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Walking activities

 Indoor Walking activity on watch is useless.
I've done lots of Outdoor Walks with GPS and decided to walk around the Mall today because it was raining.

Continous walk, no stopping, arm movement as I always do for outside walks.

Pace is a joke. Distance is way off. I can accept an estimate based on stride and steps, but 0.06 miles for about 3000 steps is nuts. And yes I had to use a CIQ steps-to-FIT data field.

Walking time was 31.19 minutes and it reported moving time as 2.01 minutes minutes. Really?

And why does Garmin offer WALKIING activites and not include STEPS in the data is beyond my comprehension!
If they can count steps outside an activity why can't they include them in an activity? Why have to install a CIQ steps data field?

And I see this problem is at least 2 years old and still no fix.

  • Was at an indoor mall?  Were you set to use GPS on your walk?  Try it with GPS off.

  • Walk Indoor activity does not  use GPS.

  • Yeah, I have the same issue too.

    I was trying to use indoor walk a few times even with my foot pod but get ridiculous distance all the time and pace is way off. I have no idea why it's so hard to fix, my old Vivosmart HR used to calculate the distance very well, and it has no GPS at all, so technically every walk is the "indoor walk".  Maybe if more people would tell about it.

    As for total amount of steps, I've actually had a talk with a support person, and she's added my request to show total amount of steps to the activity, apparently there is the ticket for it exists already. So you may want to give your vote for it as well https://www.garmin.com/en-US/forms/ideas/

  • The WALK.with GPS outdoors works fine for distance, but you need to install a CIQ data field for steps.

    Why would Garmin have 2 Walk (Walk and Walk Indoor) activities on the Vivoactive 4 without including steps? Does not make sense. And without steps it would be impossible to guess pace and distance for indoors. But even using a CIQ data field for steps the indoor Pace and Distance are meaningless. Even the walking/moving time is messed up.

    I also have a Vivosmart 4 and I'm going to test the WALK activity indoors this weekend.

  • What about the "treadmill"-activity? It seems to indicate reasonable pace and distance when I use it.
    My issue with it is that it seems to have a fixed step length, so it is only accurate for one pace. It underestimates my speed when I am sprinting, and overestimates it when I'm walking.

  • Hmm, I never tried treadmill but will test it out and see if it works any better. Have you tried to use it outside treadmill?

  • No, I have only used it on treadmill sessions, including some walking around and stretching inside the gym.
    This is how the log looks from one of my recent treadmill sessions with quite a lot of walking:
    https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/7731706749

    I was running at an incline (4-7 percent), which probably confuses the watch a bit.
    The estimated top speed of 2:28 is actually not far off. I had the treadmill set to 25 km/h at that time.
    The cadence measurements seem to be spot on. 

  • Thanks for sharing, that's very interesting, your data looks intact, not something what I get, also maybe the key that you're using running profile instead or you calibrated it against treadmill first?

  • It always asks if I want to calibrate after every session, but I have never done it, so I guess it is just the default setup.
    Also notice that when I walk or run, I never hold on to the treadmill with my hands, so I usually get nice cadence data.

  • Good thought on the Treadmill activity. I'll try that out on the VA4 this weekend, while I'm testing the VS4 Walk (without GPS).