Instinct Calories Not Updated After Editing Workout

Hi,

I did 1 set of push ups and my watch counted 21 reps (20 in reality) and counted 1 calorie. After this I edited my reps to 50 push ups to see if the information got updated. It didn't, still 1 calorie. Why is that? Do you have to change your reps on the watch itself before ending the workout if you want calories to be counted accurate?

Demonstration:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/z4Xqjav1qC8mY7HF6

0 Former Member over 6 years ago

Yeah okay, so if you only care about how many calories you burn in the end of the day there is no reason to track workouts since the calories will be the same anyways no matter reps and sets?

I think you may be a little confused on how your device works. Calories burned won't be the same if you're doing more or less sets or reps.. If you run a mile with a HR of "x" and burn 200 calories, you'll burn more calories if you run that same mile with a higher HR. Same goes for strength training. If you do 1 set of an exercise for 15 reps you'll have burned "x" amount of calories based on your HR for the time it took to do that set. If you did that same exercise for the same amount of time, but this time increased your HR because you did 20 reps in the same time frame, you'd burn more calories.

0 Former Member over 4 years ago in reply to Former Member

I think what he meant was : "if the calories only depend on the HR and not the reps, I don't need to track a specific activity to know my calories consumption since the watch tracks HR 24/7 anyways"

This being said, I disagree with that statement, since as was mentioned earlier :

Calories are counted by your HR, weight, activity class, etc for the duration of the exercise. If you did 20 reps and it calculated 1 calorie during that time period, it doesn't matter how many reps you change it too, the calories burned will be the same.

If this is true, then tracking the activity will make a difference as different activities will induce different calories consumption for a same HR.

As a test you can try to go for a 30min walk while tracking it and while keeping the watch in its passive HR measurement. When I did this test, I witnessed a higher calories consumption when I tracked the activity as when I didn't... which makes sense : if my HR goes +20 I could just be watching Brad Pitt on TV for all the watch knows, which -for all my admiration for him-, still burns less than a good walk

0 trux over 4 years ago in reply to Former Member

if my HR goes +20 I could just be watching Brad Pitt on TV for all the watch knows, which -for all my admiration for him-, still burns less than a good walk

The calculation is a bit more complex than just directly converting HR to Calories, but the selected Activity type or number of repetitions indeed do not matter.

In the calculation of the Calories burn, there are three principal factors involved:

The immediate HR
The HR Variability (showing the involvement of symphatetic and parasymphatetic branch of your ANS, the training stress, and the also for detecting the anaerobic threshold)
The daily average Resting HR

You can read up more about the way Garmin calculates the Calories on the website of Firstbeat (it's the technology Garmin uses, and recently also owns):

That's for the active part of the energy expenditure. The pasive part (the Resting Metabolic Rate or RMR) is calculated indeed on the basis of the gender, age, weight, height, and the Activity Class, as already previously stated by others. This part will be always present regardless whether you sleep, watch the TV, or do a hard workout.