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Extremely Strange Calories for Two Activities (One Must Be Wrong)

Vansos
over 4 years ago

I know that calories burned during an exercise is just an algorithmic estimate that shouldn't be taken completely seriously, but, I've always assumed it was simply based on time and average heart rate for the most part, so, that relative comparisons between activities would make sense.

But, check out these two activities done one day after the other with no settings changed or anything else that I can think of:

Strength Workout: 62 minutes, 133/166 Avg/Max HR, 105 Training Load, 811 Calories Burned (~13/min)

Indoor Cycling: 30 minutes, 150/177 Avg/Max HR, 78 Training Load, 210 Calories Burned (~7/min)

So listen ... I'm an overweight guy with a poor V02 max (working on getting healthier folks!), so, to many of you .. you might question the calories burned for the Strength Workout.  No problem. It's probably high.  But, again, my point is that on a relative basis, they should make sense.  And I put in way more effort on my Indoor Cycling routine, so, I can't understand why I'm burning 13 calories/minute doing strength with a 133 average heart rate, but, only burning 7 calories/minute doing cycling with a 150 average heart rate.  The Training Load makes sense to me for sure, but, not the calories.

For the record, I did the cycling on a Peloton with Garmin Vector 3 power meter pedals installed (might have something to do with it?).  The Peloton app estimated my calories at around 450 which sounds more reasonable as compared to my Strength Workout.

Again, I know that these are all estimates and that they should be taken with a grain of salt, but, I'd really prefer that they make sense between activities and for some reason, my cycling activities ALL seem to be really low (this is just one example ... happens every time).  My power meter is calibrated using my current FTP estimate, and my HR settings are the same for all sports (I don't have special cycling HR).

Any thoughts or suggestions?

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    Hi ,

    It sounds like the User Profile settings on your watch might not be correct. Can you double-check these values? On the watch, go to Menu - User Profile and verify that these settings are accurate.

    If you don't see anything abnormal in your User Profile settings, will you email us at [email protected]? If you include the following files for us, we should be able to help troubleshoot the issue further. Please plug your watch in to the computer and send us:

    • The files from the Garmin\Activity folder that correspond with the Strength and Indoor Cycling workouts you mentioned here
    • The file in the Garmin\Settings folder
    • Please also let us know if we have permission to access your Garmin Connect account. This will further assist with troubleshooting, if we identify there are other files/details that we require.

    Thanks,
    Mel
    Garmin Outdoor Software Quality Team

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    If you are using the Strength Workout and Indoor Cycling activities I would try to create a custom activity instead of them and use it for both types of your workouts.  There is a chance that the different type of activities count calories in different way or might consider other variables as well.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to Garmin_ODQA

    Just sent you an email with the files.  I was not able to see anything in my watch settings that would explain the issue.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    When you cycle with a power meter the watch/software can measure the actual energy produced and, using standard calculation, can determine with good accuracy the calories burned in terms of work done. There is an explanation and a calorie calculator here....

    https://gearandgrit.com/convert-watts-calories-burned-cycling/

    This approach is going to give more consistent results than messing around with heart rate as a predictor of energy production/consumption. Depending on the platform you're using - e.g. Garmin, Polar etc. - the final figure you see may include an additional few calories for BMR calories for the duration of the activity.

    In my opinion, Garmin has a clumsy way of presenting the figures. Garmin will show the ride total with BMR calories added, but in your daily calorie totals, because the BMR calories are identified separately, they need to be stripped back out of your ride total. e.g. Your ride might total 800 kcal, but it will only show as 720 active kcal, for example, in your daily totals.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to eezytiger

    Thanks .  That's a helpful calculator and explanation.  I just did another ride this morning and the calculator you provided gave me a calorie estimate that was still higher than Garmins, but, only by around 50 cals vs. the 200 or so that I would have expected given the calorie counts I'm getting for other activities.  I'm interested to see if Garmin support finds anything in my files (I'm not ruling out some other issue on top of it), but, it seems clear that as you point out, the use of a power meter helps get that calorie estimate a lot closer to reality and it's more likely that my strength routine estimate is way too high.  I'll just have to do all my other activities with my Vector 3s strapped to my feet (kidding).

  • +1 over 4 years ago

    So, I'm replying to myself just in case someone experiences the same issue.

    First of all, Garmin does explain in their literature: "your calories burned are calculated using a formula that takes into account several factors, including effort during activity and other information available from your Garmin devices. This may include FTP, weight, distance traveled, speed, elevation gain, temperature, heart rate and other variables"  OK.  So there's that.

    Then, add onto that finding is what @eezytiger explained in his response which highlights that because I'm using a Power Meter for my cycling activities, it's very likely that my calories burned while cycling are much closer to "reality" than the calories burned as reported by other activities.

    That said, Garmin support did get back to me this morning after reviewing my FIT files and settings.  They explained:

    "For your strength activity, it reports calories burned as 358 kcal in one area, but then also reports the 811 kcal that you saw. Some difference between these two values is expected based on our calculation methods, but this much variation is clearly wrong. Your indoor cycling reported 337/210 kcal for those corresponding values. While this is closer, it still seems that something is going wrong here.

    I appreciate you taking the time to report this. I’ve filed a bug report, and we will keep investigating until we find what went wrong. I’ll send you another email if we identify that some setting on your watch needs to be changed, but I think it’s more likely that this is a bug we need to fix."

    So, in short, I think we have two situations here that are compounding the difference.  One is a Garmin bug that is being investigated.  The other is simply the fact that using a Power Meter gets you better calorie estimates than HR and time, etc..

    Thanks everyone for responding.  I'll update this if Garmin nails down the bug and I see a fix in the future.