Need help confirming or disproving a bug with max HR detection

Why would Max HR be different for running and cycling? Max HR is the same regardless of activity. Yes, you can get much closer to Max by running than cycling but that doesn’t mean Max is different. As long as you have auto-detect on all three will get changed. 

Hello!
Thanks for the feedback! Since the watch offers the option of defining different max HRs for each sport, I think one could expect that only the max HR of the sport would be updated - regardless of the usefulness of different max HRs (I would like to avoid this discussion here).

After support confirmed to me that only the max HR should actually be updated for the current sport, my primary aim was to find other users who have also defined different max HR and can tell me how the watch performs behaves towards them.

Since you wrote that all values are always updated with the automatic detection, I would like to ask whether you have personally tested it this way or whether it is more of a logical guess/assumption on your part.

Any time I’ve ever had a new Max HR auto-detected both running and standard have been updated. I don’t have a cycling profile. To me, that’s exactly what should happen because there’s no difference in Max based on sport. Why Garmin allows different Maxes, I don’t know. I think the people you’ve talked to at support are misinformed. 

OK thank you for the info. If this is really the standard behavior, then I will probably delete the sports hr profiles again because I don't see any point in it.

Maybe there will be someone else who can confirm this for me about cycling.

When I had sports specific heart rate zones, the HR Max was updating all sports HR Max. Heck, I got a new cycling HR Max after a new running HR Max was detected and vice versa.

Researching this, it is common for thriathlon athletes to find different HR Max. Typically running HR Max will be higher (up to 5%?). The reasons are not 100% clear but some theories about muscle mass involved, position, weight-bearing etc.

I thought that chasing a few BPM difference won't make a significant contribution to my training and came back to a single set of zones.

Initially, I was always of the opinion that the max HR was the max HR, regardless of what sport you were doing.

After some research (out of curiosity) and conversations with 1 or 2 fitness trainers, I understood that the max HR is the maximum that the body can achieve, but you can hardly achieve this value when cycling, because less muscles are involved.

Therefore - as the statement goes - it makes sense to define different max HRs, because the training zones are derived from them and that's what it's actually about.

So I would have changed the clock to sport specific max HR - but apparently that misses the point :-)

Anyway, thanks for the feedback!

The same thing happens to me. Being able to set max hr on different sports is useful because you can only get your heart rate so high depending on what sport you're doing due to how load bearing it is. Swimming max hr < cycling max hr < run max hr. It also seems that training load and impact is based on max hr, and if your cycling max hr is the same as run max hr every cycling workout is just base even if you're doing threshold intervals or vo2 max intervals. It's frustrating.