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Does selecting different activity option gives different calorie reading?

Does selecting different activity gives different calorie reading? I chose "Other Activity" under FR235 and it gives 361C. At the other wrist i used FR35 under "Cycling" and it gives calorie count of 473C. I expect some differences but not so much. Any ideas? Thanks.

0 NickMN over 4 years ago

if you use Cycling or Running it knows what your doing and can scale it with your weight, time, known calorie burn rates for biking/running as well as your heart rate. But we know that heart rate almost has a pretty small effect on running calories... its all about the amount of work you did (miles... regardless of pace!). So Garmin can use that to adjust/scale the burn. For 'other' you could be sitting on the couch doing ankle circles and occasional light curls.... you could be doing intense ab workout... could be laying down resting doing yoga...all it has to judge is by Heart Rate. So the equations for calorie calc will be totally different. Calc for calorie burn is a VERY inprecise science. Especially if people don't have their maximum/min heart rates setup right, or if HR data is flakey from optical sensor.

0 fellali over 4 years ago in reply to NickMN

Thanks for the input.

Basically I switched to both "Bike" activity on both watches still and the observation is still the same.

I read somewhere that this *might* be due to Fr235 taking my VO2 max value into account (currently at a low 32 value) when calculating calorie where else my Fr35 has not (i have not defined a VO2 max value yet).