Step count doubled with external HRM

I noticed that my Forerunner 955 shows roughly double the amount of steps I would expect after running workouts. After some time the number corrects itself and drops down to the expected value. I can still see it in the steps graph, which shows the rise first and then the drop after some time. Looks ridicolous, like I did negative steps in some sort. I found some older postings in the forums mentioning this problem without any solution, but I think I have found the root cause. The HRM Pro+ I'm wearing during running activities does also count steps. Propably Garmin sync these steps with Connect and pushes them to the watch without checking wether thei are lining up with steps already on the watch. Connect then does this check only after some time and erases the double steps.

This should be fixed. Or is there any setting for this?

  • Afaik the strap needs to be paired with the Garmin Connect app to sync steps (and other activity tracking data that was collected by the strap itself.) If you unpair the strap, you should stop seeing (temporary) double steps.

  • The double counting is probably caused by Garmin servers' Physio Trueup which is responsible for synchronizing steps and other stats across devices. Its purpose is also to remove overlapping stats. But depending on the order of syncing, it's possible that syncing steps happens before overlap detection, causing temporary double steps on the device. It would be nice if it didn't work that way, but on the other hand it's not a big deal.