan
• Repeating a workout
• Saved workouts and plans
  • Can FitnessSyncer write a training plan for me?
  • Can I put ZWO or ERG files in my workout library?
  • Can coaches in one organization share saved workouts and plans?
• Planning a season toward a race
• Workout files
• Sending workouts to other services, and importing from them
  • Where are my planning settings?
• In the FitnessSyncer app
• Seeing your plan elsewhere
• With a coach

Planning a workout

Every day on the calendar has its own button, which plans a workout on that day. Plan a workout, or the icon in the calendar’s toolbar, plans one for today.

A workout has an activity type, a date, a name and notes, and then either steps or a planned time and distance. A new workout starts with three steps already in place: a warm-up and a cool-down that each last until you press the lap button, and 20 minutes of work between them. Most sessions have that shape, so changing the middle is usually quicker than starting from nothing. If you would rather plan a time or a distance, enter it and leave those three steps as they are; the workout is then planned as that time or distance.

When every step lasts a time, the steps add up to the workout’s planned time. A step that ends after a distance or when you press the lap button has no time of its own, so give such a workout its Planned minutes to say how long it takes. Wahoo takes a workout only when it knows how long it lasts, and the workout’s page says so when one was not sent there for that reason.

Building the steps

Under Steps, Step by step lists the steps one under another. For each step you choose:

• Its intensity: a warm-up, an active effort, a recovery or rest period, or a cool-down.
• How it ends: after a time, a distance, a number of calories or repetitions, or when you press the lap button.
• Its target, if it has one: heart rate, power, pace or cadence, as exact values, a percentage of your threshold, or a training zone.
• A note, which a watch or app that shows notes displays during the step.

Add a step places it before the cool-down, which is where new work usually goes. Add a repeat adds a set of intervals, with the number of times to repeat it and the steps inside it. The arrow buttons move a step up or down, and the × button deletes it.

Distances and paces are in miles or kilometers, according to the units in your Profile, and in yards or meters for a swim. Percentages and zones are worked out from your heart rate and power zones in your Profile, and from the threshold pace you set in Planning settings. Nothing is assumed until you set them: a percentage or zone target is then left out of what a service or file receives, and the comparison shows that step without a target.

Writing the steps instead

If you would rather type, As text shows the same workout written out, and you can switch between the two at any time without losing anything. Each step is a line of its own starting with a dash. A line without a dash, such as Warmup or Cooldown, names the part of the workout below it, and a line such as 5x starts a repeat. For example:

• Warmup
• - 10m 65% FTP
• 5x
• - 3m 105% FTP
• - 2m Z1 Power
• Cooldown
• - 10m Z1 Power

A step lasts a time (10m, 90s), a distance (400mtr, 2km, 1mi), until you press the lap button (lap), or a number of repetitions (12reps). In a step, m is minutes and mtr is meters. Its target can be a percentage of your threshold power or pace (65% FTP, 90% Pace) or of your maximum heart rate (80% HR), a zone (Z2 HR, Z3 Power), a value (250w, 140bpm, 85rpm) or a pace (4:30/km). A percentage with nothing after it is of your threshold power for a ride and of your threshold pace for anything else. A zone with no word after it, such as Z2, is a power zone on a ride and a heart rate zone otherwise. A percentage of your threshold heart rate, such as 95% LTHR, is kept as a note, because FitnessSyncer holds your maximum heart rate rather than your threshold.

A line such as 5x repeats the steps below it until the next blank line. Any word in a step that FitnessSyncer does not recognize is kept as the step’s note, so nothing you write is lost. To check how each line was read, switch to Step by step, where every line has become a step. Many training apps write workouts this way, so a workout copied from one of them can usually be pasted in as it is. To keep a word as a note whatever it looks like, put // and a space before it.

Strength workouts

For a strength workout, choose Strength as the activity type. When a step ends after a number of repetitions, Step by step also asks for the exercise and the weight to lift. Written as text, each line gives the exercise with its repetitions and weight, and can give the sets and the rest between them too:

• - Warmup Goblet Squat 15reps 12kg
• - 3x10 Back Squat 60kg rest 90s
• - 4x8 Bench Press 80kg rest 2m
• Superset 3x
• - Pull-up 8reps
• - Dumbbell Row 10reps 30kg
• - Rest 60s

3x10 means three sets of ten repetitions, and a weight can be in lb or kg. To alternate two exercises, a superset, put them under a line such as Superset 3x. FitnessSyncer knows the common lifts by name (squats, presses, deadlifts, rows, pull-ups, lunges, curls and more), and As text lists every one. Download the workout as a FIT file and copy it to a Garmin watch, and those arrive as the exercise itself, with its weight, so the watch shows what to lift. Any other exercise is kept as you wrote it and shown as the step’s note.

Done, missed or skipped

Each planned workout is matched with an activity of the same kind recorded on the same day, the one closest in duration, and says how it went:

• Planned until its day, while nothing has matched it yet.
• Completed when what you did was within 20 percent of the planned time, or the planned distance when the plan has no time. A workout planned with no time or distance is completed by any matching activity.
• Partly completed when you did something that matched but was further off than that. Its edge on the calendar is yellow within 50 percent and red beyond.
• Missed, shown as Not done on its day, when its day has passed with nothing that matches.
• Skipped when you chose Skip workout, with a reason if you gave one. Plan this workout again undoes it.

Skipping a workout also removes it from the services it was sent to, and undoing the skip sends it again.

On the calendar, a planned workout is outlined until it is done and filled in once it is, and its left edge is green, yellow or red for how close it came, as the legend beside Items to show explains. A workout that was done shows once, linking to the activity you recorded. A recording that arrives late changes the answer by itself. A planned workout is matched with what you did even when the calendar’s filter hides that activity, so narrowing the filter to one source or sport does not mark it missed.

How it went against the plan

Open a workout you have done, or the activity it matched, to compare the two step by step. For every step, and every repetition of a repeat, you see what was planned, what you did, and how much of the step you spent within its target. Across a set of intervals it also shows how far your pace or power faded from the first to the last, and how your heart rate drifted, and when you did the same workout before, how that time went.

When your device ran the workout and recorded a lap for each step, the laps are the steps. Otherwise the steps are laid end to end from the start of the recording, and the page says so. An activity with no detail to compare, such as a manual entry, is compared on its totals only.

On the activity’s page, each step is also shaded on the charts: green when it was within its target, orange when it was not, and gray when it had no target. Where a step’s target can be drawn, its range is a blue band across that step on the chart of what the target was set in, such as heart rate or power. When you did the same workout before, the page links to that activity and to Compare, which puts the two side by side.

In the FitnessSyncer app, open a workout you have done on the Calendar tab and tap “See how it went”. It shows the same comparison: how many steps met their target, the time and distance you recorded against the plan, each step with what was planned, what you recorded and its time in target, how your intervals faded or drifted, and how it went last time, with a button to open the activity you recorded.

Repeating a workout

To do the same workout every week, open it and choose Repeat this workout in the toolbar. Tick the days of the week it goes on and say for how many weeks, up to 16, and copies are added to the calendar from the day after it, or from today for a workout whose day has passed. For example, an easy run planned on a Tuesday, repeated on Tuesday and Thursday for 4 weeks, puts eight more easy runs on the calendar. Each copy is a workout of its own, so you can change, skip or delete one without touching the others.

Saved workouts and plans

Saved workouts and plans, under More options or the icon in the calendar’s toolbar, opens your library. It lists everything you have saved, which you can narrow to saved workouts or plans and search; choose one to open it. Until you save something, it says how to start. From there, Add to the calendar puts it on the day you pick, and the toolbar edits it or deletes it .

• A saved workout is one workout kept to use again. Choose Save to my library on a workout’s page. Editing it changes the saved copy, never a workout already on the calendar.
• A plan is several weeks of workouts kept together. Save weeks as a reusable plan, in the library, copies the workouts already on your calendar from a first day, for the number of weeks you choose. Nothing on the calendar changes. A plan can be renamed, and each workout in it edited or removed.

For example, a coach builds a four-week training block for one client by hand, then saves it from its first Monday for 4 weeks as Base block. For the next client, they open Base block, choose that client’s first day and Add to the calendar, and the same sixteen workouts appear on the same weekdays. A plan can also be moved onto the days of the week a client trains on: tick Monday, Wednesday and Saturday, and each week’s workouts move onto those days in order. Leave every day unticked to keep the plan’s own days.

If you keep workouts in another service that FitnessSyncer can read them from, the library offers to import them from there too.

Planning a season toward a race

With FitnessSyncer Pro, the Season plan icon in the calendar’s toolbar opens your season plan: the races you are training for, and the training phases that lead to them.

• A race has a date, a sport and a priority. An A race is the one your season peaks for, a B race gets a few easier days before it, and a C race has no easier days before it. Each race shows on its day on the calendar.
• A training phase (base, build, peak, taper, recovery or transition) covers a span of days, with what it is for and, if you choose, a weekly target load. Its name shows on the calendar on the first day of each week it covers.

When you add a race on the website and nothing in your season plan leads up to it yet, the season plan offers training phases counted back from race day: base, build, peak and a taper, or fewer of them when the race is close. Change their dates, give any of them a weekly target load, or untick the ones you do not want, then choose Save these training phases. If you skip them, the season plan keeps offering them for your next race while none of your training phases is under way or still to come. In our apps, add the training phases yourself.

Below them, the season plan goes week by week from the first day of the season to its last race or the end of its last training phase, whichever is later: the training phase, its weekly target load, the load of the workouts planned and of what you did, how many planned workouts were done and missed, and your fitness and freshness at the end of the week. A week that has not ended yet is projected from the workouts planned in it, so you can see how fresh you are on course to be on race day while there is still time to change the plan.

Planned load comes from each step’s target, placed in your heart rate or power zones, or by its share of your threshold pace, and scored the same way as the training load of what you did. Each workout is judged by the zones and threshold pace you had on its day, so changing your zones changes the weeks after the change and leaves the weeks before it as they were. The first zones you ever set count for the days before them too. A warm-up, recovery or cool-down without a target counts as easy time and rest counts as nothing. If you have not set your zones, the season plan says so, because heart rate targets are then placed in zones estimated from your age, and a step given in watts cannot be placed at all.

To end a saved plan on race day, open the plan from your library and use Add to the calendar so the plan ends on race day. Its first day is counted back from the race.

A coach you allow to plan your workouts can add races and training phases to your season plan too, and can change only the ones they added. You can change or delete what your coach added, unless your coach chose to keep an entry to themselves; that entry says only the coach who added it can change it. When your coach’s program scores training load, your season plan is projected with your coach’s settings.

Workout files

Import workouts, under More options or the icon in the calendar’s toolbar, brings workouts in three ways:

• A workout file: a FIT, ZWO, ERG, MRC, TCX, Garmin Connect workout or text file of at most 2 MB, added to your calendar. A TCX file that carries its own date is planned for that date.
• From a connected service: the workouts planned there for the past 7 days and the next 90 days are added to your calendar. From Xert, this is its workout of the day for today.
• Into your library: the workouts saved on a connected service are copied into your Saved workouts and plans, ready to put on any calendar you can plan on.

In the FitnessSyncer app, choose “More”, then “Import a workout”, or share a workout file to FitnessSyncer. To keep a workout file in your library rather than on a day, see Can I put ZWO or ERG files in my workout library?

Download this workout, on a workout’s page, gives you the workout in any of the formats FitnessSyncer can write, for a device or app that takes a file. TCX can be read but not written. Anything a format cannot hold is listed on the page rather than silently dropped. The usual ones:

• ZWO, ERG and MRC are for rides, and keep only the steps that last a time.
• ERG and MRC hold power only, so a step with no power target is written at 0 watts.
• ZWO and ERG hold one value per step, so a range is written as its middle, except in a warm-up or cool-down.
• FIT and the Garmin Connect workout write a range of zones as its lowest zone, and a Garmin Connect workout holds at most 100 steps.

Sending workouts to other services, and importing from them

Planning settings is where you set your threshold pace and choose which of the services you have connected as a source your planned workouts are sent to. Under Where your planned workouts are sent, each service has one row:

• A connected service has a switch. Turn it on or off, then select Save settings. Switching it on also sends it the workouts already planned from today on.
• A service whose connection does not allow FitnessSyncer to add workouts says Needs permission, with a button to connect it again and allow it.
• Under Services not connected yet, each service that can receive planned workouts has a button to connect it.

Send to my services now , on a workout’s page, sends that one again. To bring in workouts planned on another service, use Import workouts, which lists the services you can import from.

In the FitnessSyncer app

The FitnessSyncer app has a Calendar tab: a week at a time, with your planned workouts and what you recorded, which you can narrow to one or the other. The filter beside them leaves out kinds of recorded data, so a week of glucose or oxygen readings does not bury your workouts. It is kept on that phone or tablet, and it also applies when a coach looks at a client’s calendar. On a tablet or an iPad with room for it, a Week and Month switch shows the whole month instead, each week shaded by its season plan phase; tap a day to open its week, and the app remembers which you chose on that device. Plan a workout plans one, and you can edit, skip and delete your own workouts, skip the ones your coach planned, and build their steps the same way as on the website. More opens:

• Generate a training plan, as Can FitnessSyncer write a training plan for me? explains.
• Saved workouts and plans, including saving weeks as a reusable plan.
• Import a workout, from a file or from a connected service.
• Export calendar, with your calendar link to copy. On an iPhone, Add to Calendar subscribes to it in the Calendar app; on Android, Add to Google Calendar opens Google Calendar to add it.
• Season plan.
• Planning settings: your threshold pace, a row for each service as on the website (a switch, Connect again when it needs permission, or Connect), and This phone, a switch that puts your coming workouts on the phone itself:
  • On an iPhone with iOS 17 or later, in the Workout app on your iPhone and Apple Watch, with their steps.
  • On Android, in Google Health Connect as planned exercise sessions, for your watch and the apps that read training plans from there.

The Workout app and Health Connect take a target only as an exact value, such as 250 watts or 140 beats per minute, so a target given as a percentage or a zone is not shown there.

When you save a workout in the app and a service you send workouts to could not take it, or could not take all of it, the app tells you what was left out and where before the workout closes. After you plan a new workout, if notifications from FitnessSyncer are not on yet, the app offers once to turn them on.

On a morning with a workout planned, the app reminds you with a notification, if you allow notifications from FitnessSyncer. The Up next widget puts your next planned workout, or your week, on your home screen.

A coach looking at a client’s calendar in the app sees only Generate a training plan, Saved workouts and plans and Import a workout (while the client lets them plan) and Season plan, because exporting the calendar and Planning settings belong to the client.

Seeing your plan elsewhere

The calendar link the FitnessSyncer Calendar gives you for Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar can include your planned workouts, from 30 days back to 120 days ahead. On Export calendar, tick Planned workouts on its own for a calendar of your plan alone, or with the other kinds of data to see both. External Calendars says how to subscribe to it.

If you use an AI assistant through the FitnessSyncer MCP Server, it can list, plan and change your workouts, and tell you how one went against its plan.

With a coach

A coach can plan workouts on your calendar only if you allow it, on the Sharing tab of your account, and you can take that back at any time. A workout your coach planned says so. You can skip it, but only your coach can change or delete it while they coach you. Once the coaching ends, or your coach’s coaching subscription lapses, it is yours to change or delete. Each planned workout has its own conversation, so you and your coach can talk about it before or after you do it.

Your coach plans on the same calendar you see, from your page in their client list, with the same Add buttons, library and file import, and can also plan one workout for a group of clients at once. Where your plan is sent stays your choice: Planning settings are yours alone. Coaches will find how it works from their side in Get started as a coach.