Calories inconsistent with activity edit

4 years later I found the same bug.

It is not really a bug, rather an intentional purpose. You are allowed to edit the calories in the activity for your own review if you wish, but not in the stats and in the totals. Only values calculated by the device on the basis of the heart rate, HR Variability, avg Resting Heart Rate (and some other parameters) are accepted for that purpose. That's especially because Garmin is bound by contracts with 3rd parties (like insurance companies, or larger corporations), who often use this output for various health programs and health benefits. For evident reasons, they cannot allow far too easy editing of the data by the user.

i have a similar problem - which is that garmin (245) inaccurately records the # reps i have completed in a defined strength training workout (it typically massively undercounts).

So, i get that it may not be terribly accurate in detecting reps, that's fine, so then i go through the trouble of editing/updating the # of reps completed in the web app, but the # calories doesn't change.  I would think the # calories MUST be a part of the calorie calculation, as it directly relates to work (w=f x d).

Any way to adjust this, so that the calories adjust accordingly?  Presumably otherwise the calorie count will be MUCH lower than it should be.  Ideas welcome.

The reps have absolutely no effect on the way burned Calories are calculated. The watch does not need to know what you do and in how many reps, it measures the burned energy through the heart rate and the heart rate variability.

I am confused and surprised to learn Garmin is bound to insurance companies and not their paying customers.

e.g., for me Strength Training Functionality overshoots the tracking of calories spent by a considerable amount, usually registering double or more than the expected amount burned for an hour of a gym session. Understandably, calorie tracking for a gym session will be impossible to be accurate given the multitude of activities, repetitions, intensity and weights that watch has no way to (accurately) track. Surely Garmin cannot solely track calories based on heart rate and HRV, at the very least, it also accounts for the activity type (running, biking, swimming, weight training) if not also for the intensity of these activities.

So the question are:

1. Does Garmin utilize the original tracked results of these Strength Training sessions to calculate the Total Active Calories spent in the daily report? In my experience it seems so since every day that I work out at the gym my active daily calories is up by a seemingly corresponding amount.
2. If the answer to the above is yes, Shouldn't Garmin use the manually adjusted results to more realistically portray the actual active calories spend for the day? Thus improving the purpose of their product -- accurately tracking physical activities and data.

Even if Garmin is bound to insurance companies and whatnot, which is doubtfully true, (1) users can still game the data in different ways, and (2) the data is already considerably inaccurate -- and that's why we are looking to adjust it. Lastly,

• Has Garmin addressed these issues?

gekaram said:

Surely Garmin cannot solely track calories based on heart rate and HRV

Yes, it can. Principally, all what it needs to know is the volume of blood circulated (from your HR), and the volume of oxygen metabolized (estimated from the respiratory rate). From that it can estimate your metabolic rate with a rather good accuracy.

It assumes all the prerequisites like your weight, height, age, gender, 7 days avg Resting HR, Max HR, LTHR, VO₂max, etc are correctly set or acquired. If you are getting too high values of Active Calories from your strength workouts, then I would first check the values of all the listed prerequisites, and I would also verify whether the HR during the workout is accurate. Using a HRM chest strap is highly recommended for any serious training. The most common reasons for getting wrong values of burned Calories are wrong Resting HR, wrong max HR (it is not the highest HR you ever see in your stats!), or wrong weight.

Interesting! Thanks for the insight.

For caloric expenditure estimates, does it measure anything directly other than HR and HRV during a training session? Does it then infer the respiratory rate from HR and HRV? Are we saying that at any given HR and HRV the caloric expenditure is always the same across all types of activities, if all else is equal?

My Running sessions are in line with (or even below) the expected caloric expenditures. And it utilizes the same aforementioned prerequisite inputs, which are up-to-date and reasonably accurate. I quite often utilize the same chest strap during Strength Training.

gekaram said:

Are we saying that at any given HR and HRV the caloric expenditure is always the same across all types of activities

Yes, the energy expenditure is what your body burns (metabolic rate), and it does not depend on what you do, or how efficient you are at certain activity. You can burn quite a lot of calories while your performance may be miserable (if you are inefficient), and it can be also the exact opposite.

There is some detailed info available from Firstbeat Analytics (now owned by Garmin), and also a nice summary at DCRainmaker. They are both already rather outdated, but there is still some interesting information in it anyway.

• Microsoft Word - EE-white-paper_1 7 6_modified_corrected 2.doc (firstbeat.com)
• How calorie measurement works on Garmin fitness devices | DC Rainmaker