Change of HR zones in saved activity possible?

Hi.  I know this is 6 years old but has this changed? Is the feature available. Interesting response about use case...what about the use case where, having provided my DOB details during the setup process, get Garmin to recognise my heart rate zones automatically without requiring me to submit them? Simple yeah...but maybe not for Garmin.

8577876 said:

Garmin to recognise my heart rate zones automatically without requiring me to submit them? Simple yeah...but maybe not for Garmin.

Even for Garmin. The option is indeed there, although it may not be available at older models. Much better than using the max HR, is using the Lactate Threshold for the HR Zone table, though. You have to enable also the option Auto-Detect for the Max HR respectively for the LTHR (depending what method for the HR Zones you chose)

8577876 said:

Interesting response about use case...what about the use case where, having provided my DOB details during the setup process, get Garmin to recognise my heart rate zones automatically without requiring me to submit them? Simple yeah...but maybe not for Garmin.

If you mean that Garmin should set your HR zones based on age, they could do that but IMO it's not a good idea, because the standard Max HR = 220 - Age formula (and related variants) aren't reliable.

I think a good compromise would be for Garmin to walk you through the process when you set it up. (e.g. it could ask you what it thinks your max HR is, and whether you want to turn on auto detection.) TBH I forget how it actually works.

The assumption was that the reason why Garmin was asking my age was to setup a fitness base, not just to market to me.

This will cause you to overtrain (personal experience).

The least Garmin could do is:

a) warn people about this issue ( and how to change their values accordingly), they sure like to send me weekly specials so, they know how to get in touch with me.  

b) once the issue corrected at least give you the ability to adjust your workouts based on correct HR thresholds

(I have over a year worth of workouts with the incorrect HR threshold information).

I've been over exerting myself for over a year because of this, there is nothing on their quick documentation regarding this issue or even a warning about how their default settings will HAVE a negative impact on your health.

This is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

I'm sure glad to not be the only one who was misled by the "enter your age".

This is borderline negligence.

Don't get me started on how lousy it is at tracking distances accurately, or moving speed. 

I expected more for the money spent on their devices as they are not cheap.

4544709 said:

Garmin not making a minimal effort to populate the values correctly leads people to believe that all we need to do is enter our age. This will cause you to overtrain (personal experience).

Not sure what you mean by the correct values. Garmin uses the formula 220-age at males and 226-age at females. You can verify it by resetting your watch to the factory defaults and then configuring it, entering your gender and age. Directly on the watch, without connecting to Garmin Connect, to avoid the transfer of previously used values.

If the Max HR auto-detection is enabled, the value of Max HR will be then overridden if a different value is detected at a max effort, of course. 

All this is documented in How Are High Heart Rate and Max Heart Rate Values Calculated on My Garmin Watch? | Garmin Customer Support

This was not the case with either of my devices Edge, and Fenix, I had to update the values manually.
Irrespective of how the thresholds are set, there stills needs tome a function to update the thresholds after the correction has been made on recorded workouts. 

New workouts reflect the change, but I cannot change the previous workouts to adjust accordingly, this has an impact on how most of the performance metrics are calculated.

4544709 said:

New workouts reflect the change, but I cannot change the previous workouts to adjust accordingly, this has an impact on how most of the performance metrics are calculated.

Changing the zones later would not have any impact on the metrics already calculated anyway, since the waste majority of the metrics is being calculated on the device in real-time, using the parameters valid at that moment. There is no post-processing of the data in Garmin Connect.

Also, your HR zones could actually change over time, as our max HR decreases with age. If you use zones based on calculated resting HR, then your zones will also change as your fitness (and resting HR) change. So it wouldn't be correct for Garmin to automatically go back and adjust your zones for old activities.

But yeah, like trux said, adjusting old workouts won't change any of your performance metrics. It's all done on the watch in real time. (Editing old activities and copying them back to the watch won't change any performance metrics either.)

Bought a new Venu2 and somehow my Cycling zones which I know are reliable for my age got screwed up. TBH not for the first time in my experience. So I now have a series of activities that could do with modifying, as although I admit it is my fault for not checking...........but you can modify distance time etc if you need too (ie if it takes a while to lock onto GPS for distance) and it overrides the recorded data. So surely it is not a big deal.to expose the HR zones for an activity so that it could be edited and re-calculated?