The ever-expanding portfolio of Garmin wearables is getting a workout boost. The sports tech company has announced this week a partnership with Gold’s Gym, one of the top fitness franchises in the world. The collaboration will see an integration between the Gold AMP personal training app and the latest crop of Garmin fitness trackers and smartwatches.

Essential reading: Top fitness trackers and health gadgets

Released in 2017, the Gold AMP is a popular fitness app. Essentially a personal digital trainer, the app combines music playlists with audio coaching to keep you pushing hard while exercising. There are hundreds of workouts to choose from, individually tailored to all intensity levels.

It’s very motivating to have someone coach you during elliptical training, treadmill running, stair climbing, rowing, meditation, bodyweight and more. This and the music playlists help take out the monotony when training. The app has thousands of DJ mixes across over forty music genres. There is enough variety that you won’t listen to the same tracks in back to back workouts.

Free to Gold Gym Members, the app is available in the US and Canada at $9.99 per month. There is both an Android and App Store version.

Garmin’s latest fitness devices will now play nice with the app. The integration means owners of the Vivosmart 3, Vivosport, Vivomove HR, Vivoactive 3, Forerunner 645, Forerunner 645 Music and Fenix 5 watches will now be able to track their heart rate in real time through the Gold AMP app. Its not entirely clear why the Forerunner 935 or the newly released Fenix 5 plus watches are not on this list. Perhaps they’ll be integrated at a later stage.

Knowing you’re heart rate while you are working out is important. Most people who exercise will tell you they want to lose weight or get fitter. But few know what their heart rate is, and where it really should be. Hence the benefits of heart-rate zone training. You need to know how hard your heart is working in order to reach your top potential in the shortest amount of time possible.

“We know through our many years of experience in the fitness wearables space that the importance of heart rate monitoring during exercise simply cannot be overstated,” said Dan Bartel, Garmin Vice President of global consumer sales.

“Through this collaboration with Gold’s Gym, we’re excited to combine our two areas of expertise to provide a digital personal training experience like no other.”

Being able to see your heart rate in real-time through the app is just the first step in the collaboration. An update set to land this fall will allow users to monitor and analyse their workouts in both Golds’ AMP and Garmin Connect. A Garmin Connect IQ version of the Gold AMP app will provide a link between the two.

Garmin is not the first company to be doing this. Late last year Apple introduced GymKit. This allows Apple Watch users to pair their device directly to treadmills, ellipticals, indoor bikes or stair steppers at the push of a button. The Cupertino outfit is now partnering with various brands such as LifeFitness, Matrix and TechnoGym in a bid to make this functionality widely available.

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I often exercise with an external heart rate monitor paired to my sports watch. As good as wrist based heart

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