Treadmill Walking Wildly inaccurate

The exact same thing happens to me and it’s really annoying! Especially when you spend a lot of money on a watch that is supposed to record whilst you work out! To get around this I’ve been manually amending the miles in the app to match the treadmill as I’ve found the treadmill to be quite accurate. Again same as you it records fine on an outdoor walk, but indoors on a treadmill it’s really off. What watch do you have? It would be interesting to know if it’s a common issue with one type of watch or if it’s across several. I’ve got the Garmin forerunner 245 music.

I have been in contact with support over this and they have actually made me feel like I'm crazy. I have gotten all of the responses you have. I did try holding my arms like I would running and it seemed to want to track better. But holding your arms like that while walking is very awkward and uncomfortable. I just want to be able to track my walking miles, not everyone is a runner!  Outside, everything is spot on!  It's just so bizarre how it gets steps pretty accurately, but can't calculate mileage from that. 

Where do you recalibrate for a treadmill activity? My distance is way off too (last night I walked 1.86 mi, but the watch says 0.75). My step count is accurate. That's certainly not the problem. It's the stride length. Where do you recalibrate this? The manual says that after you complete a treadmill activity (I've tried Treadmill and Indoor Walk) there's supposed to be a "Calibrate & Save" option, but I have looked all over for that and can't find it.

I've been doing Treadmill activities every other day for months with this watch and have tried everything I can think of at the end of an activity to find the Calibrate feature, but I haven't seen anything like that anywhere.

You can't calibrate until you get it to record one mile. At the rate mine records it would take 5 hours!  

If you want to get that "5 hours" of treadmill in, you could try just starting the Treadmill activity and letting it run all day? It'll be fake numbers, but it'll at least give you a chance to make the watch think you've walked on the treadmill long enough to see the Calibrate screen. Then just set the distance to some huge number, so the next time you use the treadmill, you'll be able to recalibrate it to the correct distance when you hit the real 1 mile. That should work, right?

Hi Bryan, I amend mine in the app. Once you click on your activity that you recorded, if you click the 3 dots top right, you can then click edit activity and then this is where I manually input my miles based on what the treadmill records. I’ve attached a pic and circled the areas I mean in yellow. Hopefully this helps . Nat

When you manually edit in the app it doesn't count in your total mileage for the day. I do different challenges and some of them are mileage based, so that stinks it won't count. 

Oh I hadn't thought about that. I haven't tried a walking or running challenge yet. I know on the bike challenges, I edit the distances, and they count towards the challenge badges, but that's probably because the watch has no built-in way to estimate indoor bike distance without a speed sensor.

I have exactly the same issue, and have complained about it repeatedly.  It's a relatively new bug that was introduced a few versions ago, and I do wish they would fix it.  I did find a workaround a few days ago, which is to hold your watch arm more horizontally when you walk on the treadmill in a more "power walk" kind of pose.  That seems to give much better tracking for some reason - within 10% of actual distance (and that's probably a step length calibration issue) compared with previously when it was showing <50% of distance, just like you.  So give that a go...