Has something changed in the calorie calculation?

The calories calculation depends on many factors - your gender, age, weight, height, Activity Class (all in your User Profile settings), and then on your average resting HR, and the momentary HR during the activity. So for example if you do not wear the watch 24/.hr a day, incl. during the sleep, the watch cannot properly register the average resting HR, and the results of Calories burned during the day, or during an activity may be skewed.

Hi there - thanks for your reply.

I've not changed, added or removed any Profile data - nor experienced any change in my resting HR. I've not changed the time I wear my watch either.

As far as I can tell nothing has changed - but the recorded calories have dimished significantly - I always felt they may have been high previously, but I'd like to know what's happened to change the calculation - I don't think it's the data going in - I think it's the algorithm being subsequently applied.

As far as I can see, the algorithm did not change, otherwise everyone would have to see the same effect too. Check the reports of max HR, average HR, resting HR, all the diverse calories reports, perhaps you'll find the clue or some pattern. You could perhaps post links to two comparable workouts of yours - one before the sudden change in Calories burn, and another one after it, so that we can compare the graphs and parameters, and try to find out, why it happened.

I noticed the same thing, the calorie calculation has changed

The previous post is 3 years old, so it took long time before the change reached you

I’ve had my Descent MK2 for like a year now and without making any changes to my activity level, no weight changes etc. and a couple of weeks ago my resting calories jumped up by 200. Did the algorithm get more advanced?

6394236 said:

I’ve had my Descent MK2 for like a year now and without making any changes to my activity level, no weight changes etc. and a couple of weeks ago my resting calories jumped up by 200. Did the algorithm get more advanced?

On some models, the algorithm for calculating the Resting Calories was indeed adjusted by ~200 Calories, with the 2023Q1 firmware update. However, the adjustment did not raise the value, it lowered it. Verify the blue bars on your yearly reports for Calories: https://connect.garmin.com/modern/report/41/wellness/last_year - the change should be well visible, unless you change the weight frequently and strongly.

You can definitely see it! I’d add a picture if I could. I’ve been doing weight training for the last two months 5-6 days a week and am wondering if that’s impacting whatever Garmin in tracking. 

The change impacts the Resting Calories, and in consequence the Total Calories too. You can see the impact on the same graph, I mentioned previously.

Has there been any info on the update released by Garmin?