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Active calories inaccurate?

Former Member over 4 years ago

I’ve been using a garmin FR945 for the past two months and today I noticed something very strange.

I did a 7K walk for around 2 hours and recorded around 11,000 steps for the whole day - note that I did not start an activity on my watch when i was walking - it only shows up as an move IQ event.

After the walk I checked on garmin connect the calories for the day and I see only 125 active cal! This is definitely not correct since I had around 400 cal on a similar walk two days ago which I recorded as a walking activity.

My heart rate for the walk today was between 65-85 bpm and connect IQ has registered the 2hour walk correctly.

I checked some past days with no run or walk activities but a high number of steps and I see the same pattern. While I clearly did some walks and the heart rate was tracked the active calories are surprisingly low.

I have entered all my data (age, weight etc) in garmin connect so this shouldn’t cause the problem.

Does anyone have an idea what might be going on here? My FR945 is running software v5.50.

Thanks!

0 trux over 4 years ago

My heart rate for the walk today was between 65-85 bpm and connect IQ has registered the 2hour walk correctly.

Well, the 65-85 bpm is not really high enough to guarantee any high Calories burn. Besides that, it is not only the HR alone that is used for the Calories calculation. It is also (and especially) the HR Variability. The higher the HRV is, the less your body is stressed, and the less it burns energy (though the formula is a bit more complicated than that).

It would be interesting to find two similar days, and comparing the HR graphs, the Stress graphs, the Resting HR and the Max HR for given days (some of the data can be retrieved on the Reports page)