Activity types
Activity type is a workout category that allows you to more easily understand your workout and later group your plans according to what types of workout units were involved (e.g. Intervals, Running, Strength Training).
When adding a new workout plan, we have to select what activity type it has. In addition, the activity types are used when creating templates, we can group the templates according to their categories. And later, the workout plans created using a given template will contain the same workout type.
Each of the activity types is also assigned to one of the sport types. Thanks to them, we can easily group the types of workouts according to sports disciplines. More about the concept of sport types you can read here.
This is also very important during the process of connecting completed activities performed by athletes coming from external services to existing workout plans. For example, if an athlete completes a running activity, it will not be linked to a workout plan that includes an activity type with a sport like cycling.
Main activity types
In addition, the activity type can be main. This is a fairly important concept because this division is important for summaries and statistics. Whether the activity type is main depends primarily on the selected sport type, whether it is one of the sports selected as trained by the coach or athlete. This is set by default.
It is also possible to override the default value and explicitly mark the activity type as main. In this case, the activity type, regardless of whether it belongs to the trained sport, will be counted as main activity types. And vice versa - the activity type can be excluded from the main activities, even though it belongs to the trained sport.
The coach has specified that he trains running, cycling, and swimming. The main types of workouts will be running workouts such as intervals, running trip, running strength, in which he will choose running as the sport. We will include them in the distance covered in a given period, we will easily calculate the duration of such workouts. However, if other types of activities contain the sport type walking, climbing, they will not be main workouts, e.g. strength training, core, cross-training.
The coach has specified that he trains running, cycling, and swimming. However, he wants to add an activity type such as "Cycling with family". Although it is a cycling activity, he can clearly exclude this type of activity from the main trained activities, and it will not be included in the appropriate summaries related to the main trained discipline. It will be shown as complementary activities.
The coach has specified that he trains running, cycling, and swimming. However, he wants to add an activity type such as "Climbing stairs", whose sport type will be "stairs climbing" not belonging to the trained discipline. Nevertheless, he wants to clearly include this type of activity in the main trained activities, and include it in the appropriate summaries related to the main trained discipline. It will be shown as a main activity.
You will read about the edition of the activity types here.