5.10 Treadmill calibration question

wondering how the calibration works with the new firmware. I run on a treadmill quite a bit due to work and family and use a garmin footpod. Since I use that instead of the accelerometer and have the calibration set to manual. When I get done with a treadmill run and set the distance does it set the value to the footpod?

Just wondering and also if this will help when I get 6+ miles into a run and my stride changes and the footpod value fluctuates.

Thanks in advance.
  • From my testing since this feature came out with the beta software, the new treadmill calibration only relates to calibrating the watch accelerometer derived pace/distance, known as wrist dead reckoning (WDR), on an indoor treadmill run. The foot pod calibration was left untouched by the process. So if you use a foot pod, you'll still need to calibrate that manually or use the factor auto calculated from an outdoor run.
  • Thanks for the reply and I was assuming that might be the case. I always use the footpod which is my go to and have it set to manual calibration.
  • It actually calibrates default source for distance. Noticed that when my MilestonePod failed and distance from watch was totally out of bounds
  • It appears that the treadmill calibration shows up in Garmin Connect, but that there is no correction in the file that gets pushed to third party websites such as Strava. Annoying
  • Thanks for the reply and I was assuming that might be the case. I always use the footpod which is my go to and have it set to manual calibration.


    So I would think that if one has a properly calibrated footpod, the treadmill calibration would be academic, as the footpod would give a more accurate distance, correct?
  • I normally wear a foot pod when running on a treadmill, but this morning only had the watch and an HRM-Run. I did a quick (for me) 2 mile run, and when I was finished I didn't get the option to calibrate, and the watch showed a total distance of 0.87 miles. Normally, the distance is about 10% below what my treadmill shows, but this is less than 50% of the treadmill distance. I made sure the chest strap was detected before I started.

    So, two questions:

    1.Any clue what happened? Is there a better way to get accuracy without the foot pod (I've got plenty of outdoor runs with this watch and strap, and didn't do anything strange like hold my arm still.) I did focus a bit more than normal on cadence, but nothing close to double or anything.

    2. Does anybody know what the minimum is before you get the 'calibrate and save' option? Obviously if it's based on distance its more than .87 miles.

    Obviously not a huge deal, but it would be nice to have the metrics right.
  • I normally wear a foot pod when running on a treadmill, but this morning only had the watch and an HRM-Run. I did a quick (for me) 2 mile run, and when I was finished I didn't get the option to calibrate, and the watch showed a total distance of 0.87 miles. Normally, the distance is about 10% below what my treadmill shows, but this is less than 50% of the treadmill distance. I made sure the chest strap was detected before I started.

    So, two questions:

    1.Any clue what happened? Is there a better way to get accuracy without the foot pod (I've got plenty of outdoor runs with this watch and strap, and didn't do anything strange like hold my arm still.) I did focus a bit more than normal on cadence, but nothing close to double or anything.

    2. Does anybody know what the minimum is before you get the 'calibrate and save' option? Obviously if it's based on distance its more than .87 miles.

    Obviously not a huge deal, but it would be nice to have the metrics right.


    Did you get an answer this? The first time the watch asked for a calibration and save inputted a totally wrong number and now it's way off. It did not ask me on my last tredmill run. How do we re-calibrate?
  • According to the user manual for the Vivoactive 3 the minimum for TM calibration is 1 mile or 1.5km.

    I don't think any Garmin watch uses running dynamics from the HRM-Run or HRM-Tri for pace or distance calculations.