Flights of Stairs vs. Hills

Former Member over 5 years ago

I have the fenix 6x Sapphire with 5.0 loaded. I got it for Christmas and it is my first Garmin watch so I'm not very familiar yet. I noticed yesterday that after my walk (using the "Walk" activity) that I also had 18 flights of stairs added to my dashboard on the Connect app. I am quite confident that there were no stairs on my route. There was a hill (154' elevation gain), so my question is, is it normal for hills to register as flights of stairs or do I have something set wrong?

Thanks.

0 tmk2 over 5 years ago

It is normal. Stairs are counted whenever the watch thinks you are walking and gaining altitude at the same time. It is not smart enough to distinguish an incline from real stairs.

0 tess over 5 years ago

Here's a little info you may find interesting:

https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=LJ6vYF2phv7JUAOlsRRjC8

0 Former Member over 5 years ago in reply to tmk2

Thank you! I spent an hour going through settings trying to figure out what I had wrong...

0 C.sco over 5 years ago

It shows the equivalent number of flights of stairs you've climbed today, regardless of whether or not they were literally flights of stairs, or just a ground incline.

The reason for this is two-fold. First, it doesn't really matter whether you walked up stairs or inclined ground, the value in the exercise you got from it is similar either way. And second, there are lots of different kinds of stairs (see examples below), so it would be impossible for a watch to detect stairs versus inclined ground. So for the sake of simplicity (and accuracy), it just counts ALL elevation gains while walking as being an equivalent number of flights of stairs.