Your Garmin and Apple Watch Workouts Now Count Toward Google Health’s Cardio Load
Google Health 5.09 lets workouts from Garmin, Apple Watch and other heart-rate wearables earn Cardio Load. Here's what that means.
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Plenty of people don’t wear just one fitness tracker. There’s the Garmin for long runs, the Pixel Watch for everyday, maybe an Apple Watch from a past life. Until now, Google Health’s training metrics mostly ignored anything that didn’t come from Google hardware. With version 5.09, that changes.
Workouts you track on other wearables, including a Garmin or an Apple Watch, and sync to Google Health will now earn Cardio Load. The update is rolling out now on both Android and iOS.
What Cardio Load actually measures
If you’ve never paid attention to it, Cardio Load is Google’s measure of how much strain exercise and daily activity put on your cardiovascular system. According to Google’s help documentation, it’s built on the TRIMP (training impulse) model, which weighs your heart rate during activity alongside your age, resting heart rate and sex. Longer or harder efforts score higher.
Google pairs it with a personalized weekly target rather than a daily one, which gives you room to go hard one day and recover the next. The app then labels where you stand:
- Under training: you’ve been inactive long enough to start losing fitness gains.
- Maintaining: steady load that regularly hits your target.
- Improving: you’re regularly reaching or exceeding your target range.
- Over training: too much load, which can hurt recovery and performance.
The catch: your other watch needs heart rate
Because the whole metric runs on heart rate, only workouts that captured heart rate data will count. A logged walk with no heart rate attached won’t move the needle. For the Garmin and Apple Watch crowd that’s rarely an issue, since both record heart rate during workouts by default, but it’s worth knowing if you log sessions from a basic band or a gym machine.
This is the right move. A training-load number is only useful if it sees all your training. Anyone who did a hard Saturday ride on a Garmin and then got told by their Pixel Watch that they were “under training” knows how useless a partial picture can be.
Everything else in Google Health 5.09
The same release switches on the Health Guardian features for Pixel Watch 3, 4 and 5 owners, which we covered in detail this week, plus several smaller fixes:
- Blood pressure trends in the Heart section and insulin resistance trends in the Metabolic section
- Sleep breathing quality metrics, with daily and monthly trends
- A Log activity button with more activity types in the Fitness section
- Easier serving units and meal-time options when creating custom foods
- Restored historical step streak data, plus custom-food bug fixes on iOS
Some of these features need time before they show anything. Here’s how long Google says you’ll wait:
| Feature | Wear time needed before it appears |
|---|---|
| Blood pressure trends | 5+ consecutive days |
| Insulin resistance trends | 7+ nights |
| First Cardio Load target | 7 consecutive days and nights |
First monthly Health Guardian summaries are due in early October.
Why this matters for Google Health
Google Health is clearly trying to be the place your fitness data ends up, not just the app that ships with a Pixel Watch. Accepting Apple Watch and Garmin workouts for its signature training metric is a practical step toward that. It also makes Google Health more worth opening for people who haven’t bought into Google’s hardware at all, and that may be the point.
Sources: 9to5Google, Android Authority, Google Help. Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash.
Harish Kumar
Harish Kumar is the founder and editor of Android Captain. A computer science engineer with 13 years of experience in the technology industry, he covers Android updates, Pixel and Galaxy phones, security and the decisions shaping the platform.
