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Low training load in hiking activity

pella.gps
9 months ago

I found several discussions even years old about this topic but I found neither solutions nor explanations.
If this is a BUG it is time to fix it or in any case it is necessary to update the method of calculating the training load associated with different activities. The incorrect calculation provides misleading data for cross training.

On Halloween night I went on a 39 km Hike and 2500 m d+ with a calculated training load of 56.
It is a ridiculous offense and an outrage to the perception of fatigue and the management of cross training if I consider that the same Garmin Instinct 2X calculates a Training Load of 97 for 45 minutes of Boludering or a Training Load of 140 for 45 minutes of slow swimming or even 150 for 11K of running in Z2.

What response from Garmin on these issues?

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  • 0 9 months ago
    pella.gps said:
    What response from Garmin on these issues?

    Have you contacted Garmin Support directly?

  • 0 9 months ago

    It is a ridiculous offense and an outrage to the perception of fatigue 

    No need to feel offended. I do not think that the watch (or Garmin) is trying to offend you, or to mock your effort. All it does is estimating the Exercise Load on the basis of the heart rate. Whether you hike, swim, or run does not matter. And the distance or elevation gain do not matter either. Only the HR matters. At least I found no evidence that it would be otherwise - neither in the documentation, nor by experimenting - I have multiple watches, started a treadmill run on them simultaneously, one recording the run as Trail Run, and another one as Hike. At the end, both watches recorded an activity with pretty much the same Exercise Load value.

    I do not know why your hiking activity recorded so low exercise low, but I would look for the clues in the HR data. Next time, you can also record the hike as Trail Run instead (you can later change the activity to Hike, in Garmin Connect). If you believe that the Hike activity is intentionally underrated or that it reports low Exercise Load due to a bug, you should get much higher values then. If not (if the value remains similarly low), then it is not because of the activity type, but because of the HR that stays low.

  • 0 1 day ago

    I don't think it's Heart Rate related. During a hiking activity my heart rate gets elevated enough  (Zone2, Zone3) but the resulting load is an order of magnitude lower than I would expect. A wild guess would be that during hiking the GPS data is sampled less frequently. Maybe there is a bug that makes the load calculation (integration) to be done with the same lower frequency. Maybe I'm wrong but that model would perfectly explain what I'm seeing

  • 0 1 day ago

    Looking at some of my hiking activities I would support trux's view:

  • 0 1 day ago in reply to 4834510
    4834510 said:
    A wild guess would be that during hiking the GPS data is sampled less frequently.

    First of all, the GPS data is sampled as frequently as you configure it (either the default Smart Recording every couple of seconds, or the Every Second Recording), and the Satellites options can be adjusted per activity type. And secondly, the GPS does not play any role for the Training Load at all. Only HR (and HRV) matters. If you do not trust me, record the next hike as Walk or another activity type, and you will see the Training Load will be the similar (as long as you keep the effort and the HR on the same level).

    Training Load does not measure your fatigue. It measure the EPOC, so thinking that you will get high TL just because you feel exhausted, is a bit false expectation.