Found a significant bug:

I suggest you all raising a ticket with garmin, best to show them some concrete examples as well. Me ans some others have already done that. The more the merrier though. Helps to raise awareness that sie methong needs to be done.

I've emailed support - no response yet.

I called local customer service. They didn't know anything about the issues and just asked me to send it back to them for them to check it and send me a return. They said it would take 10 business days - no thanks. I told him the issue is not hardware related but software - the rep said he can't do anything else.

Just noticed something that tells me it is almost 100% a garmin connect backend software issue. See the discrepancy between the steps snapshot from the front page and the full steps/activities page.



Please go ahead and check the two versions of display data on your accounts and let me know if you see these discrepancies. For me some days the calories and distance are aligned and other they are way off from each other.

One thing to note, is that within Garmin Connect, not all data gets updated at the same instant. There are cases where some of the reports/widgets have a delay in showing new data if the servers are busy. For example, it's common that my steps widget is updated, but my connections widget might take 10-15 minutes to catch up.

And the last couple weeks have probably been a busy time for the servers, with people getting new devices, and having more time off to "do stuff".

Best to compare things a while after your last sync, and check https://connect.garmin.com/en-US/status do see if any stuff is delayed or backlogged (it only shows big delays, not the common ones).

HaniC I see the same thing on the Garmin Connect website. The weirdness started for me when I connected to MFP. I checked the other suggestions related to MFP settings and the settings were already as suggested.

Just noticed something that tells me it is almost 100% a garmin connect backend software issue. See the discrepancy between the steps snapshot from the front page and the full steps/activities page.



Please go ahead and check the two versions of display data on your accounts and let me know if you see these discrepancies. For me some days the calories and distance are aligned and other they are way off from each other.

One thing to note, is that within Garmin Connect, not all data gets updated at the same instant. There are cases where some of the reports/widgets have a delay in showing new data if the servers are busy. For example, it's common that my steps widget is updated, but my connections widget might take 10-15 minutes to catch up.

And the last couple weeks have probably been a busy time for the servers, with people getting new devices, and having more time off to "do stuff".

Best to compare things a while after your last sync, and check https://connect.garmin.com/en-US/status do see if any stuff is delayed or backlogged (it only shows big delays, not the common ones).

I understand this could be the case with recent data. What I am talking about is data from over a week ago. It's clearly not a server delay issue.

HaniC I see the same thing on the Garmin Connect website. The weirdness started for me when I connected to MFP. I checked the other suggestions related to MFP settings and the settings were already as suggested.

Interesting... I had turned MFP on for a day and then turned it off. I don't remember if this was the first day I got the device or after so can't pinpoint that it was the cause because these errors are there from day one when looking back through GC.

What I have worked out is that the inconsistent calorie and/or distance count is only present on days where there are 'activites' other than just daily steps. On days where I haven't worked out or run, the calorie count from both the widget and the full page are consistent. With that said there is still some weirdness whereby two equally inactive days produced a discrepancy of 800calories - ie. same step count, no activities for both days but one day was 300 calories and the other was 1100 calories. Cleary wrong - not sure if related to this issue thought.

I have similar confusing issues with calories. But as suggested, it seems to be a GC issue.
The way I see GC working is it lists calories/steps for each activity performed.
It then adds an adjustment for the 24*7 tracking stuff outside of these activities. Again, steps and calories. For this line the steps and calories are not related. E.g. I did 70 mins on a turbo trainer without activating an activity on the watch and was credited 915 calories for 2444 steps. It seems therefore that GC is taking account of the increase heart rate and crediting calories as no actual activity was logged. However, when I imported the fit file from Zwift for that activity it added another 971 calories to my total which appears to be a duplicate.

GC should be ignoring the 24*7 data for the time period that the imported exercise covered. Fitbit does this pretty well. I guess in this case the good news is that originally GC awarded roughly the right amount of calories for the activity based on HR alone but unfortunately effectively doubled it when the file was imported. So for now if you don't want doubled calories, don't import external data. That means though if you want a log of all activities you need to record them somewhere else like Strava.

While I was typing this I did find a workaround. You can edit the activity in GC and change the calories to Zero to re-set you calories to the correct level.
I also as an experiment changed the time of the imported activity and moved it forward a few hours. The calories for the activity were left at zero, but my 24*7 tracking activity increased by around 500! I can only assume that GC is still recognising the increased HR and adding some calories in the 24*7 tracking?

Conclusion: An imported activity adds calorie credits for the 24*7 tracking due to increased HR, it also adds the number of calories calculated for the imported activity. Effectively roughly doubling it. If you timeshift the imported activity and zero the calorie count you still get increase calories for the increased HR at the time of the exercise, but you get it again as you have moved another set of the increased HR to a different day part.

I hope this all makes sense!

Paul

As you can see from the above, I was also having issues and getting pretty fed up! I then wondered if the various links I had was confusing GC, especially as I was wearing a Fitbit HR as well and both were linked to Myfitnesspal. I also had links from Strava to Myfitnesspal and STrava to GC.

I decided to break all links from Fitbit. All activities go thru GC. Surprisingly todays figures look fairly good with no duplication. I don't think however that you can correlate steps with calories. The two are on the same line, but they are the steps not covered by activites and calories not covered by activities. Today I have:

8964 daily steps and only 224 calories. If the calories are HR above BMR driven (which I am now suspecting they are) you could have steps that are not driving HR much, OR and I believe this is the case also, the sampling is too low in some cases to catch the increased HR from non activity steps like getting up and moving around for a couple of minutes. Another reason could be if you use "other" activity on the watch which I have done today for 70minutes. Using this mode there are no steps recorded even though they are normally there. So if you clock up a couple of thousand steps when in other mode, are they still recorded? If yes then they may be moved to the Daily Steps line even though they were taken within an activity (other).
Also what happens if you do some stationary exercise and don't record an activity. No steps used but increased HR may add additional calories.

All the above is speculation of course and it would be good to understand how the calories are measures outside of Activites.

Re the issues I had previously with Zwift, today I used the indoor cycle mode to record the calories and used Strava to look at the exercise in more detail. I had no issue with total calories for the day. However if I imported the Zwift fit file I would then get duplicated calories. DC is not smart enough to realise I now have 2 activities (one from the 235 and the other from Zwift) overlapping and to ignore the overlap. I still think if I deleted the Indoor Bike activity and kept the Zwift import I would still have duplicate calories. I,e, the additional calories for my elevated HR which would be recoded on the daily steps line, and the calories from Zwift would be added from the .fit import. So I think that importing external activies still messes with total calories and you probably need to edit the activity and zero the calories. I decided to delete the Zwift import and leave the Indoor bike activity. I can drill down into the Zwift data in Strava if I want to see it. Today I just want data that makes sense, with the possible exception of low calories on the daily steps line due to low HR sampling.

Just following up from my previous post where I changed all the links between GC, MFP, and Apple Health. I ran 10 miles yesterday, and for the first time in a long while, the numbers for the daily step calories and distance looked reasonably believable.

Here are the stats:

Hopefully I will have success again today. I guess that means either the reconfiguration solved my problem or Garmin did something to the desktop app to fix it.

One thing I have asked them for (and put in as an enhancement request), is to make this steps breakout (between timed activities and daily steps) available on the iphone app as well as desktop.

I'm now cautiously optimistic. :)

same issue

I am having the same issue from runs doubling my calories. It doesn't happen when I cycle indoors so I'm also led to believe it's from double counting the steps from the run and using them towards the total daily step burn. I'm going to try the fix suggested by Frankie-Boy!