I worked out my custom stride length as I was a bit confused by the step counter and distance ratio on the watch and in connect. I don't know whose stride length they have being using but steps to distance calculations are really bad.
After entering my custom stride length of 0.79metre a few weeks back,
accuracy checked against the average man's walking stride length of 0.78 as seen here https://livehealthy.chron.com/determine-stride-pedometer-height-weight-4518.html
Over a set distance that my Garmin Instinct, Forerunner 35, my phones GPS, several routing apps has deemed to be 1 mile on a consistent basis, I walked the route again using the Instinct with hiking activity running without GPS, and my mobile using strava with GPS.
Walking this distance up to the mile point my instinct registered 0.83 miles.
Strava 1 mile.
Now walking back strava registered 2 miles and the Instinct being even further out.
Strava showing full walk GPS phone tracked.
The amount of steps taken during activity used to show up after and when used with my stride length actually tallied up very accurately with the GPS distance.
So my question would be, why is my custom stride length not being taken into account during activities without GPS to more accurately track distance? Why is the watch not at least using the mens average stride length as a base for providing a steps multiplied by average stride length to assess distance?
The only thing that seems to have changed since I updated my stride length a couple weeks back, is that connect now seems to have increased the distance per steps in my daily step count tracking metrics.
You may ask why I would want a GPS watch to track activities accurately without GPS. Well, I present you this review and the idea that you can use the watch as a traditional ABC device over long hikes not using GPS to save battery. For. Instance, the reviewer mentions the distance tracking being poor but Ultratrac GPS being even worse for. Measuring distance.
"I usually turned the GPS off in order to save battery. The watch has 14 hours of battery with the GPS on; however, I did not want to have to fully charge the watch every night. I tried using the UltraTrac GPS mode (this sends out less frequent GPS pings and extends the battery life to 40 hours). Unfortunately, when I compared the UltraTrac with the mileage indicated on my maps, I found the UltraTrac distance data was no more accurate than not using the GPS. Instead, I relied on step data to measure distance. With the GPS off, the speed and distance measures were not very accurate. But the altimeter, the watch’s most critical function, worked great."
https://www.treelinereview.com/gearreviews/garmin-instinct
The most frustrating thing about this is that if the device implemented by custom stride length, it would be pretty accurate. My £25 Honor band 5 that doesn't have a custom stride length, but learns your average stride length from times you have used connected GPS by the distance travelled to steps taken ratio, performs without GPS when tracking the same 1 mile distance pretty much spot on with the GPS trackers,which is what the Instinct is capable of doing if it implements my average stride length metric into non GPS activities.
All the custom stride length does at the moment is update your step graphs distance.
