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When walking slow, Garmin says you are not moving

9742419
6 days ago

Hello!

I recently did a hike in winter conditions, therefore a slow walking speed. In Garmin I see the total time correct, about 7h30m but it says I've been moving for only 1h30m. This is totally inaccurate. The export to Strava, however, says I've been moving for 3h30m, which is closer to reality. 

I assume this can be caused by a threshold that Garmin has on what speed to consider as moving. Can I override or configure this?

The watch is a Garmin Instinct 2 Solar

Thank you!

  • 0 6 days ago
    9742419 said:
    Can I override or configure this?

    You can try adjusting the auto-pause pace threshold, although it will rather impact the difference between the Time and Elapsed Time, and probably not the ratio Time / Moving Time. You can also enable the option 3D Speed in the settings of the activity - it may help with the threshold during steep ascents and descents.

  • 0 6 days ago in reply to trux

    I already disabled auto-pause and enabled 3D speed and 3D distance. 

    What is also funny is that on this hike Garmin Connect reports:

    Avg Moving Speed: 6.2 km/h

    Max Speed: 5.9km/h

  • 0 5 days ago

    There isn’t a way to configure this.

    At least as far as the pace data field on Garmin watches are concerned, I think the threshold for moving is 60:00/k. At least that what it was on my old Forerunner 935. Anything at 60:00/k or slower would be displayed as “—:—“ (“0:00” on newer watches.)

    Can’t say whether it’s the same on newer watches, and it’s not necessarily the same threshold that’s used for moving on Garmin Connect (which is calculated after the fact). I did a bunch of searches, and while some Garmin sources do mention there is a threshold for movement as far as moving time goes, they refuse to mention what it is.

    Strava uses a threshold of 30:00/mile for running:

    https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articles/216917157-Strava-Training-Glossary-for-Running#:~:text=The%20moving%20threshold%20is%20anything,shown%20on%20the%20GPS%20device.

    “The moving threshold is anything faster than a 30-minute mile pace for running activities.”

    Since 30:00/mile is 18:39/k, I guess it’s safe to say that the moving threshold for Garmin Connect is a lot faster than 60:00/k. Alternatively, perhaps Strava uses a much slower threshold for hiking activities.

  • 0 5 days ago in reply to FlowState

    Do you have a sense of what your actual average and minimum paces were? Unfortunately, to keep the y-axis scale of pace graphs reasonable (as pace is basically 1 / speed), every platform, including the Garmin Connect website and app, will pick some arbitrary minimum (slowest) pace for y-axis, which means any paces slower than the minimum will be displayed as the minimum. (A speed of 0 is technically a pace of infinity minutes per km or mile, so obviously they need to pick *some* minimum)

    For one of my interval runs where I moved slowly and stopped during rest intervals, the website showed a minimum pace on graph of 25:00/k, while the app showed a minimum pace of 9:00/k ish. You can get around this by temporarily changing the activity type in Connect to cycling, which will cause speed to be graphed instead of pace. Since the speed graph goes all the way down to 0, there’s no issue with not being able to see how slow you really went (and when you came to a stop).

    So you could:

    - temporarily change the activity type to Cycling, to get a graph of speed (so slow speeds are properly represented)

    - try to “eyeball” various thresholds to decide which one would look like it would produce 1:30 moving time out of 7:30

    You could also export the FIT file from connect and open it with www.fitfileviewer.com, to get a graph of speed. One advantage is that you get speed in its original format [m/s], with 3 decimal places.

    On a side note, I can say for sure that the threshold for moving (as in moving time) is not the same as the threshold for being idle (in the run/walk/idle detection feature for running activities), as I have an activity where the difference between moving time and total time is 25 seconds, but the idle time is given as 4 seconds. The support article for run/walk/idle detection says that you’re considered idle when your cadence is 0 and your speed is 0.03 m/s (or roughly 555 min/km), which is way too slow to be plausible for the moving time threshold anyway