My new Fenix 5x is giving me wildly lower calorie burn than my previous 4 sevices, which included a Garmin 610, 630, vivo smart and a tracker from another company. While doing the same tennis workouts/drills, and volleyball tournaments, the calories burned are coming out considerably lower than my previous workouts - less than half of the previous calculations. For instance, a two hour tennis drill session used to burn about 1200+ to 1800 cal. The calorie burn according to the Fenix 5x for the same drill session is about 650-750 cal. My other trackers read a significantly higher calorie burn, and according to MyFitnessPal and Livestrong, those activities should be bruning about 1450 calories (and actually, the drills should burn many more calories than actual match play). For volleyball, the readings are similarly low. These are high level, competitive workouts. I played both sports in college and professionally, and am still competitive even at my age (54). I spoke with the Garmin people, and they said that it was because my heartrate was very low and my vo2max was very high, meaning I'm in very good shape. However, I'm in worse shape than I've probably ever been in, and definitely much worse shape (after coming back from a few surgeries) than 1 year ago when the other readings were taken. Anyone have any ideas? Stats: 54yo, 6'1", 190 lbs, RHR 47-50, (yesterday's workout) Ave BPM 96, Max HR 146. This was a a workout with a college player and he gave out before I did. Lots of sweat, changed shirts twice. Just seems odd, all things considered. Help please.
I bought a Fenix 5 Shaphire last week coming from a Polar M600 (OHR with 6 led). Compared with my previous tennis session reading Garmin seams really out of the ball park for HR and consequently for the calories. Just to be clear M600 OHR reading where in line with V800 HR (Chest strap H6). A the same time running metrics seams in line with my previous products, so I trust that with some tweak Garmin can adjust... why they do not develop a custom activity for Tennis? Next time I'll test F5 with the H6 Chest strap.
Have the same problem. My weight is 112 kg. Yesterday I biked 39 miles with an average speed of 28.7 km per hour. The average heart rate of 145 beats per minute. The trip took one hour and 22 minutes. And I Garmin fenix 5x showed that I only burned 129 calories!!! It is very small. With me went the other. He has a Garmin Forerunner 920XT. He's got about the same values of time, speed and distance. But calorie consumption has already 864 kcal! With its weight of only 77 kg. two days ago I was walking with included exercise "walking" for half an hour and I clock counted 136 kcal!
April 25, 2019: I have a Fenix 5x for the last few months after having a 935 for a number of years. I have used an HRM chest strap on both for indoor swimming (I do about a mile to 3,000 yards for my practices. I used to log off about 500 to 700 calories for 60 to 90 minutes of swimming at about 2 min per 100 type of pace on the 935.
EVERY online calculation (Endless Pools, US Masters Swimming, My Fitness Pal) with my weight (Garmin 5x knows it) and time, and stroke, and distance and etc etc etc. all come out for about 600 plus calories for 1,650 yards and 30 (472 calories) to 39 minute (613 calories) rate. .......and NOT 225 calories that Garmin and the Fenix 5x and my TRI/HRM heart monitor are reporting? I mean I am complimented if you think my VO2 and fitness level is so fantastic and my 13 strokes per length make me an efficient Olympian...... HOWEVER the truth is I had a meniscus operation 4 days ago......was dragging both my legs on a trolley and was REALLY pumping some serious O2 and HRM levels as it was HARD work!! I think my calories should reflect an accurate burn rate???
Seems like some flawed algorithms or profile assumption? A friggin slice of cheddar cheese burned in a mile of swimming???
There are a couple of possibilities here. Depending on the number of workouts you've recorded with your Fenix 5X it may not have fully adapted to you yet. The FirstBeat algorithm Garmin uses adapts based on past workouts so it can be inaccurate if it doesn't have enough data to work with.
You should also double check your heart rate settings such as max, and zones. Even if you had these set correctly it seems that occasionally a software update to the watch will reset them and they need to be changed. This could be fairly relevant in your case since 111 BPM (your average for your swim) is lower than what is typical for a hard workout so if that's accurate I'm guessing your max and zones are lower than typical and making sure these values are accurate is important. Hope this helps.
