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Intensity Minutes do not work

puupulk
over 3 years ago

The Intensity Minutes feature clearly only includes tracked activities and ignores non-tracked (Move IQ) events – although it's supposed count both:

https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=pNU9nnDzzGAHmEavp9rpY8

I've walked 10000+ steps every day (bar one) this week – including long, brisk, continuous walks – but Garmin Connect only counted 5 Intensity Minutes for the whole week. So today I manually started a "Walk" activity, did a regular, leisurely walk and voilà, almost every minute of the activity counted as an intensity minute (although I even stopped a few times). That's not how this feature is supposed to work.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to puupulk

    Then you got automatic: "This is the default intensity minutes calculation used by Garmin. It’s derived by comparing your heart rate during activity to your average resting heart rate."

    It also says: "heart rate is elevated above the threshold that is considered moderate intensity"
    I can't find any info about what that threshold is. The same with the threshold for the number of steps.

    An idea could be that it is only using the heart rate for calculate your intensity minutes and not the steps. When you start an activity the logging of the heart rate is more frequent which will give the watch better heart rate data to calculate intensity minutes from or maybe the measurement was just better for that walk. Wrist heart rate is highly affected by the watch fit. Compare the heart rate data between those activities.

    To get the attention from Garmin in the forum it is better to post in the forum for the device: https://forums.garmin.com/sports-fitness/running-multisport/f/forerunner-55-series 
    Contacting support is a guaranteed way to the Garmin's attention.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to e7andy

    Yep, you might be right. I re-read the user manual and it says that "if heart rate is turned off, the device calculates moderate intensity minutes by analyzing your steps per minute".

    So it sounds like cadence is only taken into account when heart rate tracking is disabled. The Garmin Support website worded it differently.

    My heart rate tracking was not disabled but I had no resting heart rate set. Let's see if setting this to 'Auto' changes anything. If not, I'll contact support. Thanks!

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to puupulk

    Setting the Resting HR didn't help, unfortunately, but I did confirm that steps "earn" intensity minutes only when heart rate tracking is disabled. Today I went for a 5+ km walk, earned 0 intensity minutes. I then started a 'Walk' activity manually, slowly strotted around for 5 minutes and immediately earned 3 intensity minutes. Then I turned wrist-based heart rate tracking off, walked around some more (without recording the activity) and earned 10 more intensity minutes, most likely based on steps.

    So something still isn't working. I'll let support know.