After working closely with David the past 2 weeks I’ve been able to integrate Intervals.icu into my app Watchletic, which lets you perform structured workouts on Apple Watch.
This integration imports structured workouts setup in Intervals.icu for running, cycling, swimming and cross-country skiing (so far) and then once performed, you can export it back for further analysis.
This comes after requests from several users so I’m so happy to finally offer this. I’ve been using it myself for the past week to plan my runs and it’s been working well so far.
It’s still very early, and I know people use this service in a multitude of ways, so I’m bound to have missed some use case, meaning I’m very open to feedback if I’ve missed something.
To let you trial it for a bit, and to get more people that can give me feedback to make it better, here’s a promo code for 3 months free usage: INTERVALSICU (valid to be used until December 31st, 2023). You can use it by, inside Watchletic app, going to Watchletic Club and then Redeem Code.
I hope anyone who has an Apple Watch and have been waiting for this enjoys this integration and plase share your experiences and suggestions in this thread.
When uploading results of a Watchletic run, I noticed the cadence seems to be perhaps shown at 50% in intervals. In Strava and Watchletic the cadence shows at 2x
Interesting. There’s not a lot of documentation on cadence in FIT files so if I remember correctly I think I provided it in a way that TrainingPeaks understood. Will investigate again to verify that the value is truly correct and maybe provide different FIT files for TrainingPeaks and Intervals.icu if that’s required.
Update 2: Unfortunately that didn’t fix it. I’m hesitant to change cadence on Watchletic’s end since the FIT file data generated is technically correct and there were some solutions for showing actual “Running Cadence” in the post @app4g shared. Eventually @david might provide it natively for Intervals.icu and then all exported data from Watchletic would probably be wrong (if I changed the exported FIT file to use SPM instead of RPM even though FIT file expects “RPM”).
Thanks for looking into this. I’ve historically recorded running using apples native workout app. They must use a different field as I don’t have the spm cut in half.
Not a huge deal - I’ll take a look at options to adjust.
I’ve enjoyed the simplified watch face with the ability to customize what shows, and the verbal cues is giving me back an option not to run with my phone (following TrainAsOne plans)
How do you export from native Apple Workout to Intervals.icu? I’m guessing you’re using some third party app for that, maybe I could try investigating how that app exports.
The recording of the workout to Health should be no different from the native workout app, but the export can differ between apps.
apple watch → strava → intervals gives me NO cadence information on intervals. that was my error. this must’ve been the first time I noticed the info in intervals.
apple workouts: apple health= accurate. strava = accurate. intervals = no data.
watchletics: apple health: accurate. strava = accurate. intervals = 50% cadence
Sorry for the misinformation regarding the data feeding re: apple watch.
A quick caveat regarding swimming, before you get rid of your Garmin, is that I’ve noticed distance calculations with swimming and Apple Watch is a bit hit-and-miss. Watchletic shows the distance that Apple Watch reports, with no in-between calculations, and some users have reported that it sometimes doesn’t calculate distance correctly.
I think this is probably the reason why the native Apple Watch Workout app doesn’t allow structured workouts for swims.
So I’d say for structured workouts with swimming you’re probably better off using interval distances as guidelines (the watch will announce and show how long your next interval should be) and then calculating distance yourself by amount of laps you do.
I’m not a swimming expert but you can Google for some more info on how to get more accurate swimming distances on Apple Watch.
Huh, that’s interesting. The Apple Watch is always very, very accurate in the pool (native app). I wonder what is so difficult about implementing structured workouts.
Apple is obviously focused on triathlon - they marketed the AWU1 at Ironman athletes explicitly - and since then they have really improved their running and cycling functionality. I think the last two items remaining are swimming and routing/mapping. Kickboard detection is nice, but I’d much rather have live pace data and structured workouts.
Definitely curious to see if the next watchOS update brings improved mapping/routing for hikers and structured workouts for swimmers.
Please do try it yourself, it’s free to try and I’ve heard mixed results, for some it works great and for some it doesn’t. Sounds like it depends a bit on how you swim, so if the native app works good for you in terms of distance it should work the same in Watchletic.
Please let me know if you try it and whether you have any feedback!
Hi Viktor, I have an athlete with an Apple Watch she has installed Watchletic and I believe she has used your promo code. Can you give us a step by step guide how to integrate Intervals.icu and Watchletic.
I want her to be able to download and follow the daily structured running workouts as I populate her calendar.
Apologize for the late response (had a newborn baby) but here goes step by step:
In Watchletic app, go to Integrations, scroll to Intervals.icu, press Connect and allow Watchletic to read and write data.
Now Watchletic will automatically fetch new workouts every 8 hours (or your athlete can manually import by pressing “Import” below Intervals.icu title)
The workouts can be performed either through the Apple Watch app Watchletic or through the Apple Workout app
Once performed the workout will automatically export to Intervals.icu if that option is turned on (which it is by default) or manually by the athlete by going to History in Watchletic iPhone app and then pressing Export followed by Export to Intervals.icu
