I recently bought fr235 and everything seems to work fine except calories count. At the end of day it seems to show that I have burned 5k to 7k active calories which is ridiculous. My usual activity is 10k-12k steps including 5k run. My weight is 69kg. I have linked to my fitness pal and at end of day I seem to have burned 4-5k calories and by that standard I will disappear in air in few weeks. I saw some posts but no clear solutions or definitive response from garmin. Seems like some software issue.
Confirming you aren't crazy. I posted in reply to another similar thread as well. I have been sick and mostly not moving all day and with resting + active combined it thinks I will have burned around 3200 calories today. That's bonkers! For reference, my BMR is around 1700, so with the one 20 minute walk I did today + couch time, at most, I should have maybe seen 2200. (And that's probably even exaggerating things a bit.)
I logged a service request but got no response. What is point of wearing it all the day if it has to give so inaccurate results of activity tracking? I am wondering why did i buy this so costly watch when only feature that works is GPS running that too wrist heart rate is wrong.
I recently bought fr235 and everything seems to work fine except calories count. At the end of day it seems to show that I have burned 5k to 7k active calories which is ridiculous. My usual activity is 10k-12k steps including 5k run. My weight is 69kg. I have linked to my fitness pal and at end of day I seem to have burned 4-5k calories and by that standard I will disappear in air in few weeks. I saw some posts but no clear solutions or definitive response from garmin. Seems like some software issue.
Today I was using Garmin Connect on web and noticed one Activity Class setting and it was set to 10. Don't know why? There is table relating to activity class I thought my activity level will range 6-7 for most weeks but can fall to 2-3 sometimes. I have changed that setting to 7. Let me see if that corrects active calories being measured. But I could not understand is this supposed to be set manually or Garmin automatically determines it. In MFP I have set sedentary profile. What should be correct setting here and how does it affect calorie measurement?
Setting activity class to 7 seems to have cut abnormal calories reading a lot but noticed another anomaly. I went for a walk in morning but did little other activity so my steps other than walking recorded as activity are just 936 but distance covered is 2.36km and calories burned 928kcals. How could that be??? Maybe it is double counting somewhere.
I seem to be getting to root of this bug of abnormal calories. Take a look at screenshot.
Have others seen this bug too? Or I am still missing something here?
Some tasks that seem rather simple can cause the heart rate to read much higher than it actually is. One example is using a riding lawn mower to cut the grass. Because of the bouncing and vibration the wrist monitor will go into a "cadence lock" with the rate that your watch is almost vibrating on your wrist. When that happens your Active Calories will be calculated on that erroneous heart rate. You may also find the steps recorded can get goofy. Want to "burn" 1000 calories in an hour while sitting comfortably and sipping tea from the cup holder, just cut the grass for an hour with the 235 a bit loose on your wrist. BTW, the solution I've found for this particular problem is to put on a Chest Monitor and put the watch into the Bike Indoor application. While I still end up with some extra steps from the bumpier spots in my yard but I do get a nice clean heart rate trace without a really inflated Active Calorie count.
I'll also point out that if you are sick with an elevated temperature your heart rate will also be elevated. Because one function of an elevated heart rate is to aid in shedding excess heat, so when you have a fever the body will respond by increasing your heart rate. When that happens your calories per hour will increase and while I don't know the exact percentage of increase I would not be surprised if 102 degree F fever yielded a 30-50% increase in your caloric consumption.
Finally, some rather routine household chores can result in an increase in a calorie burn that many might find surprising. Every fall I have to rake and bag about 40 bags of leaves for disposal in a specific type of craft paper bag and this year I decided to set my watch to Bike Indoor for this job and see just how much exercise this task was. What I found was that I could average 4 very tightly packed bags per hour with an average heart rate of 120 bpm, which for me was 400 calories per hour.
However, that said I have noticed that the 6.30 update seems to be a bit optimistic about the Active Calorie estimate. In my case I have the impression that I am being "granted" about 400-500 calories per day that I didn't actually "earn". It's pure speculation but one thing I have noticed is that when I get up and start moving about if I check the heart rate widget it will show an estimated heart rate that is NOT at all close to my actual heart rate. For example just rising from a chair and walking 20 feet will sometimes have my heart rate indicating 120 bpm and if I take the time to wait for an actual lock on the heart rate it will actually be between 80 and 90 bpm. If the watch does that every time we get up to fetch something that is going to lead to an inflated estimate of the calories consumed.
Now, on the flip side of this during an actual exercise session I believe that the watch may be under estimating the calorie burn. For example this morning I did a hard run on an Elliptical Trainer for 36 minutes with an average heart rate of 154 and the total calories was just 403. Back when I was using my Forerunner 15 that would have resulted in about 450-460 calories.
