Connecting your data

Connecting Strava

Strava is the one source you need. It carries your activity history — runs, rides, swims, walks and gym sessions — with duration, distance, elevation and heart rate, which is enough to build every training metric on the dashboard.

1. Open the connections page.From the dashboard header, or go there directly.
2. Press “Connect with Strava”.You are handed to Strava’s own approval screen. You may need to log in there first.
3. Leave the activity permission ticked.Strava lets you approve the login while withholding access to your activities. That produces a connection that can read nothing, so it is checked and reported rather than left looking fine.
4. You come back here.The connection is stored against your account and the next import picks it up.

Private activities. The permission requested is activity:read_all, which includes activities you have marked private. If you would rather they stayed out, set them to private on Strava after deciding — this site cannot selectively skip them.

Why Garmin is different

Garmin is not available to connect, and that is deliberate rather than unfinished.

Strava has a proper grant flow: you approve specific access, and you can revoke it at any time without changing your password. Garmin has one too, but it is open only to approved business partners rather than to a project like this one. Without it, the only way in is your Garmin email and password, which a site would then have to store and replay on your behalf — full access to your account, not revocable, and impossible to scope.

Asking you for that would be wrong, so the answer is that Garmin data is unavailable here. In practice that costs you less than it sounds: a Garmin watch syncs its activities to Strava on its own, so they arrive here anyway, and everything built from them — fitness and form, load, intensity distribution, decoupling, routes — works from Strava alone. What you lose is the recovery layer, which never leaves Garmin: HRV, sleep stages, respiration, readiness, body battery and VO₂ max.

When your data appears

The import starts the moment you connect, and takes a minute or two for a few years of training; after that it only fetches what is new, and runs again when you open the site on data more than twenty minutes old.

Strava allows a fixed number of requests per day across the whole site, so the importer works within a per-run budget. If it runs out, the remaining athletes are picked up on the next pass rather than being failed — so a busy period means waiting a cycle, not losing data.

What the signals page needs

Signals compares each figure against a baseline built from your own history, so there has to be a history first. Nothing on that page is fitted on someone else's data: the model is trained per person, because "unusual" only means anything against the record of one body.

Three parts appear at different points. The effort-versus-heart-rate comparison needs roughly twenty sessions in a sport with heart rate and zone data. The trained model needs about two months of comparable training days — it also ignores the first six weeks of any record, because fitness and fatigue start from zero and their climb is arithmetic rather than training. The daily body measures need about four weeks of overnight recovery data, which only a watch provides.

Connecting Strava alone gets you the first two. The page then says the model reads training only, and it does not offer a reading of how your body answered — because without overnight data there is nothing to read it from.

Connecting with other people

You can connect with people you train with. A connection is mutual: one person asks, the other accepts, and either can remove it at any time — which revokes access immediately.

A pending request grants nothing. Until it is accepted, the other person sees exactly what a stranger sees, which is nothing at all.

What happens to your data

• Your activities are yours. Nobody sees them unless you accept a connection with them.
• No public profiles. There is no half-open tier — a visitor who is not connected to you sees nothing, signed in or not.
• Your Strava token is revocable. Disconnect here, or from Strava’s own settings, and the import stops. No password of yours is ever stored. What was already imported stays, and keeps working: the figures derived from it are still rebuilt when the analysis changes, and the connections panel says Strava is not connected rather than showing a sync that is not happening. Nothing is added to your record after the last day it already covers, so a gap since you disconnected is not read as a training break.
• Connections currently see everything you have. That is the default setting; visibility is stored per category, so it can be narrowed rather than being all-or-nothing.

If something goes wrong

I connected Strava but my dashboard is still empty.

The first import runs within twenty minutes. If it is still empty after that, check the connections page — it shows whether the grant was stored and how many activities have been imported.

It says my connection cannot read activities.

The activity permission was unticked on Strava’s approval screen. Disconnect and reconnect, leaving it on.

Some of my activities are missing.

Only activities inside the site’s history window are imported, and an activity with no duration recorded is skipped. Activities deleted on Strava are removed here on the next full re-import.

My heart-rate zones look wrong.

Training load is computed from your heart-rate reserve, which needs a resting rate. Without Garmin there is no source for it, so a standard value is assumed and your load figures are internally consistent but not directly comparable with someone who has that data.