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Respiratory rate / breathing rate during exercise (with HRM tri) way off (36 vs 18) or not?

botsche
over 4 years ago

Hope someone here can help me. I have a Garmin Fenix 6 with an HRM tri HR strap. Today I ran at a very slow and steady pace with a running cadence of 160 spm. I maintained a 4 steps inhale / 5 steps exhale breathing rhythm throughout almost the entire run. I expected my respiratory rate to be 160 / 9 = ~18 but instead Garmin Connect shows an average breathing rate of 36. Is my watch way off, or does Garmin count an inhale and exhale as 2?

Thanks for helping me.

Berend

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    I've never found breathing rate remotely accurate with or without a chest belt.

    Try this: breathe in for 5 seconds, hold your breathe for 10 seconds. Repeat. If it's working you should see a breathing rate of 4 a minute. I find it seems to stick to around 13 to 14 regardless. 

    Interestingly (I think!), if you use something like Elite HRV to do your morning readiness, breathing in and out does seem to impact the real time reading - so apparently breathing has some impact on HRV which I assume is how Garmin are trying to track it. Like quite a few features, it doesn't seem to work well in practice and appears to be an unreliable metric for the sake of it.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    It cannot measure the breath rate directly. I relies on variability of heart rate. Typically HR increases slightly when you inhale and decreases when you exhale. Did you use a chest HR monitor? The optical one may not have enough accuracy to measure HRV while running.