New Instinct Owner with Questions

1) I dont know much about steps. But if you dont start walk or hike activity then it can calculates steps only from movement of arm. If you start activity "Hike" which has icon of person holding walking poles then I think, it could calculates steps from total distance and custom of Stride length.

2) floors count. I did start to used "watch mode = barometer" {you can find that in barometer settings} for daily activity. For MTB ride I am using altimeter mode. Anyway. I found that accuracy of floors count is much better. It is bit confusing because if you used barometer mode then altimeter is not changing at all.

When using poles your arm swing motion is 1/2 of your normal motion. As the watch is on your wrist, it makes sense (although incorrect) that you only get 1/2 credit for the actual number of steps taken.

Regarding floor counts, as mentioned below you need a slope of ~8 degrees (I heard this from a Garmin product manager). If you're not going up fast enough and steep enough, you won't get credit. I believe the algorithm somehow incorporates step count so with your step count halved, you probably need double the slope and twice the distance to get a single floor. When hiking, trails wander up and down, so unless it's steep you will get very little floor credit.

I wrote about this to Garmin over two years ago because I used poles on an 11 mile 2,400' elevation gain hike (the elevation came from the watch's own data file - and is accurate). I got 23 up floors and 141 down! I've been meaning to test my foot pods with hiking sticks so did it this morning on my standard ~1 mile neighborhood loop. The foot pod connected, the distance was correct, but my steps were half the usual and my floors were 1/3rd.

Garmin - please fix this by making the wearables actually use the foot pods for step counts on hiking/walking activities! The watch would then have the correct step count, altitude, and GPS information to correctly determine floors.