Strength Training with a Garmin: In a Gym

After prepping my workout plan (as described “Strength Training with a Garmin: Before You Go to a Gym” article) and syncing it to my watch, I’m ready to go to a gym. In a gym I focus on exercising, therefore all the photos for this article I took at home.

Working Out with Garmin Venu 3 in Action

First things first: when choosing exercises, select “Workouts” (not “Strength”) from the list. Originally, I thought “My Workouts” would hold my custom workouts or Garmin workouts I specifically added. But for some reason, it includes exercises I haven’t even seen in Garmin Connect.

So, I navigate to “Strength” and choose my workout there. I.e., Workouts -> Strength -> <name of your workout>.

The watch displays the workout plan. Surprise, surprise! What was an “exercise” in Garmin Connect becomes a “set,” and “rounds” transform into the number of sets. Cool!

However, this only works well for identical sets. If your sets differ, the structure gets messy (as mentioned in the previous post).

To kick off the workout, I press the top button (on Venu 3, at least. Other models might vary). My first exercise is a time-based warm-up, so a timer starts with a blue progress arc. The rest timer uses the same visual.

Next comes a rep-based exercise, pull-ups in my case. This mode lets you swipe between multiple screens. You can even set up automatic scrolling, but I prefer manual control.

The first screen shows:

• Current set: 1 out of 3 (only sets within a “round” are counted)
• Auto-detected reps
• Current heart rate (HR)
• A green arc visualizing completed reps

The second screen displays:

• Total time
• Total burned calories
• Total reps

The third screen focuses on HR zones:

The fourth screen, super handy, shows current reps, set, HR, and the upcoming exercise after the current “round” (usually rest).

The fifth screen (yes, there are five!) previews a few upcoming exercises in the workout.

When I finish a set, I press the lower button to confirm. The watch displays the counted reps and weight (from the workout). I can edit them if needed and tap the green button (not sure of the official term for this screen element).

Then, the watch moves on to the next exercise, usually resting.

Resting Up

During rest periods, the watch offers a few screens as well (actually, resting is just a special type of a time based exercise ):

Timer:

Combined timer, sets, HR, and next exercise:

A preview of upcoming sets:
If you click on an exercise within a set, you can see the targeted muscle groups (both front and back of the body).

Pausing the Workout

The only way I found to pause the rest timer is by pressing the top button of my Venu 3. Technically, this is the “end workout” button, but it gives you the option to continue, essentially functioning as a pause.

Skipping an Exercice

Originally, I couldn’t figure out how to do this, but after reading the comment jamie posted, I looked into it further and discovered that, indeed, you can skip an exercise and come back to it later.

Here’s how to do it: Scroll down to the last screen (during an exercise or while the rest timer is running), tap the three dots (“…”) and select “skip group” from the menu. Similarly, you can tap “view skipped” to see the skipped exercises and select one to add it back into your workout plan.

Wrapping Up the Workout

Once I complete the workout (or need to stop early), I press the top button. This brings up options to delete the record, continue exercising (aka unpause), or complete and save it.

The watch then displays:

• Work time and rest time (admit it, most gym time is spent resting )
• Total sets, reps, and weight
• HR zone statistics
• Burned calories
• Workout benefits (based on HR zones, I believe, so I take it with a grain of salt)
• Body battery impact

And that’s it!

Limitations

I found the following limitations:

• You can’t check the full list of exercises in the program. No way to see what’s coming up later (beyond 3 next sets).
• You can’t view your reps/weight for the current exercise from a previous session. This was something I used often with GymRun and Galaxy Watch.
• You can’t add sets to an exercise.
• You can’t change the exercise order. Skipping a set means skipping it entirely. Update: you can.
• Basically, if you deviate from the workout plan, things get tricky. Actually, I do not know what to do in this case.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I’m impressed with how Garmin Venu 3 guides me through the workout, the visual design of the workout screens, and how the results integrate with the Garmin platform.
However, if you need even a bit more – you are very limited.