My wife commutes by bike and we've noticed she has a massive spike in her steps at the times she rides. She's using the Fenix to record the ride so the watch should not be counting steps. Anyone else have this issue?
lezavw90 if you look across the forum you'll see that this is a problem common to many of the devices. My 5+ gives me steps for swimming, kayaking sometimes driving! Antything where the accelerometer identifies movement of the wrist that it thinks equates to a step. Having said that "steps" are just a very crude metric to try and identify whether someone is being active or not. Does she get a resonable number of steps for the cycle - i.e. does it equate roughly to cadence for the ride or is it a stupid ridiculously high value? If the first then why worry - she is being active so don't see why she shouldn't get credit for it.
Thanks for the response. I use a Fenix 5x and don't have this issue. If I record a bike ride there is no steps (running on the other hand counts steps). The overall step count is not crazy high but she has an office job and it's nice to see you were more active at work not including the bike ride. Also step count adds calories burned so you are kind of doubling down with extra steps while riding and then the ride on top of it. This really shouldn't be hard for Garmin to implement. The moment you hit record on your watch step metrics is turned off.
lezavw90 I agree Garmin ought to be consistent - if they count steps for cycling on one device then really it should be the same on the others. As far as doubling of calories goes - are you sure that steps logged during an activity create calories burned in addition to the activity calory count?
When this has come up in the past, there tends to be polarized views on whether steps should be counted in an activity. What about running? If someone is making an effort to log 10k steps every day, and one day they run a marathon but only walk an additional 2000 steps have they failed to hit their goal? What about snowshoeing? Or other walking-based activities such as hiking? Even with some types of cycling you can end up walking/running some distance, either wheeling your bike or carrying it.
I think the best compromise would be if the user could set a "Include Steps" option on a per-activity basis. It's not going to improve on the issue of mis-identified steps, but at least it would give the user the choice of whether to include them in their step count.
I agree that giving the option per activity would be the best fix for this, It's probably not a big enough problem for most people though to make it into an actual update. Just as another data point, I rode my bike 50 miles on this last Saturday with a few thousand feet of elevation gain and ended up with less than 1000 steps at the end of it. I think those were actual steps that were taken in the morning before my ride when getting ready and walking out to my shop. I'm using a Fenix 5 Plus.
Also, now that I think of it, I've been described as a very "quiet" rider. Which means my upper body doesn't move much at all. I was also on fairly smooth roads and in aero on a time trial bike for most of the ride, so maybe not the equivalent of stop and go on bumpy roads in town on a commuter bike.
lezavw90 I agree Garmin ought to be consistent - if they count steps for cycling on one device then really it should be the same on the others. As far as doubling of calories goes - are you sure that steps logged during an activity create calories burned in addition to the activity calory count?
When you log your food and exercise in an app like My Fitness Pal. It takes your steps and exercise. When I go for a 5k run it will say "Garmin Connect 27 mins running 400 calories" Then it will also say " Garmin Connect steps 7500 300 calories" 5000 of those steps came from running. It's not a huge deal but it definitely should be something you can choose to opt out of.
lezavw90 Ah - OK - sounds like an issue with my fitness pal and the way it interprets Garmin data on top of the prolem with Garmin logging steps for som activity types and not others
Browner40 I've just swum for 45 minutes and I've gained about 1200 steps (which is roughly the number of strokes I've taken in the pool) - it's also logged me 59 Intensity minutes all of which clocked up after I got out of the pool :) - no idea how it arrives at that
yeah, that's a whole other issue there though. It would be nice if you could choose to disable step count on non-run activities, especially for something like swim or bike where you aren't stepping. Although I must admit I'm at a bit of a disadvantage for these step challenges(I have really long legs) and would probably leave them enabled for all activities anyways ;).
