Why is elevated heart rate during an activity recorded as stress?

3814635 8 days ago

After recording an activity on my FR965, when I check the Stress insights, the elevated heart rate during the activity is recorded as stress. The manual clearly states that during activities, stress is not recorded. What's going on here?

0 Etupes25 8 days ago

Normally, you should not see stress bars during an activity, but it doesn't mean there is no stress.

The watch is categorizing physiological levels called rest, sleep, stress (high, medium, low) and... physical activity.

So, the "stress" is everything outside of physical activity (detected by motion and HR threshold), and is tracked though HRV.

That said, from your body perspective, a physical activity is training stress. So you will see some language about overall stress that include the stress of physical activities.

0 FlowState 7 days ago

If you're seeing stress during a timed activity such as Run (which was my interpretation of your post), it could be bc there were periods during the activity where your HR was low enough and/or you were moving so slowly that Garmin considered you to be "inactive", so it decided to record stress anyway.

I think this was somewhat implied, yet not explicitly stated, by part of Etupes25's answer.

I took a look at some of my recorded timed activities on my FR955, and yeah, some of them have stress bars near the beginning or end. Most do not, but some do.

I think the key here is the meaning of the phrase "physical activity", in the context of Garmin's statement:

www.garmin.com/.../

Stress levels are not measured by your Garmin device during physical activity because the strain of physical activity itself can be considered stressful. The impact of physical activity is best measured and understood in other ways. Public speaking and running up a flight of stairs can both send your heart racing, but the underlying reasons why are fundamentally different.

I think they mean literal physical activity, not simply "recording an activity on your Garmin device".

It's also worth noting that for me, Garmin also apparently does not record stress during Move IQ events or other "active" periods (marked by grey below the graph, and perhaps detected based on HR). So there's perhaps 2 things happening here:

- Garmin can disable recording of stress outside of a timed activity when it thinks you're physically active

- Garmin can enable recording of stress during a timed activity when it thinks you're not physically active

I guess you could try to test this theory by recording a 2 hour work meeting as a timed activity - see if stress is recorded during this meeting. Or you could just record an activity while you're sitting on the couch and watching TV.

0 FlowState 7 days ago in reply to Etupes25

That said, from your body perspective, a physical activity is training stress. So you will see some language about overall stress that include the stress of physical activities.

I don't think OP's complaint is about some language in the UI that says physical activity imparts training stress on the body, I think their complaint is that stress (as in the Garmin stress feature that is supposed to exclude physical activity) is recorded during a timed activity.