How to connect FATMAP with your Garmin device

Yes, if you have a Garmin device, you can easily connect this to your FATMAP account!

Once connected, your Garmin adventures will automatically sync to your FATMAP profile.

Read on to find out more...

• How do I connect my Garmin account to FATMAP?
• Why is my new adventure not showing up in FATMAP?
• Does FATMAP bring in any old Garmin activities or just newly recorded ones?
• How do I know when my new activity is in FATMAP?
• How can I manage my incoming Adventure Visibility with Garmin?
• Does all of my health data like HR, speed, cadence, and effort come into FATMAP?
• Will the stats that my device records be exactly the same as what shows on FATMAP?
• Are you going to add more third-parties?

How do I connect my Garmin account to FATMAP?

Connecting your Garmin account is fast and simple.

1. First, navigate to the Profile tab in the app. 

2. Next, go into the new Settings page.

      

3. Click into Tracking Apps & Devices - this all-new section is where all your third-party connections will be accessed. Whether you are connecting or disconnecting from Strava, Garmin, LifePass or any other future third-party provider.

4. Here, you can tell if an account is already connected based on the phrase in that section. As you can see here, we are connected to Strava but not Garmin or LifePass. Select Connect with Garmin.

     

5. The app will now open up a connection with Garmin and ask you to sign-in to Garmin using your Garmin account credentials.

6. Once you sign in, simply hit Agree to accept the terms and conditions.

   

7. You will be prompted to go back into the FATMAP app and then you should see a screen like this where you can set your visibility settings. Select "The FATMAP Community" for your synced adventures to be visible on your profile, or select "Only Me" to keep them private. You can always go back in and change this at any time, and you can also change the visibility of individual adventures.

8. When you are ready, hit the Connect with Garmin button and you will get a confirmation screen confirming the connection. Now, FATMAP will bring in some of your past Garmin adventures and any time you track something new on your Garmin and sync it, it will come into FATMAP automatically so you can view it on our amazing 3D map and share it with your outdoor community!

  

9. In order to send GPX directly to your Garmin, you will have to ensure the data sharing settings are set up in your Garmin device. Go to Account Settings, then Account Information, and then scroll down to Connected Apps. Select FATMAP and enable Courses Sharing.

 

Why is my new adventure not showing up in FATMAP?

If you have connected your Garmin account and you recorded a new adventure, but are not seeing it in My Adventures in FATMAP, it could be one of a few things:

1. The most common and likely issue is that your watch has not synced with your Garmin Connect phone app OR that your Garmin Connect phone app has not upload the track to Garmin's servers. This could be due to lack of internet connection (as we all know happens in the great outdoors), the app not being open on your phone, or the watch failing to sync to the phone. Make sure the phone app is open and you see the adventure in your Garmin account. As an additional step, simply hit the resync button in the Garmin Connect app to reprompt the sync
2. Another possibility is that the adventure you recorded was of a type that FATMAP does not support. The most common activity which FATMAP would ignore is one with no geospatial component such as any indoor activity like indoor cycling, yoga, etc. When FATMAP receives an activity like this, we ignore it.
3. Finally, it could be that not enough time has passed. While our tests show that this service is quite fast and should bring in adventures from Garmin within minutes, it is highly dependent on the amount of activities that need to be processed. As a general rule of thumb, if you know your Garmin Connect app has uploaded the activity to Garmin and you still do not see your adventure in FATMAP after 15 minutes, there could be an internal issue - feel free to reach out to us!

 

Does FATMAP bring in any old Garmin activities or just newly recorded ones?

For now, once you connect your Garmin account, FATMAP will bring in the last 5 years of activities from you Garmin account. These activities should start to roll into your as soon as you sign up and are usually all in My Adventures within about 15 minutes (usually faster than this) depending on how many activities you have done in the last 5 years. In addition, of course, every newly recorded activity after you connect your Garmin and FATMAP accounts will come into FATMAP automatically

 

How do I know when my new activity is in FATMAP?

Once we process a new Garmin activity of yours, we will send you an email telling you that a new Garmin activity was just added to your FATMAP account and is ready to view and share!

How can I manage my incoming Adventure Visibility with Garmin?

Follow these steps to change the visibility options for future Garmin adventures:

1. Travel to Profile > Settings
2. Then click on Tracking Apps & Devices
3. Click Manage Garmin (this will show if you have already connected Garmin to your FATMAP account)
4. Finally, click the option for Who can see future Garmin recordings? and change to the option that suits you

Does all of my health data like HR, speed, cadence, and effort come into FATMAP?

No. At FATMAP, we are purist for the outdoors. We care about people getting outside, period. Competitive stats about how fast you did something or how high your heart rate was is not on our radar. We want you to be able to see what you did in 3D, share that with your outdoor community, and analyze that in whatever way you want - how steep was the beginning of that hike, what was your highest elevation, etc.

We bring in the geometry of the line, the timer time on your watch, and the activity - that's it! The other stats are calculated and crunched by the FATMAP 3D engine you know and love.

Will the stats that my device records be exactly the same as what shows on FATMAP?

Short answer: Yes for some things

Long answer: At FATMAP, we love our 3D map and elevation model - it is what FATMAP is built on. We use this model to calculate statistics for lines. This allows us to calculate the statistics for something you are planning and are not sure about. For adventures (stuff you have recorded) the distance, ascent, and descent will be exactly the same on FATMAP as your device records. As of August 5th, 2021, we changed our ingestion pipeline to start writing this information so that we can prefer this info to the info we calculate in the background. If your device does not contain this info or it was corrupted for some reason, we will show you our calculated statistics for that number instead. So any adventure you have done after this date will show these values exactly as your watch recorded them.

There are still some data fields that we use our calculated statistics for. Most notably the gradient and elevation profiles. We still use our elevation model to generate these so that the 3D view of the line and the graph of the data align correctly.

Are you going to add more third-parties?

That is the plan, yes! Suunto is the next provider we plan on integrating. As much as we would love to do this tomorrow, it takes time to do this and we have no clear timeline on when we will definitively do this yet.