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intense minutes while cycling

I use a heart rate monitor both when cycling and running, which I think measures accurately. The Edge 530 measures my cycling workout. However, when I exercise, the values recorded by the watch are used to generate the daily heart rate graph and calculate the minutes of intense activity. The problem is that the watch records extremely low heart rates while cycling. While the real values are coming from the heart rate monitor, on the watch, I often barely reach my resting heart rate, so for example, today's one-hour interval workout was rated as 0 minutes of intense activity. It would be nice to think that I have become incredibly strong over the winter, but that is far from the truth I didn't have this problem before, but it has been happening for a few days now. Has anyone else experienced this?

0 KevinJames over 2 years ago

Looking at my data from today, I had the opposite problem. Even though my heart rate on the 955 was much lower than what was recorded by my chest strap on the Edge 530, the watch gave more Intensity Minutes!

This is why I've never given any value to Garmin metrics - the whole device-based approach doesn't work (unless you solely use that device). I know the physio true-up function is supposed remedy this to some degree, but there have always been issues.

I had a whole discussion with support as to why the active calories on my 955 were way lower than those recorded from my ride (with heart rate and power). It came back to what was calculated on the device, even though there was much more accurate data sitting there in Garmin Connect.

It probably comes down to licensing but that doesn't stop it being a mess.

0 ocular20 over 2 years ago

Intensity minutes is a pretty worthless metric on the watch (at least how it's auto-defined on the watch by default). I think it's based on % max HR and for me it's always been set too low. Even on recovery days, when my RPE is very low, pretty much all of my aerobic activity minutes are still labeled as intense.