How to use Garmin interval training on your Garmin watch

• From the home screen (1), you want to find the run settings (3) menu. There are a few ways to this but I simply go to the activity menu (top right button) then press and hold the middle button on the left whilst ‘Run‘ is selected (2). This will bring up the specific run settings options.
• You will now get options such as Training and Run Settings (3). From here you can also change settings such as the screen layouts and auto-lap. For the purpose of this guide, you want to be going to the Training, then Intervals (4) options.
• Once here, you’ll see there are intervals already setup out of the box so you can either follow this or customised your own. Please note though, you can only have one interval structure set up at any one time. If you want to have a ‘bank’ of intervals sessions ready to go then the ‘Workouts’ feature is your friend.
• Edit the interval and choose your flavour. Open, Time or Distance based interval repetitions and rest. I tend to use time or distance but open has its uses such as running on a lapped circuit (or a running track).
• You can really make this your own, 1-minute run, 2 minutes rest. 5 minutes run, 1-minute rest. 1-mile run, 1-minute rest. This is completely up to you, along with the number of repetitions, obviously :-)
• Enable or disable the warm-up and cool-down options. I find them useful to start and end my sessions so I can do 10 minutes or so of jogging to and from the location I want to do my session. On this point, I tend to leave warm-up and cool-down as ‘open’ so I can start when I’m ready but you may choose to be more structured such as 5 minutes before your intervals automatically start.

Doing an interval training session

• When you’re ready and set-up go straight to ‘Do Workout’ (4) to load the interval screen. It won’t start automatically until you press the start button, as per a normal run. You can also wait until you have a GPS signal!
• You’ll notice warm-up displayed first if you’ve enabled it. Depending on how you’ve set this up you’ll either start your main intervals after a set time, distance or when you press the ‘lap button’. The intervals screen can then be used to count through the reps. Note that can also scroll through your other screens if you prefer them.
• Once all your repetitions are done you’ll cool-down will automatically start, if your repetitions are based on time or distance after the final one. Otherwise, you’ll need to press the lap button before it kicks in.

That’s it really! It’s relatively straight forwards but as with anything, easier when you know how. Any questions please contact me :-)

I’ll do a follow-up post on ‘Workouts‘ as that allows much more flexibility to build in custom intervals sessions. Garmin has its own guides on intervals which you can see here, specific to your device.