Skip to main content

The Impact of Cardio on Your Workouts

Find out how to log or sync cardio sessions from Apple Health & Google Health Connect and how they impact your Gravl workouts

Goran avatar
Written by Goran
Updated yesterday

Many of us don't just lift 🏋🏼‍♀️, we also regularly do cardio 🏃🏾‍♂️. And if you’re heading out for an hour-long run, you’d probably want Gravl to account for that fatigue and adjust your workouts accordingly.

Good news: if you are using Gravl's AI-Optimized routine, that's exactly what happens.

This routine is designed to build workouts based on your most recovered muscle groups, and Gravl factors in your cardio sessions, whether logged directly in the app or synced from Apple Health or Google Health Connect.

To enable external syncing, simply connect Apple Health and Google Health Connect to Gravl and toggle on the necessary permissions (accessible from the Settings page).


After each cardio session, the app will ask if your effort was light, moderate, or high. Based on your input, fatigue is applied to the relevant muscle groups (primarily your legs), and if your next workout would have targeted those muscles, it’ll be automatically regenerated.

But if you skip training for a couple of days and your legs recover in the meantime, Gravl’s smart enough to notice. The next time you open the app, it’ll prompt you to regenerate your next workout - because, well… we all know you shouldn’t be skipping leg day. 😏

When selecting the effort, keep the following in mind:

  • Light effort will have no effect on your next leg workout.

  • Moderate effort will prevent leg workouts from generating for the next 24-48 hours.

  • Hard effort will result in your next leg workout not being generated for the next 48-72 hours.

If you prefer not to include your cardio sessions in Recovery, you can always disable the setting under Profile > Settings > Cardio Workouts.

And now: Run! Sync! Lift! Repeat! 💪🏾

Importing an External Cardio session:

Logging a Cardio Session in Gravl:

Did this answer your question?