Why your workouts are not reaching your Hammerhead Karoo
One look at the Hammerhead Dashboard tells you which half of the chain broke, and it is worth doing before you touch anything. If the workout is sitting in the Dashboard's workout list, the fault is between the Dashboard and the device. If it is not there, nothing you do to the Karoo will help, and the cause is almost always a documented provider rule rather than a bug. A surprising share of these reports turn out to be a feature behaving exactly as its vendor describes it.
By Jim Camut · Former pro & ex-Bruyneel Academy racer
Updated Aug 4, 20264 chapters7 citations
Start at the Dashboard, because that one look halves the problem
Open the Dashboard and check the Workouts list. Anything imported there syncs to the Karoo the next time the device connects to the internet [Hammerhead Workout Import], so the workout's presence or absence in that list splits every possible cause into two piles that share no fixes.
Know what arrival looks like on the device before you decide it has not arrived. A workout scheduled for today carries a Today tag in the Karoo's workouts list and raises a notification in the Control Center [Hammerhead Karoo Workouts]. If the Dashboard has the workout and the Karoo shows neither, you have a transport problem and the rest of this section is the fix. If the Dashboard has it and the Karoo does too, but the session looks wrong, skip to the last section — that is not a sync failure at all.
The device pulls rather than being pushed to, which is why an unconnected Karoo looks broken. To force it, connect the Karoo Companion App and press Sync on the Karoo — the phone needs an active internet connection for this to do anything [Hammerhead Companion Sync]. The same article documents a genuinely useful side door: share a workout file to the Companion App from your phone's share menu and it becomes a workout on the Karoo, immediately if the device is connected, otherwise the next time it reaches Wi-Fi or you press Sync.
If the Dashboard does not have the workout, stop working on the Karoo. Re-pairing the device, reinstalling the app, and factory resets all address the half of the chain that is working. And if you uploaded a file yourself and it never appeared in the Dashboard, that is a rejection rather than a sync failure — a different problem, with its own published rules.
When it never reached the Dashboard: the provider rules that block it
Linking an account is not the same as that account sending workouts. Several of the services the Dashboard connects to are route or activity destinations that never send a session at all, and three of the most common failure reports here are documented behaviour rather than faults.
TrainerRoad has two conditions and both catch people. A scheduled workout only reaches Hammerhead if you set it to be completed outside, and TrainerRoad states that outside workouts are made available on the day they are scheduled, and that you will not see them in advance of that day [TrainerRoad Hammerhead Sync]. So Thursday's session being absent on Tuesday is the integration working. The Ramp Test is a separate case — it cannot be pushed outside at all, because it is not designed as an outdoor assessment.
Intervals.icu fails for a different reason: people look for the connection in the wrong place. Its developer's announcement notes that although a Hammerhead box appears on the intervals.icu settings page, the connection has to be created from your Karoo, and the device needs updating first [Intervals.icu Karoo Sync]. Riders who hunt for an intervals.icu button on the Dashboard and find nothing usually conclude the integration does not exist.
Xert produces the report that is not a fault at all. Xert describes its Wahoo integration as pushing adaptive workouts to the device, but describes the Karoo integration as launching the Xert EBC app on the Karoo mid-ride [Xert Integrations]. Xert sessions are not meant to appear in the Karoo's own workout list, so no amount of unlinking and relinking will put one there. If that is what you were waiting for, you were waiting for something the integration never promised.
One rule spans all of them. What syncs is a structured workout, not a line of text on a calendar. A session written as a description of the targets rather than as built intervals has nothing to send, and it fails quietly rather than erroring — which is exactly what makes it hard to spot.
In the Dashboard but not on the Karoo
This half is short, because there are only a few moving parts: an internet connection, a current device, and a pull the Karoo has not made yet. The Companion App's Sync button is the manual override [Hammerhead Companion Sync].
Wi-Fi is the usual answer and the usual blind spot, because the phone being online is not the same as the Karoo being online. The device syncs when it connects to the internet [Hammerhead Workout Import], so a Karoo that has sat in a kit bag since Sunday holds Sunday's list no matter what the Dashboard shows. Wake it, let it join a network, and check again before diagnosing anything further.
The Companion App covers the case where Wi-Fi is not available — connect it and press Sync on the Karoo, with the phone online [Hammerhead Companion Sync]. Note that the app's ride-upload feature is limited to the latest generation of Karoo, so an older unit still depends on Wi-Fi for the return leg even when the outbound one works.
Firmware matters more here than it does on most devices, because integrations have arrived over time rather than all at once. The intervals.icu connection in particular requires an updated Karoo before it can be created at all [Intervals.icu Karoo Sync]. A device that has not been updated in a year is not missing a fix; it is missing the feature.
It synced, and the targets are still wrong
This gets filed as a sync failure and is a different sync entirely. Your Karoo's FTP, power zones, heart-rate zones, and rider weight come from a third-party platform you nominate [Hammerhead Training Metrics] — so a workout can arrive perfectly and still prescribe the wrong watts.
The mismatch is easy to create without noticing. Your plan lives on one platform, your training-metrics sync partner is set to another, and a workout expressed as a percentage of FTP resolves against whichever number the Karoo holds. The sync did its job; the two accounts disagree about your threshold. The partner can only be changed on the Dashboard, not from the Karoo, and Hammerhead's own advice when recent changes are not reflected on the device is to trigger a manual sync from that page [Hammerhead Training Metrics].
The deeper version is a threshold that is simply stale. A number set in March and still prescribing intervals in August is not a configuration error, and nothing in the sync chain will flag it. If every session has felt slightly wrong for a month rather than one session feeling wrong today, suspect the number rather than the pipe.
All of this is the argument our broader guide to training with a Hammerhead Karoo makes in another form: the device is a delivery layer, and it renders faithfully whatever the layer above it committed to. AdaptCycling sits in that upper layer. We keep one set of numbers, estimate your threshold from your own power curve rather than a test you have to remember to schedule, and re-send the coming days after the plan rolls over — because a rolling window has to be re-pushed, not set once and trusted.
Quick answers
How do I force my Hammerhead Karoo to sync workouts?
Why is my TrainerRoad workout not showing on my Karoo?
Why can I not find intervals.icu on my Hammerhead Dashboard?
Why do my Xert workouts never appear in my Karoo's workout list?
The workout synced but the power targets are wrong. What happened?
Sources cited in this guide
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More inside Training with a Hammerhead Karoo
Start here · Foundational guide
Training with a Hammerhead Karoo: a self-coached guide
How structured workouts actually reach a Karoo, what its importer accepts and rejects, and where the ecosystem stops for self-coached riders.
Read the full guide
Other articles in this series
- 01
Karoo structured workouts without TrainingPeaks
TrainingPeaks is not required, and Hammerhead's own docs are part of why people think it is. The free upload route and the providers that qualify.
- 02
Training plan apps for the Hammerhead Karoo
Hammerhead ships no training platform, so the app you connect is the plan. What TrainingPeaks, TrainerRoad, Intervals.icu and Xert each actually do.
- 03
Intervals.icu to Karoo workout sync: how it works
The official sync landed in January 2025 and is created from the Karoo itself. What syncs, what the importer rejects, and the format trap.
- 04
ZWO file not importing to a Karoo: the rejection rules
Hammerhead rejects the whole file, not the bad step. The step types it accepts, the target rule, and the difference between rejected and ignored.
- 05
Karoo structured workouts without a power meter
A heart-rate strap satisfies the Karoo's sensor requirement, but heart-rate targets exist only in FIT. What HR can target, and what it cannot.
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