Calories burn with and without heart rate monitor

to accumulate enough information to convince Garmin to straighten out whatever is wrong here.

Have you contacted Garmin Support? I agree with SCHINDER's statement that Calorie burn using HR is inaccurate with lower HR zones. I'm surprised that you device seems to vary that much though. I don't notice such wildly varying burns with my edge500 when I walk. I don't walk with it a lot though so maybe it's just something I've not observed. I'd think that they'd use another method for slower paces, but I don't know that for fact.

There may just be something wrong with your device that Garmin Support can determine and either get you another under warranty or provide a solution for your current device.

It's been a while since I looked at the first beat technology that Garmin uses in many of its devices (not sure about the 1000). I thought it used the change of HR over time as opposed to an average HR or such. So possibly a bad HR signal could throw out the calculation very quick.

Have you contacted Garmin Support?.

Funny that you mentioned that. I called Support Friday on another matter and got a recorded message stating that all of those people had the day off because their systems were being upgraded or maintained or something like that. Isn't that what weekends are for? Any way, I have been feeding a couple of people in the Vivo group a steady stream on this subject since it started to reveal itself last week. They have not responded but that is not unusual either.

I'm pretty sure that what is wrong with my device is buggy software. This is my second one. They replaced the first one after I showed them a phenomenon I have since named sensor shag. If you have a Vivosmart and an HRM. You too have sensor shag. More on that here: https://forums.garmin.com/showthread.php?176806-Double-pace-when-running-no-pace-at-all-when-running&p=492340#post492340. They are working on that but I digress.

I know just enough about Firstbeat to be dangerous. The Vivosmart does not incorporate it. My fenix 2 does. All Garmin HRM's support it. It uses heart rate variability (HRV) to quantify energy expenditure, training effect and recovery times. HRV is a measurement of variability from one beat to the next and—counter-intuitively—more variability is good.

I am recording all of today's activities on the fenix 2 as well but will wait until after all of the VS Activities are synced before I sync the F2. I want to be sure that some kind of Voodoo that attempts to reconcile the numbers from the two devices is not responsible for some of the bizarre numbers I am seeing. After three, two mile walks today, I have calorie values of 47, 132, and 103 from the VS using the HRM1B on the first and 3rd of those. Reading from the watch, the fenix provided corresponding values of 137, 167, and 142. More details to be provided at the end of the day.

Ok FL, with 700+ cals for a 2 mile walk at <4mph, and no HRM, tells me something is screwy. I don't think it's a common problem, but something unique to you.

If a 2 mile walk would be this incorrect for everyone, MANY people would have noticed it. I think it's local to you. I'd first guess the device, but seems you already got a replacement. Then comes settings. Things that impact your burn for something like this would include things like weight. Could it be that during this activity, your weight was incorrectly 1500 lbs when it should have been 150 lbs, or something like that?

Hi Jim. There was something screwy but it is a little hard to figure out and is an indication of some kind of bug. At the outset of that particular walk, my band was showing a non-blinking heart icon but no heart rate. I had no HRM on. I tried a couple of things to remedy this situation but finally gave up and set out. That Activity shows no HRM but had that way stupid burn number.

I have not changed any settings from yesterday to today. No more WAY stupid numbers but some pretty dumb ones with the HRM on nonetheless. Let's dive in:

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The numbers in the red boxes are the REALLY stupid ones. Frankly, all of the Garmin numbers are well below generally accepted norms. A few people have theorized that Garmin forgot to add the BMR back to the HR based burns but that is not enough to explain the difference.

I think most Garmin customers are coming at this from an athlete's point of view. They have their Edge, their Forerunner, their Swim. They bought the Vivowhatever to account for the other 20? hours of their day. That was my idea and I am far from calling myself an athlete. Unfortunately I am afraid that most Vivo purchasers have no baseline. They bought this instead of a Fitbit because they thought the HRM and Speed Sensor support made a difference for a would be athlete. Turns out ... not so much.

Again, you're getting very low heart rate numbers for an athlete, so you may be falling off the low end of an algorithm that they use when there's an HRM available. They may take the presence of an HRM as an indication that you want 1) actual calorie burn during the activity and 2) more serious numbers than the junk numbers they give using the accelerometer alone. Note that where your average HR was above 90, the count gets bigger by more than a factor of 2. Just out of curiosity, I'd try going out and keeping my HR below 90 the entire time and see what happens.

My conclusion, as it was when I used a Withings Pulse for 5+ months, is that these devices are useless to me. The numbers they give aren't reliable (even the one number they can actually measure, the "step" count). If they motivate you, then by all means keep wearing them, but realize that they measure very little and aren't accurate for even that. When the button on my Pulse started to fail, I simply took it off and didn't replace it.

Thanks Schinder. Before your reply I had embarked on a different strategy. My goal is to see what happens when the HR numbers are high. Specifically, I plan to do at least four 2-Mile runs today and compare the numbers with and without HRM and between the VS and the F2. I'll also compare the Shapesense Calculator output to the Calories-Calculator one.

As far as the reliability of the numbers go, I will agree that any numbers that devices like this give you are going to be wrong but that is no excuse for not making the guess as good as it can be. The worst estimates are off the cuff. Diary keepers do a lot better. Activity trackers do a lot better than that. Heart rate based estimation is generally regarded as better than motion measurement. Outside of the lab HRV based energy expenditure measurements seems to be the new gold standard.

Until Garmin's numbers start making sense, I am going to keep believing that they are doing something fundamentally wrong. If I am right, they can fix it. However, in my experience, absent a large body of compelling data to support your contrary position, Garmin engineering is never never wrong. That is why I am hoping to inspire others to contribute data to this cause. At the end of the day, I may be the one who turns out to be wrong but hopefully I will understand why.

For those interested in a sneak peek, here is the first run: https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/698006928. The fenix 2 gave me 208 calories for this one. The METS value is 218. The Shapesense and Calories-Calculator sites agree exactly at 282. Hard to say which of these numbers is right but it is a pretty good bet that the Vivosmart's 135 is at least a tad low :).

Until Garmin's numbers start making sense, I am going to keep believing that they are doing something fundamentally wrong.

One of the flaws in your 'science' though is that I as well as some others believe your device or HR monitor might not be working as Garmin intended. So all your effort is just proving that when something is broke, you will get bad data.

Interesting thread. Glad a PM referred me here.

I think the closest thing we could get would be for someone with a New Leaf profile loaded on their "other" fitness device to compare similar activities. Vo2max testing and loading a metabolic profile into a Garmin watch is basically as close as one can get to having a lab on your wrist during activities today. Curiously, Garmin seems to have removed this functionality from their latest generation of devices, probably because Life Time Fitness bought all of MGC's testing equipment and intellectual property in 2012 for a little over $1M, and you can't get a New Leaf profile anywhere other than LifeTime now as a result. Apparently, the Vo2Max estimates based upon your recorded activities now take the place of the previous "metabolic profile" stuff in the x10 series of watches.

EDIT: With New Leaf going out of business 3 years ago and selling their equipment to Life Time Fitness, it seems like you can't get any .nlf profiles for the watches that had metabolic profiles enabled. According to reports, they had major accuracy issues anyway. Vo2max testing at an experienced facility remains the gold standard; they'll give you a breakdown of fat metabolism vs. carbohydrate metabolism at varying heart rates. And the newer Garmin watches estimate this Vo2max based upon your run performances anyway, and reports suggest it's pretty darn close to reality. You can also reverse-calculate Vo2max based upon your run split times and use a variety of calculators to determine your likely calorie burn.

Thanks VR. That is certainly possible. I need the exercise anyway and this is more interesting than pounding the pavement without a cause.

It is also the reason I would love to get some similar data from others. If everybody else's calorie counts are reasonable and consistent then the freak from Miami with the cute research assistant has a second bad Vivosmart, a bad heart, or a serious cognition problem :).

BTW I went through a similar exercise before when the Vivofit was new to the market and Garmin new to the activity tracker game. It took a while but they finally got that sorted out.

Interesting thread. Glad a PM referred me here.

I think the closest thing we could get would be for someone with a New Leaf profile loaded on their "other" fitness device to compare similar activities.

Thanks for that txg. Got me thinking and I found a good but somewhat dated article here: http://www.dcrainmaker.com/2010/11/how-calorie-measurement-works-on-garmin.html. For those wanting a real deep dive on the New Leaf stuff, that is here: http://www.dcrainmaker.com/2012/01/look-at-testing-with-new-leaf-fitness.html.

BUT . . . even forgetting the absurdly wonky 800 calorie 2 mile Friday walk, the HRM on/HRM off differences I am seeing both walking and running don't require precision to six decimal points to stand out as a problem. Same guy, same workout, same day&#8212;with HRM X Calories&#8212;without HRM 2X calories. Even 2X consistently below alternative calculation methods. So far, this is holding true for my high heart rate running workouts as well. 223 without HRM and 135 with. The Fenix 2 with its magic HRV algorithm gave me 208 with the HRM and 245 without. Two runs down. Two to go.

I sure hope somebody else is out there collecting their own results.