Suunto Ambit 3 Workout Interval Planning

Quite a few of you are coming to this site as you are having problems with Suunto’s workout feature.

Here are some of their detailed instructions.

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The most obvious use for planned workouts is interval workouts: set a warm-up, intervals with recovery times and a cool-down. But you can be more creative than that and use the workout planner in pretty much any exercise. Hill repeats, changing tempo during your exercise, increasing intensity workout. Even a strength training session or stretching can be guided with a planned workout. And there is no need to run those 400m intervals on the track just to hit the right distances. Your watch will guide you on any terrain.

With the guidance of a planned workout you hit the targets of your training better and progress faster.

To get started with the workout planner you will need a Suunto Ambit3 watch, the Suunto Movescount App, both with the latest software, and a Movescount account.

The process has three steps:

1. Plan the workout with Suunto Movescount App.
2. Sync the workout to your Suunto Ambit3 Peak, Sport or Run.
3. Select the workout in your watch during training.

MANAGE YOUR PLANNED WORKOUTS

To access the workout planner, launch Suunto Movescount App with both Bluetooth and a data connection active. Tap the settings icon and then ‘Ambit3’. Tap ‘Workouts’ and choose an existing workout or create a new one by tapping ‘‘Edit’ and then the plus icon).

You can manage your workouts by choosing which ones are synced to your watch: the ones that are “switched on” in the Edit view are synced; the gray ones are not. You can have up to five workouts in your Ambit3 at a time.

The workouts are synced through Movescount, so a data connection is needed to sync them to your Ambit3.

PLAN A NEW WORKOUT

A planned workout consists of a name, description and one or more segments (warmup, interval, recovery, rest, cooldown).

You can define the type, duration and target for each step. The most obvious duration choices are time and distance, but you can also use heart rate (HR below or above certain limit) or calories. Alternatively, you can define the duration as “lap”. That means the segment ends when you press the ‘Back Lap’ button on the watch.

Each of the steps has a free text field that can be used to give yourself additional guidance. The text pops up on the watch at the beginning of the segment.

In addition to duration, you can define target limits. For the limits you can use speed, pace (min/km or min/miles), cadence, power, HR or none.

Once you have a segment defined, you can repeat it as many times as you like (well, up to 99 times). You can drag more segments inside the repeat as well. Just hold a finger on the desired step and drag it inside the repeat you created. This way you can have the interval and its recovery included in the same repeat block, for instance.

The same dragging and dropping feature works even outside the repeat block. Just sort the steps as you like. If you want to duplicate or delete a step, swipe left.

The multicolored grid at the top of the planner screen gives you a visual representation of the workout to help you get an overall view of the workout.

SYNC THE WORKOUT WITH YOUR WATCH

To start a guided interval workout:

1. While you are in a sport mode, keep [Next] pressed to access the options menu.
2. Press [Next] to select WORKOUT.
3. Scroll through the available workouts with [Light Lock] or [Start Stop] and select with [Next].
4. Press [Start Stop] to start your exercise recording. The guidance starts when the recording starts. The interval workout display is shown as the last display of the selected sport mode.
5. Complete the workout or end it at any time by stopping the exercise recording as normal or going to the options menu and selecting END WORKOUT.

In the beginning of each step you will be notified with the text you wrote for the segment, the segment step number, duration and targets.

During the workout the planned workout screen will show you a graph of the target limits and your performance related to those. You will also see the remaining time or distance for that step.