Swimming Intensity Minutes (Again!!)

I'd be interested in some feedback from anyone at Garmin as to what happens with intensity minutes during a pool swim activity.

My understanding is that I don't get any intensity minutes during the activity itself but do get some immediately post activity due to a period of elevated HR.

My recent observations however show that this is not entirely true.

Today before my swim I had 289 intensity minutes

Immediately after saving my swim activity I still had 289

As I walked down the poolside looking at the watch face my minutes jumped from 289 straight to 299 - and I had only been out of the water for about 2 minutes absolute maximum.

My intensity minutes are now at 329 as I write this - having been sitting down since swimming and changing. So I have accumulated 40 intensity minutes since leaving the pool.

In addition I have also seen increments to my Vigorous intensity minutes following a swim even though this is less frequent.

If there is a Garmin person who can elaborate on how this works then I'd be interested to hear

0 chatlow over 6 years ago

Assume you are not wearing a HRM tri or swim strap? If not then there's no HR data at all as optical is turned off during activity so I wouldn't expect any extra minutes as no intensity factor would be calculated.

As for it going up straight after you've finished, this is likely because the OHR is back on again, soaking wet and giving a very high skewed result. Mine was showing 140 when i was sat in the car for two mins after a swim on tuesday because the contact between sensor and skin was still wet. Dried off and it shot back down to 60 odd.

That said free minutes == free coffee at SB with my Vitality lol

Cheers

0 JSRUNNER_ over 6 years ago

chatlow - even if you wear HRM-Swim you don't get intensity minutes in a swim activity. It's not giving unreasonable results at the point that it shoots up as I have already dried my arm and watch. However the point is not that it is registering BPM > threshold but the fact that it records 10 intesnity minutes in under 2 minutes after stopping the activity

I'm just trying to understand the logic in the background

0 chatlow over 6 years ago

Ah yeah, you're right, its a min of 10 mins to count towards intensity minutes. Wasnt sure about using HRM with swim activities.

I'm out of ideas then sorry!

0 JSRUNNER_ over 6 years ago

chatlow just hoping that a Garmin person may enlighten me - just curious more than anything :)