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Exercise load for hiking/climbing a mountain is WAY off.

Peter Daniels
13 days ago

I climbed a mountain yesterday (Columbia Point in the Sangres). 9 hours. 5600 ft of elevation gain. 14 miles. HR was mostly green, some orange, some blue for 6.5 hours. Hiking activity exercise load was 212. I rode my mountain bike for 35 minutes today. Load 80. The 9 hr mountain climb was definitely more than 2.6 times the load of the 35 minute bike ride. I don't care if I briefly got into the orange and red. PLEASE adjust the load algorithm for events like this.

  • 0 13 days ago

    I'll copy-paste what I wrote yesterday on another part of this forum. Doesn't solve your problem but helps explaining why you got the loads you got:

    The Garmin Training Effect and Exercise Load estimate peak EPOC, basically the effect on the cardio-vascular system (which can be estimated by measuring heart rate). Hiking and walking often mainly cause muscular fatigue, which is more difficult to measure. 

    Another thing affecting the scores is that even if you occasionally get your HR up during hiking and walking, it's followed by easier periods, during which your cardio-vascular system recovers (your muscles, not so much). That's why those zone 3 peaks during hiking don't give as much load as running mostly in zone 3.

    Here's one paper describing the EPOC estimate in Training Effect: www.firstbeat.com/.../white_paper_training_effect.pdf

    And (being also an avid backpacker) I too would like Garmin to come up with a metric that also takes muscular fatigue in long lower effort activities into account. But I understand it's a difficult match. If you have connected your account to Runalyze, its TRIMP metric seems to take low-effort activities better into account. But it underestimates high-intensity activities in my experience.

  • 0 12 days ago in reply to Bitti

    Thank you . I still think there is some incorrect calculation of Load even just using Cardio (HR).  I was in the green or orange (>122 bpm) for roughly 85% of the first 5 hours of my climb. This isn't an occasional spike - I gained 5600 ft of elevation. 

    And yes, Garmin should ALSO build something that takes into consideration muscular fatigue - esp. for recovery and training recommendations. People could get hurt overdoing it.