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Health & Fitness
Garmin Connect
Updated Aug 23, 2026
Garmin is the watch company, and its Connect export is the deepest of any consumer fitness platform. Every GPS activity, heart rate reading, sleep stage and Body Battery score the hardware has ever recorded for you, in FIT files that Strava, COROS, Wahoo and TrainingPeaks all read natively. That portability is the reason it is worth the wait, which is the catch: it can run to a month.
Get Garmin Connect →Affiliate link — supports Digital Takeout Day at no extra cost
What you'll get
Activity files (FIT — GPS, HR, cadence, elevation, temperature, power)Daily summaries (CSV)Sleep stages with HRVBody Battery & Stress scoresHeart Rate Variability (HRV) statusBody composition (from paired Index scale)Step / floor / intensity-minutes summariesWorkout plans and training calendarsAccount metadata and order history
Before you start
- Go to garmin.com/account/datamanagement/ and log in
- Sign in with the same account your watch is paired to (Garmin Connect, Garmin Pilot, etc. — they share one account)
- Confirm the email on file is current — the export is delivered there
How to download
- Under "Export Your Data", click "Request Data Export"
- Choose "Export all data" (the only option — Garmin doesn't currently support date-range slices for the bulk archive)
- Confirm the request — Garmin emails a download link when ready
- Wait — typically delivered within 24–48 hours, can take up to 30 days for very large accounts
- Click the link in the email before it expires and save the ZIP
Pro tip
Garmin's bulk export delivers every activity as an individual FIT file — the gold-standard format for fitness data and the one Strava, TrainingPeaks, and COROS can all read natively.
Recommended backup tools
- Amazon SSD — Local encrypted backup — Garmin archives are multi-GB for long-term athletes, SSD is the right home
- ProtonDrive — End-to-end encrypted off-site copy for the full FIT-file archive
- pCloud — Lifetime storage option for one-off full-account exports
After the download
- Unzip — activities live in a folder of individual .FIT files named by date and activity type
- FIT files open natively in Strava, COROS, Wahoo, TrainingPeaks, Runalyze, and GoldenCheetah — drag-and-drop import works in all of them
- If you are switching from Fitbit to Garmin, see our <a href="/guides/fitbit-to-garmin">Fitbit → Garmin transfer guide</a> for moving history from your old account