Zwift Rides No longer count towards Intensity Minutes

e7andy said:

Since is never has worked with Zwift no matter what you experienced the problem is something else here.

I don't know what this means. It used to work just fine. I haven't had any issues since I purchased Tacx Net 2T and signed up for Zwift about a year ago. Then, all the sudden it stopped working.

e7andy said:

Check the heart rate on your 935 during a ride and make sure it is high enough.

Well, yes, it is. It's still not as accurate as the chest strap HR sensor, but it definitely is showing high enough HR to count towards intensity minutes. That being said, I don't think it matters. I believe it used to take the data from the synced activity itself (i.e. Zwift ride activity pushed to the Garmin Connect), which, in my case has an accurate chest strap HR sensor data. The issue is that for some reason it stopped to take that data into account.

That being said... While writing this reply, I realized something: I just checked the HR data on my Garmin Connect and... apparently, there's no HR data synced to the Garmin Connect from the watch since March 2nd! Even though it IS being shown on the watch (i.e. it does show the current and the "past 4 hours" HR).

Somehow I didn't notice that HR data for the past days was missing. So, it might indeed be that Garmin was using the HR from the watch itself only to calculate the intensity minutes and, thus, doesn't calculate/report those anymore b/c of the missing HR data.

I tried restarting my watch and syncing it with the Garmin Connect and... HR data is not being synced! I do still see the current HR and the "past 4 hours" data on the watch, but nothing for the past days on the watch. And the Garmin Connect mobile app is not showing any HR data at all.

Well, at least now I know what the root of the problem is, I guess.

That being said, I still think it's ridiculous Garmin Connect doesn't take the synced activity HR (and other?) data into account in order to calculate intensity minutes. I just don't get it. It makes no sense to me whatsoever. The HR data is there and it's even more accurate than what I'd normally get from the watch itself (not to mention watch could have ran out of battery, etc). Why does it have to be ignored? Nonsense.

Kion said:

I still think it's ridiculous Garmin Connect doesn't take the synced activity HR (and other?) data into account in order to calculate intensity minutes. I just don't get it. It makes no sense to me whatsoever.

Intensity minutes are calculated on the device. If the device don't calculate the intensity minutes you will not get any intensity minutes. It is not done on the server. That is why it will not work with any device (or software) that doesn't support intensity minutes like Zwift or older Garmin devices.

Yes. It should be possible to calculate intensity minutes from the logged HR data no matter how it is reported, but that is just how it works. I even bought an extra Garmin (Vivosmart 3) just for the intensity minutes since my previous Garmin (920XT) didn't calculate intensity minutes.

e7andy said:

Yes. It should be possible to calculate intensity minutes from the logged HR data no matter how it is reported, but that is just how it works.

Indeed. That's my point. But I am not going to buy even more devices from Garmin in order to get my intensity minutes calculated properly just b/c Garmin can't handle the data properly. There's really no excuse for it. I really don't care (and I shouldn't) where they calculate it, on the device or on the server - they do have the data and they should be taking it all into account.

But yeah, I get it. That's how it works for Garmin and that's the number one reason why I am probably not going to continue using Garmin for my fitness tracking going forward. I need something more reliable.

It's pity b/c some years ago I switched from Fitbit to Garmin and really enjoyed that Garmin supported more activity types (e.g. rowing, which I couldn't get tracked on Fitbit back then) and had more detailed data compared to Fitbit (even though Fitbit have always had better UI/UX).

Looks like it's time to get back to the market research and see how things have changed since. Maybe Fitbit has upped their game since? Or maybe there are new players / worthy competitors on the market now?

Sadly enough, with all the issues Garmin has... it might still be the best one on the market in terms of sports/fitness tracking. As I said though, I need to do some research to see how things have changed during the past couple of years.

Kion said:

As I said, it used to work just fine, but stopped to work recently.

Intensity Minutes are calculated by the device (your Forerunner), hence if you did not or do not use it at Zwift rides it could never work and will not work. And if you use your Forerunner while riding Zwift, it did work and it still does work, assuming the FR gets the heart rate. There was absolutely no change.

If you do not get Intensity Minutes whle wearing the watch, then there are two main possibile reasons why it is so:

1. You do not reach or exceed 10 consecutive minutes where your heart rate is elevated above the threshold that is considered moderate intensity.
   
   
2. Your Resting HR is too high, for example because you do not wear the watch during resting periods and/or during sleep. For the IM, the ratio HR / RHR is deciding (~150% RHR for the IM level, and ~200% of RHR for the vigrous level of IM)

There was abslutely no change in the IM processing, and there is no relation to whether you ride on Zwift, or whether you record an activity at all.

trux said:

You do not reach or exceed 10 consecutive minutes where your heart rate is elevated above the threshold that is considered moderate intensity.

That's definitely not the case as missing intensity minutes were for the mid/high intensity rides.

trux said:

Your Resting HR is too high, because you do not wear the watch during resting periods and/or during sleep.

Nope, none of that either (my resting HR is below average for my age group and I pretty much never take the watch off my wrist, except when I need to charge it, i.e. for about an hour once every 10 days or so).

As I explained above, the issue seems to be related to the HR sync issue. I still have no idea how it was reporting intensity minutes for some weeks without having any HR data though (i.e. I do have intensity minutes calculated/reported for the past couple of weeks, even though Garmin Connect is missing HR data for the past month).

HR data is now showing up on the Garmin Connect app again (it wasn't after I synced with the watch right after watch restart, but appeared eventually, after a couple of hours or so), so I guess I'll be getting the intensity minutes too, but there was/is some sort of the HR vs Intensity Minutes data discrepancy there (aside from the HR syncing issue itself, that is - the latter, I believe, could have been caused by the recent firmware update - I should probably always restart my watch after firmware update, but I didn't last time, so maybe that's why HR syncing stopped working, no idea).

Whatever the issue was though, it's frustrating that I've lost a month of HR data and got inaccurate intensity minutes for the past couple of weeks. Not the end of the world of course, but once again - I believe the ultimate solution here is to take the data from all the sources into account (and use a server-side intensity minutes calculation, instead of the on-device approach, if that's what it takes to get it right).

Kion said:

As I explained above, the issue seems to be related to the HR sync issue.

The typical reason for missing HR data (and IM) is having multiple accounts associated with the device. That happens to people very frequently - there are daily a dozen of cases of people here on the forum alone. Every one of them would swear he/she never created a second account, but it then turns out it was the case anyway (the Sign Up button is easier to tap than the Sign In). And in the momnet you have two accounts, one part of the data may land on the wrong one. Sometimes it is the HR data, in other cases the Activity data.

The Master Reset of the watch usually helps too, because it forces you to reassign the device to the GC account, but normally it is enough (and in fact better and safer) to remove the device from GC Mobile, from GC Web, and from Garmin Express, signing out from all three apps, then signing back with the same credentials everywhere, and adding the device back to all of them.

You can read more details in the document Data is Missing from My Garmin Account After Syncing 

trux said:

The typical reason for missing HR data (and IM) is having multiple accounts associated with the device. That happens to people very frequently - there are daily a dozen of cases of people here on the forum alone. Every one of them would swear he/she never created a second account, but it then turns out it was the case anyway

I could swear I don't have two accounts, but I don't have to b/c I know I don't! :)))

Seriously though, I do only have one account for sure (yes, I checked).

As I mentioned earlier, after restarting the watch and waiting for a couple of hours, it started to sync HR data again. I believe the issue was related to the watch firmware update that happened around the same time HR stopped to work (I didn't restart the watch back then and will now remember to restart it after each firmware upgrade, even though I actually believe it IS restarting automatically after firmware upgrade... but maybe it needs to be restarted once again manually after that).

What's really frustrating is that Garmin relies on the device itself for the activity related calculations (e.g. "Intensity Minutes"), which, IMO is just unreliable. The calculation should be happening either on their servers or on the mobile app (I understand that doing it all on their server might not be as easy to do as it sounds - I'm a software engineer myself :)) and it should take all the data into account, no matter which source (e.g. Zwift) it comes from.

Kion said:

I could swear I don't have two accounts, but I don't have to b/c I know I don't! :)))

If the HR was not syncing to your account, then you indeed had multiple accounts. That's practically certain. I follow this forum since years, and saw hundreds of identical cases. Never there was a different reason for this issue. 

trux said:

If the HR was not syncing to your account, then you indeed had multiple accounts. That's practically certain.

And yet, that's not the case for me :) First of all, as I said, I checked. I only have one email tied to Garmin and it's the only account I have.

But if that wasn't convincing enough, I mean, the fact that all other data except HR was syncing properly (there's no way same device would sync some data to one account and the some other data - to another, right?) AND the fact that HR started to sync properly after watch restart (restarting watch wouldn't magically switch accounts data is being synced to, amiright? and then, as I said, I only have one account anyways :)).

So, yeah, it was purely a data sync issue. That's practically certain.

trux said:

I follow this forum since years, and saw hundreds of identical cases. Never there was a different reason for this issue. 

Well, following something for years doesn't mean it never changes...

And now we know there can be another reason for this issue! :)

So, in addition to the advice to check for a dupe account, there's now a second advice to restart the watch.

Kion said:

But if that wasn't convincing enough, I mean, the fact that all other data except HR was syncing properly (there's no way same device would sync some data to one account and the some other data - to another, right?) AND the fact that HR started to sync properly after watch restart (restarting watch wouldn't magically switch accounts data is being synced to, amiright? and then, as I said, I only have one account anyways :)).

Those are exactly the symptoms indicating you had the multiple account mess-up. Identical to every single case I see here on the forum every day, since years.

And as I wrote, the watch reset fixing it, confirms the diagnosis too.