First day with F5, one day too much

The obvious stuff...

1) Have you got all your body data entered properly in the watch and Garmin Connect Mobile? Height, weight, sex, activity class, wrist etc? Heart rate zones too?

2) One day is hardly a good sample of how a device is behaving. Did you do anything that could have given you an artificially high step count?

3) Contentious but serious point, how do you know your F3 was right and the F5 is wrong? Did you physically count and verify the steps on the F3? I'm not challenging you, just curious.

4) It shouldn't need saying but for every user on these forums having problems there are many, many more that aren't. By the nature of support forums, they attract people having issues or who have had issues, or those that like to tinker. Not those for which the device is working fine. (For info, I fall between those camps!).

It is possible that you have a dud but that what you describe don't necessarily sound like systematic issues with the F5. Please post some more data and we'll try and help you resolve your issues.

Thanks for the reply,

I have got everything in correctly as far as im aware. Im not sure about HR zones but i checked the max HR rate which is a standard formula. i have adjusted the stride length etc. its just counting way too much. for example, today says i done 8090 steps...in reality i have hardly moved except the odd potter around the house and i went for a short cycle (5 miles, one hour with my daughter, using garmin speed/cadence) that cycle states i burnt 650 cals which could be possible considering i do NO exercise.

but active cals today = 3015 for doing bugger all.

I have set all the other info, weight, height, age, wrist, exercise level etc.

Let me know what info you need and ill make it available.

Dont get me wrong, i love this watch but i just need to do what it says, its messing up my cals

Thanks for your help

Craig

Do you have negative adjustments enabled on MFP website?

https://myfitnesspal.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1084233-should-i-turn-on-negative-calorie-adjustments-
http://myfitnesspal.desk.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1084232-what-is-the-calorie-adjustment-in-my-exercise-diary

Thanks, I have enabled it, but i doubt it will make any difference and ill just go back to disconnecting it garmin from MFP.

This morning, its an equally crazy start, its 9:30 and states I have done 771 steps and 140 active cals.....all i have done is walked down the stairs (which it doesnt show) and grabbed coffee followed by sofa.

Im wondering whether it need a burn-in time to adjust, but i cant really see it, as it would need to realtime contact the mothership for analysis and update or modify algorythms on the watch.

I also wonder if it has to do with being a fat git, im not sure how to configure the HR zones for fat gits, it seems to treat everyone equally which cannot be right.

All this doesn't help the wildly inaccurate step count though, i mean i could understand it increasing active calories due to HR fat git + steps, but not the step count itself. I would of thought that the algorythm they use would be the same as the F3, but it seems not as the F3 for me is far more accurate.

Thanks, I have enabled it, but i doubt it will make any difference and ill just go back to disconnecting it garmin from MFP.

This morning, its an equally crazy start, its 9:30 and states I have done 771 steps and 140 active cals.....all i have done is walked down the stairs (which it doesnt show) and grabbed coffee followed by sofa.

So 140 for 771 steps for a gentleman of a larger build who isn't particularly fit isn't completely unreasonable. On the high side yes but not totally crazy.

More curious is why the registered step count is so high...

Im wondering whether it need a burn-in time to adjust, but i cant really see it, as it would need to realtime contact the mothership for analysis and update or modify algorythms on the watch.

As explained here the watch calculates the active calories, not GC 'mothership' as you put it.

I also wonder if it has to do with being a fat git, im not sure how to configure the HR zones for fat gits, it seems to treat everyone equally which cannot be right.

There are a large number of calculators for this but as you rightly point out the treat everyone equally which clearly isn't the case. Your wrist HR should help you establish your resting HR but the other zone thresholds will be more difficult to establish if, as you say, you are carrying a bit a extra and and your general cardiac fitness is on the lower end. The online calculators give an average and if you in a place where you are looking to improve then you are going to be on the lower end of that data set. The absolute accuracy of the results isn't of huge importance though. What is important is the trend, if your reported calorie burn per day is improving and you are losing weight and covering more distance in a relative sense then this is the key thing. If you can get yourself to a point where you are running flat out then you will be able to gauge you max HR more successfully empirically.

All this doesn't help the wildly inaccurate step count though, i mean i could understand it increasing active calories due to HR fat git + steps, but not the step count itself. I would of thought that the algorythm they use would be the same as the F3, but it seems not as the F3 for me is far more accurate.

I agree, this could be an issue. Could you maybe try manually counting the steps from getting up to get a true comparison with the F5 count? I'm not seeing this from my F5, it is broadly in line with my F3. As I said in my first post there is always a possibility of a dud watch.

I think this is quite telling. i have only had the F5 2 days, all other data comes from F3

After speaking with Garmin this morning, they told me to reset the watch, then if no improvement to go get it replaced.

So I did the following:

reset the watch
set it back up again

took photos of the steps/calories on this and my buddies forerunner
went for a walk
Took more photos at the end

compared with my buddy and i was about 90 steps out which is fine as we are different people and i have calibrated the stride on mine. I then used freemaptools to measure approx distance of the walk, followed by the mapmywalk calculator to see what the calories would be on their site.

It worked out to be very similar, so im guessing the reset helped a lot

Please let us know how it functions going forward.

Very interested in hearing if it works out for you after the reset.

It worked out to be very similar, so im guessing the reset helped a lot

Excellent news Craig! I hope it behaves itself going forward.

Excellent news Craig! I hope it behaves itself going forward.

Thanks, im a very happy bunny :) theres a lot of improvement over the 3. ill update later this week looking at how it performs.