Fitness Data Syncing Hell: A Guide to Connecting Strava, Garmin, and Apple Health

You finish a brutal 45-minute incline workout on your treadmill. You save it. Then, you check your Apple Health rings—nothing. You check Strava—still waiting. You look at your Garmin watch, which has been patiently tracking your heart rate, and it has no idea you even worked out.

This is fitness data syncing hell. It’s one of the most frustrating experiences of modern fitness, turning a post-workout high into a session of technical troubleshooting.

The fitness tech market is incredibly fragmented. You might have an Apple Watch (dominating market share), a dedicated Garmin (for serious running data), and a smart treadmill like a NordicTrack (which uses iFit). The product page for that treadmill promised it would sync with Strava, Garmin, and Apple Health. So why is your data trapped in silos?

This guide will explain why this happens and provide a permanent, universal strategy to fix it.

The War of the “Walled Gardens”

The core problem isn’t a bug; it’s a business strategy. Apple, Google, and Garmin are in a battle for your health data. They each have their own ecosystem—Apple Health, Google Fit, and Garmin Connect—and they build “walled gardens” to keep you inside and competitors outside.

• Apple Health wants to be the ultimate dashboard for all your data, but it’s famously difficult for competitors (like Garmin) to write data to it.
• Garmin Connect is a fortress. It’s happy to pull in data from other sources, but it hates exporting its rich data (like Body Battery or Training Status) to rivals like Apple.
• Fitness Platforms (like iFit) are often “one-way streets.” They are happy to push a completed workout summary to Strava (because it’s good marketing), but they are not designed to receive data from your Garmin watch to control your workout.

This is why “official” syncs, like the iFit-to-Strava connection, can be problematic. They might be slow, only sync certain data fields (missing heart rate or incline data), or break entirely when one company updates its software.

You aren’t doing anything wrong. You’re just caught in the crossfire of a corporate data war.

The Solution: Stop Building Bridges, Start Building a Hub

Most people try to fix this by building individual bridges: one for iFit-to-Strava, another for Strava-to-Apple Health, another for Garmin-to-Strava. This is fragile and creates duplicates.

The solution is to change your model. You need a “Data Hub”—a single, neutral, third-party app whose only job is to be a universal translator.

Think of it this way: Your iFit workout is a package. Your Apple Health app is a mailbox. iFit doesn’t have the key to Apple’s mailbox. A “Hub App” is like a central post office: it accepts packages from everyone (iFit, Garmin, Wahoo, Polar) and delivers them to everyone (Strava, Apple Health, Dropbox, TrainingPeaks).

Your new workflow should look like this:
1. Data Sources: All your devices (Garmin watch, iFit treadmill, Wahoo bike) send their data to one place: your Hub App.
2. The Hub: The Hub App cleans, de-duplicates, and organizes the data.
3. Data Destinations: The Hub App then pushes the final, clean workout to all your “dashboard” apps (Strava, Apple Health, etc.) simultaneously.

How to Build Your Data Hub (A Practical Example)

The most popular and reliable hub apps for this are RunGap or HealthFit (primarily for iOS).

Let’s set up a hypothetical workflow using RunGap:

1. Authorize Sources: In RunGap, you connect your “Sources.” This means logging into iFit, Garmin Connect, Polar Flow, etc. You only have to do this once.
2. Authorize Destinations: You then connect your “Destinations”—Strava, Apple Health, etc.
3. The Workflow:
4. You complete your run on the NordicTrack T 7.5S. iFit saves the workout.
5. You open RunGap. It automatically sees the new iFit workout and imports it.
6. Because it’s also connected to Garmin, it might see a duplicate “indoor run” from your watch. RunGap is smart enough to merge them or let you choose the one with the most data (e.g., the iFit file with incline data, merged with the Garmin file’s heart rate data).
7. You press “Share.” RunGap then pushes this single, complete workout file to both Apple Health (so your rings close) and Strava (so you get kudos).

This process is manual (you have to open the app and press “sync”), but it is reliable. It puts you in control and ensures that all your data goes to all the right places, every time.

A Note on Privacy and Cost

This strategy requires two small investments:

1. Cost: These hub apps are not free. They typically require a small quarterly or annual subscription (e.g., RunGap is around $10-15 per year). This is a tiny price to pay for sanity and is a fraction of a single month’s iFit subscription.
2. Privacy: You are trusting this app with your health data. You must read their privacy policy. Reputable apps like RunGap and HealthFit process data on your device and are generally trusted by the athletic community, but it’s an essential step to verify.

Stop spending 10 minutes after every workout fighting with syncs. By investing a few dollars in a data hub, you solve the problem permanently and finally become the true owner of your own fitness data.