Related
This discussion has been locked.
You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

Active Calories very low with respect to Activity Calories

wmbaum
over 4 years ago

My understanding is that activity calories are gross calories including BMR, and active calories are net calories beyond BMR, but it seems lately that the Active Calories are very low with respect to Activity Calories.

Yesterday, I had Active Calories of 175 or 200 before going to the gym and doing about 90 minutes of strength training with a chest strap (Wahoo TICKR X) connected to my VA 3, which came out to 405 calories.  Then 30 fairly leisurely minutes on a bike for another 201 calories.  After those two activities, my total Active Calories were under 400.  600 active calories in 2 hours only represented about 200 Active Calories??  This seems rather off to me..

This is all very different from what it would have been a few months ago.  Some of that is me, but a bunch of it seems to be in the Garmin calculations, and I'm not sure how much is which.  I had  a back problem which resulted in back surgery in January, and virtually no exercise between November and February, which had it's impact on my strength and cardiovascular health.  Since then, I've been working out like crazy, and lately I've been doing a lot more cardio, HIIT, etc. which has resulted in noticeable improvements in my resting heart rate and cardiovascular health overall.  2 and 3 months ago, similar workouts resulted in significantly higher Active Calorie burn. 

How much of this is me and how much is Garmin calculations?  Have others seen their Active Calories drop a lot?

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    I believe that the Active Calories are all the calories above BMR.  THE calories from recorded activities are included in addition to general movement and such through the day. 

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    Thank you, I actually posted about this as well in early May. I think I have been seeing the exact same issue since the 6.20 software update. I also reported it to the Garmin support, but no response so far. I monitored this for a while, and on most activities (it doesn't happen always, but about 5/6 of the time), I can clearly see that the calories counted by the watch don't keep up with the calories counted by the activity.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    I might add that I am also using a chest belt, so it definitely doesn't have to do with sensor inaccuracies. It's simply the watch not counting the same calories as its activities.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to driftwave101

    The chest strap seems to be the common denominator here.  The activity is using the more accurate source and recording higher heart-rate and calorie burn. The active calories seems to be using the internal wrist-based sensor and ignoring the more accurate data from the chest strap during the time of the activity.  However I'm not sure this explains the magnitude of the difference I'm seeing.. 

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to wmbaum

    I think that the watch's HRM switches off when you are in an activity using an external HRM, so the watch can not use any data from the internal sensor. You can see it yourself because the LEDs will be switched off.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    Update:  Some time ago I had set my vo2max to be somewhat low in order to compensate for what seemed like overly generous calorie calculations from Garmin at the time.  Recently, in order to compensate for these very low calorie calcs, I removed the vo2max setting.  This was in hopes of restoring a more average/default calorie calculation rather than intentionally low.  A few days ago I updated my vo2max setting to be more realistic, and this seems to have noticeably affected the active calorie calculation and improved the situation.  It is still low with respect to the activity calories, but much less so..  The days with the biggest discrepancy between activity and active calories seem to have been when the vo2max settings were 'removed'.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to Narziss

    I just checked, and you are absolutely correct.  When the external is connected, the LEDs switch off, so there is only one active heart rate source at a time.

    While it could be that the Active Calories is using different curve fitting algorithms and ignoring the spikes of weight training, etc., it's not about sensor accuracy. 

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to wmbaum

    I am also getting the issue without a chest strap. If I cycle for 30 minutes, get 170 activity calories, but only 47 active, something's definitely off. ;-) 

    Crossing fingers that one of the sensor fixes that come with the new updates will fix this. :-)

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to driftwave101

    Nope, even with 6.40 update and 6.10 sensor hub update, the problem still persists.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    Same issue here.  15 minutes of moderate-high intensity exercise, over 2000 steps, and it credits me with 62 active calories burned.  Yet, a Harvard study showed that someone of my age and weight should burn approx. 200-225 calories, and the machine I used said 200 cals.  I have other examples where the calories burned seems very low.  62 calories burned in 15 minutes of active cardio working out?  My BMR accounts for 20 or so during this time!