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Treadmill distance way off, calibration making things even worse.

So, of course, you can never know if a treadmill is counting the distance perfectly. But the ones I've been using for years have reported distances consistantly, and on par with my outdoor running distance/time. And my FR 235 did a good job estimating Treadmill distance, consistently reporting around 0,95 km per 1 km on the teadmill.

The FR 945 is a completely different story. It started of recording about 1,4 km per 1 km on the treadmill on my standard 5 km @ 4:30 min/km. Using the Calibrate after saving function doesn't make things any better, actually they are getting worse! Today (fw 2.80 on the watch) every 1 km on the treadmill was more than 2 km on the watch, resulting in a world record over 10k at 21:19 min - WOHOOO!  Disappointed

As I understand the concept of calibrating, the watch should take the distance I put in when calibrating, and use it together with the number of steps measured for the same workout to get a new stride length for better treadmill distance calculation in the future? Or does the calibration feature only edit the distance for that specific run? 

The only setting that I've found that could mess things up is the optional manual stride length for walking in Garmin connect app, but I have that one of, and it shouldnt be relevant for tredmill running nayway?

This problem seems widesperad on the FR245, is it equally bad for everyone on FR 945?

  • the problem with this is the Calibration is not a Learning point for the 945... the difference between the treadmill machine and the watch is awesome. some times around 30%.

    We should trust the "calibration" as a "machine learning" input. otherwise is useless.

    it also does not take in count the calibration input and shows the fastest Mile or Kilometer or distance without taking into account the Calibration value entered.

    I have replaced my 935 with the 945 and to be honesty feel this is worst Battery, Accuracy, and so on.

    all these problems are Software problems due that the hardware has been improved, so please work on a good SW firmware update.

  • We are glad to hear that 3.30 resolved this issue for you. I would like to mention that we are still working on an additional improvement as we realize 3.30 does not resolve this for all users. 

  • Hi Garmin-Blake, status for a fix for fenix 5x? My Fenix5x still way off. Please let me know what version I should be running with a fix. Thanks in advance to this major issue. 

  • 4910906 - Upgrade to Software beta version 9.72.  It fixed my Fenix 5x plus. See my post above for more detail.

  • Thanks Brandon! 

  • Welp.  Looks like I spoke too soon.  Calibrated last monday and it worked just fine until Friday.  This weekend I did two outside runs.  Now this morning (Monday) I ran on the treadmill again and its way off.  It appears it used my outdoor run to re-calibrate the treadmill parameters which threw them off again.  Does anyone know a way to stop this?  It was perfect before my outdoor run.  Now my stats are all messed up again today.

  • I dont think there is a way to stop this, it was always supposed to use outside runs to precalibrate for indoor runs. 
    Calibrate and Save was introduced later.


  • I'm ok recalibrating on outside runs, but it doesn't  save stride length or correct the accelerometer. It used to work perfectly but something changed in the last few months. Very frustrating for treadmill users, which there is a large number of. 

  • Same issue on the Garmin Fenix 5x

  • I updated my FR935 to the 14.72 firmware and things seem much better.