Body Fat% is a way off PART2

Returning mine

yes I agree, to me it obviously uses BMI and there it goes wrong. Amber, could you forward pnmckenna's message to the engineers? Its a pretty easy fix and would solve all issues. I think you will get more and more complaints over time if this is not being fixed.

I just returned mine and had to buy an S1 on Ebay.

I have the same problem. Changed activity level form 8 to 10 which decreased body fat from 22-23% to low 18-19% . The last view weeks I worked on strength, visibly decreased body fat, but maintained the wheigth. As a result, I'm in the 19-20% body fat range. Something seriously wrong with the metric

Ya, it seems that the scale reports 20-23% body fat for virtually everybody. I have seen very few (possibly none) reports of people saying the scale reports anything below 20% or above 23%, no matter how skinny or obese the person is. The few reports I've seen where people said the scale was "accurate" usually happen to be people with 20-23% body fat - so it seems like it's a "even a broken clock is right twice a day" situation.

It's very unlikely that 99% of the scale's users have precisely between 20-23% body fat.

I, too, have visibly reduced my body fat in recent weeks; I've definitely gained muscle and lost fat. By my best estimate (and using bodyfat calipers to verify), I should be around 11-12% body fat. But in those same weeks, the scale has reported 21-22% every time. A body fat composition that high is simply not possible for someone who is my height and weight.

I'm not really that upset about this metric being so bad, I knew it was bad before I even bought the scale; I mostly just wanted the scale for showing weight, and it works fine for that. But it's weird that the scale has been out for so long, with every single user reporting massive errors in the BF algorithm, and nothing has been done about it so far.

Garmin-AmberD

Same issue. I did an experiment.

I have 10hour training week, I'm 171cm tall and 67kg.
S2 says that my BF is 19%

My father - no trainings, jelly-belly, 165cm and 71kg
S2 says that my fathers BF is the same19%

But it is not only about fat
after a hard interval workout I'm 2kg lighter but S2 gives me even bigger water % than it was before workout

Hi, I alos recognised that behaviour. After a long run I lost about 1.4kg. The scale didn't read it as water loss. It was the same like before the tun. So the fancy metrics seems to be pretty useless.

I've tried today twice changing only the age and the body fat has changed from %15,7 to %13,4.  It seems clear that the algorithm depends on the age. Please Garmin fix this via a firmware update or something similar.

Garmin sent me a replacement scale, and of course the result is exactly the same. The BF% displayed by both scales is the same.

The support person that ordered the replacement had claimed that the firmware on my old scale could be corrupted. I knew that was nonsense but agreed to the replacement nevertheless, thinking that perhaps my issue was a hardware issue that Garmin had fixed in later production releases. Garmin support should stop treating users as idiots.