Connecting a device

Taper reaches a Garmin watch directly. For COROS, Wahoo, Suunto and most other brands it goes through intervals.icu, a free account that already talks to those watches. Strava is separate again: it is where your activities come from, not somewhere workouts go.

Taper itself runs in any browser and as an Android app on Google Play. Connections live on your account rather than on the device, so it makes no difference which of the two you set them up in.

Garmin

Open Profile, then Connections, and switch Garmin on. Enter the email and password you use for Garmin Connect. If Garmin asks for a verification code, it appears in the same place: enter the code and you are connected. If the code does not arrive, wait for the countdown and use "No code? Send a new one".

Your password is used once to authorise Taper and is never stored. Only the resulting access tokens are kept, and switching Garmin off deletes them.

What happens once Garmin is connected

Your activities import automatically, and your planned sessions are sent to your watch as structured workouts with their steps, targets and rep counts. Press Sync everything now in Connections to run both immediately rather than waiting.

Changing your plan marks the affected sessions to be rebuilt. The next sync rewrites the ones that changed and removes any that no longer exist, so your watch matches your plan rather than accumulating old copies.

Strava

Switch Strava on in Connections and you are sent to Strava's own sign-in page to approve access. Taper never sees your Strava password.

Strava is the source of truth for your activities. Where the same run arrives from both Strava and your watch, Taper keeps one copy rather than two.

A non-Garmin watch, through intervals.icu

This is how a non-Garmin watch gets your plan. For COROS, Wahoo, Suunto and most other brands, intervals.icu sits in the middle: Taper writes your planned sessions to an intervals.icu calendar, and your watch syncs them from there. The account is free.

If you have a Garmin, you do not need this. The Garmin connection already sends workouts to your watch, with their full steps and pace targets, and it does it in one hop with no second account to set up.

Only one can be on at a time. Taper sends your workouts to a single destination, so connecting intervals.icu while Garmin is on is refused, and the error tells you which to disconnect first. That is deliberate: with both, every session would reach your watch twice, and nothing on the watch tells two copies of the same session apart.

A COROS goes through the bridge like any other brand. Since intervals.icu's September 2026 fix, a session you delete or move in Taper is removed from your COROS calendar too, so your watch matches your plan instead of collecting old copies. Your runs can come back in either way: through the same bridge, or through Strava if you already sync there.

On the COROS calendar a session shows its timed steps as minutes and its distance steps as kilometres side by side, so an easy run with strides reads as five minutes of strides beside just under four kilometres of easy running rather than as one total.

Setting it up

1. Create a free account at intervals.icu and connect your watch brand to it, using their instructions for your device. Do this first: if intervals.icu cannot reach your watch, nothing Taper sends will arrive either.
2. In intervals.icu Settings, set your threshold pace under the running zones. Without it, intervals.icu has no pace scale: your workouts arrive but their pace targets do not bind, the workout chart stays flat, and no pace reaches the watch. A recent hard 5k pace is a fine starting value; Taper shows yours under Training zones on the Profile page.
3. In Taper, open Profile, then Connections, and switch intervals.icu on. Press Connect with intervals.icu: you approve access on their own site and come straight back. There is no API key to find or paste, and Taper never sees your intervals.icu password.
4. Press Sync everything now, then sync your watch as you normally would.

Taper is granted your intervals.icu calendar and your activities and nothing else. You can withdraw that from your intervals.icu account whenever you like, and switching the connection off in Taper hands it back too.

Apple Watch needs one more app

An Apple Watch cannot import a workout on its own, so connecting intervals.icu is not enough by itself: your sessions reach the calendar and stop there. Install the Intervals.icu Companion app from the App Store on your iPhone, and it puts a matching app on the watch. It is made by an independent developer, not by intervals.icu itself, and it is what reads the calendar and gives you the session on your wrist, converting it through Apple's own workout format. That format holds distance, time and energy, not pace, so on the watch a pace target arrives as an alert during the session rather than as a number the watch holds.

Install it from the phone rather than looking for it on the watch, and open it once on both so it can sign in. If your workouts appear in intervals.icu but not on the watch, this is almost always the step that is missing.

Where your warm-up ends

In Taper, under Profile then Workouts, Warm-up completion is either Lap press or Fixed. Fixed ends your warm-up at the distance Taper prescribed, on every watch. Lap press asks the watch to hold it open until you press the lap button, so you start the session when you feel ready rather than at a distance decided in advance.

On Lap press it depends on the watch, because not every brand takes an open step. Where it is not taken nothing is broken and nothing is lost: the warm-up simply arrives as the distance Taper prescribed, the same as Fixed.

• Garmin: Your warm-up ends when you press lap.
• COROS: Your warm-up ends at the distance shown.
• Suunto: Your warm-up ends when you press lap.
• Wahoo: Your warm-up ends at the distance shown.
• Apple Watch: Your warm-up ends at the distance shown.

Your cool-down is a fixed length whichever you choose, on every watch. A warm-up is open because you extend it until you are ready to work; a cool-down is a defined easy piece you run out and stop.

Turning a connection off

Every connection can be switched off from the same table, and each one clears up after itself.

Switching Garmin off removes the workouts Taper put on your watch, then deletes the saved sign-in. Only workouts Taper created are touched; nothing you built yourself is affected. Anything Garmin refuses to delete is reported rather than passed over in silence.

Switching intervals.icu off removes the sessions Taper put on your calendar and hands back the access you granted. Switching Strava off stops new activities importing; the ones already imported stay.

Activities you have already imported are never removed by disconnecting. To delete those, use Profile, then Data.

If something is not working

Garmin sign-in fails. Check the same email and password work at connect.garmin.com. If you normally sign in through Google, Apple or Facebook, you may need to set a Garmin password first. If you have changed your password recently, switch Garmin off in Taper and connect again.

The verification code never arrives.Codes can take a minute. Use "No code? Send a new one" once the countdown finishes. After three tries, close the row and sign in again, which starts a fresh request.

Workouts are not on the watch. Press Sync everything now and read what it reports. If it says workouts were sent, sync the watch itself: most only pull new workouts when they connect to the phone app. On an Apple Watch, check you have the Intervals.icu Companion app installed on your iPhone - without it the sessions reach the calendar and go no further.

The sessions arrive but the paces do not. The workout is on the watch, the steps are right, and every pace target is blank or the workout chart is flat. Set your threshold pacein intervals.icu - their Settings, under the running zones - and not in Taper. Without it their side has no pace scale to hang your targets on, so the targets are dropped in transit and nothing about it is visible from Taper. A recent hard 5k pace is a fine starting value, and Taper shows yours under Training zones on the Profile page. Re-send with Sync everything now once it is set.

Nothing is importing. Check the last-synced time under the switches. If it is stale, sync manually and see whether an error appears. A connection that has stopped working shows as switched off rather than pretending to be healthy.