Bring Garmin, Apple Health & Strava into one app
If you've been training for a few years, your data is scattered. The marathon block lives on Garmin. The gym sessions you logged on your phone are in Apple Health. A few rides are only on Strava because that's where your friends are. Each app shows you a slice, and none of them shows the whole athlete. Pulling it together is less about file formats than most guides suggest — it's about understanding the two hubs that already connect everything.
The two hubs that already connect your devices
You probably don't need a tangle of point-to-point integrations. On modern phones, two platform services act as central hubs:
- Apple Health (iOS). Your Apple Watch and most third-party fitness apps write workouts here automatically. Any app you grant access can then read that full history — route, heart rate, splits and all.
- Health Connect (Android). The Android equivalent. Fitbit, Samsung Health, Strava, Whoop, Wear OS, and other compatible apps sync into it, and other apps read from the same place. (Garmin is a notable holdout — it doesn't sync cleanly into either hub, so move Garmin data with file exports instead, covered below.)
So the practical move is usually: make sure each of your devices syncs into the hub for your phone, then use an app that reads from that hub. You don't connect ten apps to each other — you connect them all to the one hub.
When files are still the right tool
Some history predates your current setup, or lives in a service that doesn't sync cleanly. That's what file exports are for. From Garmin Connect, Strava, Coros, Suunto, Polar Flow and most platforms you can export individual workouts — or a full archive — as GPX, TCX, or FIT files (sometimes bundled in a ZIP). A good importer reads all of these, so a one-time bulk move of your old training is straightforward even when live sync isn't available.
The part that quietly matters: de-duplication
Here's the catch nobody warns you about. The moment you pull from multiple sources, you risk counting the same workout twice — the ride your watch recorded and the copy Strava synced. Without de-duplication, your totals inflate, your trends lie, and any coaching built on that data is built on sand. The importer has to recognise a workout it has already seen and skip it. This is invisible when it works and maddening when it doesn't.
Why consolidating is worth the effort
A complete history isn't just tidy — it's what makes good coaching possible. As we covered in how AI fitness coaching works, a coach can only adapt to what it can see. Feed it half your training and its picture of your fitness, fatigue, and trends is half-right. Bring everything into one place and the advice you get is grounded in what you actually did.
How Gritty handles it
Gritty Fitness is built around this exact problem. It reads your history from Apple Health on iOS and Health Connect on Android — covering Fitbit, Samsung, Strava, Whoop, and Wear OS — and accepts GPX, TCX, FIT, CSV, and ZIP files for everything else, including Garmin: export your activities from Garmin Connect and upload them. Every import runs through one preview screen with the route map, stats and heart-rate chart, gets de-duplicated against what's already there, and can be linked to a scheduled session so Grit reviews it in context.
The result is one coach looking at one complete history — instead of five apps each showing a sliver. That's the whole reason to consolidate: not neatness, but a plan that's built on all of your training, not part of it.
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