I only noticed the auto-sets feature in strength workouts this morning. I assume this was added in 3.53 beta. I have to say it works pretty well. It determined when I was doing a set and counted reps (pretty close) and spotted the end of a set and the start of a rest period. Much kudos to Garmin for this. I noticed that if I had a poor form ( a couple of times :) ) it would fail to spot the set, but if I kept good workout form it was pretty accurate.
The auto set beta has been there all along (also rolled out to Fenix 5 and 935 a while back). The only thing I have noted is you need to be doing 5 or 6 reps or more to get it to trigger, so no good when you’ve upped the weight for a final set when you know you’ll fail at 1or 2 reps. But you just manually start and finish the set in those scenarios.
I only discovered this a few weeks back and agree that it’s pretty impressive, especially how well it guesses at what exercise you’re doing just from the motion of the watch.
As well as consistent form being important, I’ve also noticed that if I change the speed of an exercise (e.g. I realise I’ve done my first few curls in a set too quickly so I slow down a bit for the rest of the set) then it can also get a bit confused.
Both A) when I push the handle forward-upward sitting, and also B) when I lean backward on another equipment there are either breaks resulting in rest or some of the movement is too short to be recognized.
False breaks are more common during B), while not counting properly is more common during A).
Pulling down a handle above your head until your *** or shoulder, or pulling backward a handle horizontally (like in case of rowing) are calculated properly. Always. I never saw a single miss at all during these exercises.
And certainly there are those when your watch has no chance to count anything like lifting your legs while you are hanging resting your lower arms on some pads horizontally and grabbing a knob or whatever it is called in English.
Or when you rotate your body horizontally while sitting on a sort of chair.
I concluded that while rep counting is a nice feature I use Strength only measuring the total elapsed time in the gym and the calories burnt. And since WHR or lets call it OHR is not reliable at all, therefore calories are not accurate either, then the whole recording is about when I visited your gym and how much time I was there excluding the technical breaks :-). If you wish to record your net time, which says nothing btw, because leaning backward can be done for minutes and minutes, while pulling down a handle cannot, the you can use the manual start and stop.
