Active calories and intensity minutes not added during activities

Former Member over 8 years ago

Hello,

I am new to fenix 5.

Oddly, I noticed that while I was hiking for hours using the built-in "Hiking" activity app, two strange things happened:
1. The active calories that the app recorded were not added to the total active calories that day.
2. The intensity minutes (Some within high heart rate zones) that the app recorded were not added to the intensity minutes of that day.

Did anyone else encounter this issue in this or other activities?

Gal

0 carl.andersson over 8 years ago

Question about your intensity minutes - where did you see that recorded for the activity? I don't ever see a separate intensity value for a recorded activity, but then I am using a Fenix 3.

As I understand the way intensity minutes work - you need to record a consecutive block of 10 minutes of moderate or intense activity in order to start accumulating minutes. So it's quite possible that your hiking activity didn't trigger as it the moderate parts weren't in parts of at least 10 minutes. It's hard to tell without seeing the actual activity on the connect site.

My experience over the past 2 years is that active calories from recorded activities almost never lines up with the calories in the app/connect website.
They also never add up to what you get in myFitnesspal if you have them syncing.

From what I've read the two are independent calculations. This is most likely due to the fragmented nature of Garmin's product lineup.

The total daily calories is a feature that grew up out of their basic activity trackers (so step/movement based). Those devices had no ability to track/record individual activities like going for a run etc.
The activity calories is a function of the dedicated running/multisport devices which originally had no all-day tracking features, so you would get a fairly accurate calorie burn for the activity but no all-day data.
Over time these two separate catagories have started to integrate and blur, but the back-end Garmin uses is still complex and often siloed so information can be different in different parts of the system.

It wasn't that long ago that steps from activities and all-day steps didn't line up correctly, and if you've seen how terrible the search function is for activities on the connect website (they even had to remove "text search" because they couldn't fix a bug) then you'd understand that Garmin are a bit stretched in terms of their software development.