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Is HR accuracy different when tracking activity vs just the widgets?

jmejiaa
over 3 years ago

I’ve been having some issues with my heart rate widget while working out but not tracking. I use trainer road for my indoor workouts so there’s no need to track on the watch. I've after the workout, garmin connect has a different HR than the workout.

Today I tested this by comparing the widget to an actual activity. If I don’t have an activity tracking on the watch, the watch seems to stick to 80ish heart rate. It updates often but doesn’t go up. Once I start tracking an activity it shows my accurate heart rate of 120+.

  1. What does this mean for my daily heart rate if it goes above 80 if I’m doing something but don’t track it?
  2. is heart rate monitoring less accurate when not tracking an activity? I don't see any settings related to this

This wouldn’t be an issue if garmin took the heart rate from the workout into the daily heart rate but it seems it only uses the workout data for some of the firstbeat metrics. It leaves my heart average all wonky.

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    I believe I read (can't be 100% sure, but it might have been on dcrainmaker.com) that during an activity, your watch will give more power to the HR sensor and you'll typically get more accurate results than you would if you did not start an activity.

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    There are a few things to unpack here.

    The heart rate widget will show the current heart rate, but the graph of daily heart shows the highest and lowest HR's maintained for at least 1 minute.

    Yes, the HR sensor is more accurate when tracking an activity. If you peek at the sensor under the watch, you can see that it is strobing in 24/7 mode, but on solid in activity mode. There isn't a setting for this - it is part of the battery saving features of the watch. If accurate HR in the TrainerRoad scenario is important to you, then record your workout as an Indoor Trainer session (you can discard rather than save at the end, if you prefer). If you enable the Broadcast HR During Activity option, you could even record your HR into the TR workout.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to mcalista

    Thanks, this all makes sense. It is weird that connect doesn't use the heart rate from the workout after TR sends it to garmin. Coming from an Apple watch, I think the big difference is Garmin "thinks" at a device level while Apple is trying to make everything fit a timeline at the user level. This is evident because of things like "training status" being different across devices.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to jmejiaa
    jmejiaa said:
    I think the big difference is Garmin "thinks" at a device level while Apple is trying to make everything fit a timeline at the user level. This is evident because of things like "training status" being different across devices.

    Yeah, part of this was due to the way Firstbeat licensed a lot of their software. Now that Garmin has acquired Firstbeat, this is (slowly) changing.

    But you can consolidate Training Status across devices using the Physio True Up feature.