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Intensity minutes vary wildly different between devices

I had a Vivosmart 5 which has been returned for a gps error. It tracked walks etc fine but gave a stupidly high mileage. In the interim I’ve got a vivosmart 4. Last week I did a walk with my vivosmart 5 and it gave me 205 intensity mins for a 10 mile walk. The breakdown was z4 2mins, z3 19 mins and zone 2 140 mins. Today I did the same mileage but a harder (steeper) walk and it recorded z4 4 mins, z3 64 mins and z2 113 mins. It gave me only 20 intensity mins!! Zone 3 & 4 were higher today but I only got 20 mins. The same has been true of a cardio workout - my vivosmart 5 would give 60 mins but the vivosmart 4 for exactly the same workout (dvd) gave 30 mins.

0 trux over 1 year ago

What is your setting for the Intensity Minutes on either of the watches? The default one, or did you change it to use HR Zones? If you use the HR Zones on both devices, are the zone tables set identically? If not using zones, was the Resting HR identical for both dates?

Otherwise, Vivosmart 4 uses an older algorithm requiring at least 10 continuous minutes above the HR threshold. Any periods shorter than that will not be counted, even if the HR is above th threshold.

Read more about it here: How Are Intensity Minutes Earned? | Garmin Customer Support

0 2189099 over 1 year ago in reply to trux

Hiya, thank you for this. I only had my Vivosmart 5 for 8 weeks and it’s being replaced so I’m waiting on the new one. I’ve never changed any of the heart rate settings on either watch - they were set to default.

My resting heart rate was 51 on 8th Feb when I did that same dvd workout and 57 yesterday so I assume that did make a difference although when I do these workouts I know my heart rate is c132 pretty consistently (I workout every day, and whilst it differs in length and type, the intensity is usually the same).

I did a 45min workout today and realised that the Vivosmart 4 wasn’t picking up my elevated heart rate at all so I suspect it’s the heart rate monitor that’s not working properly (it’s brand new out the box!).

I’ve only just moved over from a competitor of Garmin (the well-known one) after 7 years with them as I got fed up with what they were doing to the app and their watches seemed to break after about 18 months. So I’m less than impressed about the experience I’ve had so far! I’ll just have to wait for the replacement Vivosmart 5

0 trux over 1 year ago in reply to 2189099

2189099 said:
I’ve never changed any of the heart rate settings on either watch - they were set to default.

In that case they can be different on each of the watches. However, if you did not change the default setting of Intensity Minutes eiter, then HR Zones are not used at all for the IMs. They are based on the average of the Resting HR of last 7 days, and it may change considerably.

For any serious training, I recommend using a HRM chest strap. Wrist HR from the optical sensor will never be accurate enough, especially when you move. Besides that, the strap offers much more metrics, than the standalone watch (HRV, LTHR, Respiratory Rate, Performance Condition, Stamina, more accurate VO₂max, some models also diverse Running Dynamics, and more accurate distance and pace during workouts)