Question: Sportmode: hiking, trail run, mountain climb / mountaineering

I do stairs every morning bc I'm a psycho who likes to see the floor count go up haha. 

I own a wahoo tickr hr strap that has always worked amazingly well for me. For $40 don't buy any other hr strap! Unless you swim. Not sure if you can swim in this. 

Anyway I tested hr with strap/phone combo and simultaneously with watch. At resting numbers were identical. Going up flights 11 floors x2 heart rate on wahoo got north of 165 and Garmin never crossed 115 (no activity selected). I switched the activity to "floors" and then did the stairs again and Garmin got up to I believe 150 when I reached the top and wahoo read 170. The wahoo was correct.

I was wearing watch the same and tests were done within 10 min of each other. Definitely some soft cap action going on. Im fine with this and ALWAYS use wahoo chest strap when running when I care about HR. And Garmin is always perfect when I'm not working out. But just want people to know that if you pick wrong activity HR will be off big and it isn't bc OHR sucks. It is just programmed this way bc other brands complain about super high random spikes in HR and I think Garmin wanted to have most reliable reading. If you change activity during workout stop the activity and switch it on watch (or us multisport or just generic cardio for non strength stuff etc). I'm assuming cardio probabaly allows high heart rates but simply haven't tested them all. I just use run 98% of time bc I'm a runner. 

Did one last test this morning on my 945. Used cardio mode and did 10 minutes of stairs. I checked manual pulse over 10 seconds towards end of my workout then multiplied by 6 and garmin watch was spot on (just under 160 bpm). Over my last two tests I did wear the watch one notch tighter on the band so technically I changed 2 variables (activity and tightness). I probably won't do a third test but if I was going to it would be no activity selected with watch at new tightness level and see how that tracks on a 10 min stair climb. 

For now my biggest pointers are make sure watch is tight. No matter what you do you shouldn't be able to lift it off your skin. And choose the proper activity that most closely matches what you are doing. If need be create a copy of an activity and rename it and change the data screens. Cardio mode seems to be good for general movement at elevated heart rate and will probably be my go to when I don't choose biking, swimming, or running. 

Lastly, clean the back of watch before and after each physical activity or you have no shot at an accurate HR. This will probably be my last post on the topic. Happy workouts guys and gals

trux said:

while I was changing many activity types on my watch, and the value on the watch remained on the same level, regardless of the activity type chosen.

trux said:

I'll do the test happily again.

I don't think doing the test over is necessary, nor was our bickering back and forth. I just discovered the Instinct has the Elevate 2 sensor while the F6, 945 and 245 (the three watches with issue) use the Elevate 3 sensor.  Different hardware, different software. This explains why ForeKing, Who Knows and I have it, but you're unable to replicate the problem.  I just tried it on my backup 935 (Elevate 2), and was unable to replicate it either. No hard feelings?  I can be a bitchy broad at times. 

tess said:

No hard feelings?

No problem. I do not take arguing on forums seriously. It is fun, although sometimes it may not look like one

I'm glad to hear that.