Export Apple Health Workouts to Strava & Garmin

Moving Apple Watch workouts into Strava, Garmin, and TrainingPeaks

The Apple Watch is a superb activity tracker, but Apple Health keeps your workouts in its own walled garden. If you're switching to a Garmin, coaching in TrainingPeaks, or you simply want your full training history on Strava, you need a way to get those sessions out. Apple's Export All Health Data gives you a ZIP with an export.xml file, but that file is raw HealthKit XML, not something Strava or Garmin can read. This tool bridges that gap entirely in your browser.

What the tool actually does

It reads export.xml in 8 MB chunks (these files are routinely 100 MB to over 1 GB, so loading the whole thing at once would crash the tab). As it streams, it collects two things: every <Workout> block, its activity type, start and end time, duration, distance, and active energy, plus every HKQuantityTypeIdentifierHeartRate sample. For each workout you export, it pulls the heart-rate samples that fall inside that workout's time window and writes them into the file. If a workout's own attributes are missing a distance total, it sums the matching DistanceWalkingRunning or DistanceCycling records inside the same window instead.

Why TCX, not GPX

GPX is a GPS-track format: its whole job is to store latitude/longitude points. TCX (Garmin's Training Center XML) is built for workouts, it carries laps, total time, distance, calories, and, crucially, heart-rate samples, even when there's no GPS trace. Apple's export.xml stores workout summaries and heart-rate readings but not coordinates, so TCX is the format that preserves the most of your data. Strava, Garmin Connect, and TrainingPeaks all import TCX natively, which is why this tool produces TCX rather than an empty GPX.

A note on GPS routes

If you did an outdoor run or ride, its GPS route isn't in export.xml at all, Apple stores it separately in the workout-routes/ folder of your export ZIP as a ready-to-use .gpx file. You can upload those directly to Strava or Garmin without any conversion. This tool deliberately focuses on the large category of workouts that have no route: indoor bike sessions, treadmill runs, pool and open-water swims logged without GPS, strength training, yoga, HIIT, and gym classes. For those, a TCX with time, heart rate, calories, and distance is exactly what you want.

How the generated TCX is built

Each file is a valid TrainingCenterDatabase document. The workout's HKWorkoutActivityType is mapped to a TCX Sport (Running, Biking, or Other), and the session becomes one Activity with a single Lap holding TotalTimeSeconds, DistanceMeters, and Calories. Inside the lap, a Track lists each in-window heart-rate reading as a Trackpoint with a Time and a HeartRateBpm value. When Strava or Garmin ingest the file, that's what produces your heart-rate graph and your average and max HR.

Reading the results table

Every workout in your export is listed with its activity, date, duration, distance, energy burned, and how many heart-rate points were matched to it. A workout showing 0 HR points simply means Apple didn't log heart rate for that session (common for very short or manually-added workouts), the TCX is still valid and will import with its time, distance, and calories. Everything you see is computed from your real data; nothing is estimated or faked.