Peloton Rides Can Finally Sync to Your Garmin Account

Rejoice, Peloton/Garmin users—you no longer need to double log your Bike workouts, nor use third-party apps to bridge the gap between the two devices. The latest Peloton app update now lets you sync Peloton workouts to your Garmin. A previous update enabled syncing the opposite way, but now we have both.

How to enable syncing between Peloton and Garmin

To enable syncing, open up the Peloton app on your phone. Tap the person-looking icon in the bottom right (not your profile pic in the top left, which is different) and then tap the hamburger menu in the top right corner, and then Connected apps & devices. 

You’ll see Garmin Connect as an option under the list of apps. Tap this, and then you can set up your Garmin/Peloton connection. You’ll need to log in to your Garmin account, and then you have two options: 

• Turn on Auto-import activities if you want your Garmin activities to show up in your Peloton history. You can choose to only import some activity types if you don’t want them all.

• Turn on Send to Garmin Connect if you want your Peloton activities to show up in your Garmin history. Again, you can select activity types if you don’t want everything syncing. 

These are two separate toggles because you may not want everything synced both ways. For example, if I have Peloton sharing my rides to Strava, I don’t necessarily want to sync Peloton rides to Garmin to also be shared to Strava from there. 

Why the new syncing between Peloton and Garmin is an improvement

Previously, if you wanted Peloton rides logged on your Garmin, you probably did this one of two ways. The most straightforward way was to just wear your Garmin watch and also log a workout on the watch. This way you had two entries (one in each app). The main drawback of this is that you don’t have all of Peloton’s data: no power, cadence, output, and so on. Syncing the ride from Peloton to Garmin now means you get all that data and the name of the ride (“5 min Warm Up 60s” in my example here).

If you’ve been double logging, there’s one thing you should know about switching over: The workout logged by the Peloton won’t include heart rate data unless you have some kind of heart rate monitor paired to the Peloton device. Fortunately, you can probably use your Garmin for this, without starting a Garmin workout. Just tap the Broadcast heart rate item in your watch’s control panel in your Forerunner or other compatible watches. Here’s the instructions for setting this up on the Forerunner 570; for other models of Garmin watch, check your device manual to see whether you have this feature and where to access it.

The other common way was by using SyncMyWorkout, a paid service that syncs data between your Garmin and Peloton accounts. This service may have just become obsolete for many users, although it does seem to have a historical data import feature that the Peloton/Garmin integration does not.