Garmin Active Calorie Adjustments

You burn Active Calories whenever your heart rate is higher than the Resting HR, during the day and night. And the higher the HR, the more Calories you burn. Also the respiratory rate has an impact on the number of Calories you burn.

1. What is resting and what is not?
2. Where can I see a breakdown of the active calories?
3. What if I'm rowing indoors and my HR is not resting but my workout is being recorded into an app that will later be uploaded to Garmin? Does the calories get double counted?

400 calories for getting out of bed and driving less than a mile down the road is not a 400 calorie burning event. Something is wrong.

Droogles said:

What is resting and what is not?

How Is Resting Heart Rate Calculated on My Garmin Watch? | Garmin Customer Support

"Daily RHR is calculated using the lowest 30 minute average in a 24 hour period."

The 7-Day average is then used - that term is also explained in the document. Any heart rate above the RHR value is active (not resting)

Droogles said:

Where can I see a breakdown of the active calories?

In Garmin Connect, on the Calories page, you can see the resting and active Calories breakdown of the daily Calories. You can also see the breakdown in the details of individual activities, in the details of each respective activity.

Droogles said:

What if I'm rowing indoors and my HR is not resting but my workout is being recorded into an app that will later be uploaded to Garmin? Does the calories get double counted?

As long as you wear your watch with the wrist HRM on, or a HRM strap connected to it, the Calories are counted in the same way regardless whether you log an activity or not. Imported activities should not change the daily Calories in such case. You can verify it, by noting the daily Calories values before and after the import.

So Garmin’s estimated calories burned during exercise is used for instead of, for example, what ErgData calculated using a power meter? 

I just rower for about 6 minutes and burned 70 calories per the power meter but Garmin reported 90.

As a side note, why am I seeing active calories AND my workout in MFP. That workout was in Garmin Connect. Based on what you’re saying, I’d expect it to be accounted for in the active energy. This is a hot mess.

It's been a while since I used myfitnesspal, but I'll take a shot at it.  Basically what you are seeing here is that MFP expects you to burn 1730 calories today.  Garmin shares your workouts and your all day heart rate information, which MFP then uses to project out to the full day based on the kind of day you are having.  So, if you are being super active, it assumes you will be super active all day.  In this case it thinks you will actually burn 2,146 calories total today based on what Garmin has shared.   Added on to this, it looks like you have also logged a workout for 183 calories that I think it is adding the Garmin numbers, so it's getting double counted.   If you are wearing a Garmin watch while doing an activity (whether you record it or not on the watch), I believe you should not also record it in MFP.       Again, it's been a while so some of this may be outdated or wrong.     

Did you manually enter the workout in MFP?   Did you record it as a workout on your Garmin watch?  What does the calories screen in Garmin Connect look like at the same time it looks like this in MFP.  All of those would help explain what's going on. 

This is wrong for anaerobic for the row I just did. Zone 5 shouldn’t be >156. I’ve had my Max HR set at 190 from the beginning. Anaerobic or Z5 should be 190 * .90 or 171:

I do not use MFP since a few years either, so do not know whether something changed, but there is an option in MFP settings controlling whether or not adjusting the Calories with the activities from Garmin Connect. In the time I used it, the default value was wrong, if I remember well, so it may be worth of checking, if you experience any discrepancies between GC and MFP.

Droogles said:

This is wrong for anaerobic for the row I just did. Zone 5 shouldn’t be >156. I’ve had my Max HR set at 190 from the beginning. Anaerobic or Z5 should be 190 * .90 or 171

Is it an imported activity? If so, then you probably have the HR Zones on that device set wrong. Or the external applications exports the HR Zones incorrectly. Try recording a workout with your watch instead, and then compare the HR Zones. 

Droogles said:

So Garmin’s estimated calories burned during exercise is used for instead of, for example, what ErgData calculated using a power meter? 

I just rower for about 6 minutes and burned 70 calories per the power meter but Garmin reported 90.

Very well possible. The power meter measures the mechanical output, while Garmin measures the metabolic rate of the body. Although there is certainly a relation between those two, it does not mean your body cannot burn more than is necessary for the mechanical work.