How different apps calculate calories burned.

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Did a short ride with intervals today using my Garmin to record the ride. Garmin Connect calculated my calories burned at about 995, Strava says about 350. I didn't have an HR monitor on this ride (new one should be in tomorrow) but I didn't expect such a large discrepancy. Any insight on which is more accurate?
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  • ntnunk
    ntnunk Posts: 936 Member
    edited March 2017
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    Indoor ride or outdoor? If outdoor, road or offroad?

    I ask becuase, in truth, both aren't much more than guesses. That said, if it was an outdoor road ride and your height and weight are set close to correct in Strava, the Strava estimate is probably closer. Strava bases calorie esimates on power, either reported (if you have a power meter) or estimated (if you don't). Assuming correct weight settings for you and your bike, normal road surfaces and no crazy wind, Strava's esimated power algorithm is usually at least in the ballpark. If you were on a trainer or riding offroad it quickly goes out the window though.

    Anecdotally, with calories coming from my power meter (the most accurate way to estimate power outside of a lab, as far as I'm aware) A 60 minute interval ride will typically net me 350-600 calories, depending on how intense the workout is.
  • TheBigYin
    TheBigYin Posts: 5,683 Member
    edited March 2017
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    Here you go>>> bit long-winded, but read through it and you'll understand the way Strava works a bit better...

    (it's a copy/paste from ages ago when I wrote it!)

    Hold on Tight, Here Comes the Science Bit...

    One or two people may have noticed that the Calorie consumption figures for a given bike ride may well be different to the figures that are calculated using your Garmin or other Logging devices... I noticed this a while ago, and being the kind of numerically obsessed geek that I am, I decided to look into it further.

    It is my contention that rather than simply taking the calorie calculation that your HRM/GPS logging device provides, Strava has taken upon itself to try and give what could potentially be a more accurate figure - certainly if the data logging device is a non heart-rate-monitor linked smartphone...

    As I'm sure you have all noticed, Strava works out a "Virtual Power" figure for your ride, which is based on the speed you're riding at and the amount of up/down/steepness of gradients you have encountered. So, for the entire ride, Strava has a figure for the number of Watts of power you are "laying down". Therefore, it can also add this up and arrive at the number of total watts expended, which, divided by the number of seconds ridden, gives a total amount of energy expended in driving the bike and you along. (Basic Physics - 1 Joule = 1 watt per second).

    So - to take a worked example - my Sunday ride from the 13th October 2013 - http://app.strava.com/activities/88753940 - we have a "Total Work" figure off 1,555 kJoules of energy needed to drive me and the bike around that particular route. Okay, so how do we get from that to Calories. Simples - google tells us that 1 joule = 0.239005736 calories. For the purposes of this calculation, lets simplify a little and just work to 4 decimal places shall we...

    Therefore, the actual energy used to move me and the bike around was 1,555 *0.2390 = 371.645 kCalories.

    Wait a Minute Mark, I hear you say... Strava reckons that you burned 1656 kCalories on that ride, not 372! ... What's going on ??

    Again, it's a fairly simple thing. While the Pedal Cycle is a wonderfully efficient machine, the Human body is a lousy inefficient engine (some more than others - but I'll get to that later!) So, while I pushed out 372kCal of energy riding, I also wasted energy in sweating, in digesting my breakfast, in thinking about what I was going to have for dinner, worrying about if I'd get home in time to hand over a Turbo Trainer to Fran, producing Snot, My heart beating approximately 20,000 times, Talking to fellow cyclists, filling (and subsequently emptying) my bladder and 1001 other little things that the human body does while riding a bike that AREN'T directly related to shoving the pedals round. This is where things go from the directly measurable (because, in fairness, MY power figures WERE from a real Power Meter, rather than Strava's Guesstimates) to the "taking an average figure and hoping it's right"

    So, let's call the difference between what you shove, and what you burn to shove it the "Metabolic Efficiency Factor" (or MEF for short, because I can't be doing with re-typing that again and again. Again, a quick Google seems to show that studies tend to put this MEF at somewhere between 20 and 25%... So - I did a little digging...

    All this data is based on MY ride information over the last week or so...

    StravaGarminTBY.png

    I've basically used the Calories and Work figure to come out with the MEF that Strava is using... Allowing for Strava only displaying whole digit numbers, it would appear that the MEF for my rides seems to be coming out pretty consistently at 21.43%. Interestingly, the data also shows that its using the same figure for rides on my Roadbike (which has a power meter on), on the Indoor Trainer (which was taking power figures from the Indoor trainer's calculations of resistance) and from the MTB, where the power figures were wholely down to Strava's own power guessing routine...

    Just for the sake of thoroughness, I also decided to have a look at a cross section of the members of the GS MyFitnessPal "club" and see if if this MEF changed (say, depending on Age, Gender, Height, Weight, Calculated Body Mass or any other wierd and wonderful way.)

    StravaPowerCalcs.png

    NOPE. Same figure more or less... and that list covers a fair cross-section of ages, genders and body shapes I reckon... It appears that they've decided on a "one size fits all" approach...

    Just out of interest, here's a good bit of data...

    Calories 6621, Work 5938, 21.43%... want to know who that was... Laurens ten Dam - the Pro from the Belkin Team..

    ( http://app.strava.com/activities/86637795 for confirmation :wink: )

    Now, call me a defeatist, but I seriously doubt that MY metabolic efficiency is likely to be exactly on a par with one of the better Pro's :laugh:



    But, you may also have noticed another column in the first little chart I posted... The "Garmin Calories"...

    Well, it's self explanatory I suppose - thats the calories that My Garmin read at the end of the ride. One thing to notice is - they're all over the shop... you'd expect them to be all either higher or all lower, or all somewhere near, wouldn't you...

    So did I at first. Then I thought about it a little more. You see, a few months ago, I went and submitted myself to one of those "NewLeaf" Metabolic Profiling tests. There's a really good writeup on the DC Rainmaker blog if you want to know more about the test ( http://www.dcrainmaker.com/2012/01/look-at-testing-with-new-leaf-fitness.html ) - mine was much the same, but on a Wattbike rather than a treadmill thankfully.

    The end result is a sort of "profile" of my metabolic efficiency factor, broken down into 10bpm "bands" so the Garmin knows that if my HR is showing between 80-89 bpm, i'm burning 6.76561kCals /minute of fat and a total of 9.02081 kCals, whereas between 140 and 149 i'm burning through 0.76040 kCals of fat and 13.80201 kcals in total. It has data for basically all points between 30bpm and something like 240bpm, though if I hit either of those figures, i'm sure my calorie expenditure would be the last thing on my mind.

    I guess that all this waffle show is that estimating Calories from exercise is a) difficult b) an inexact science and c) if you give 5 people a chance to do the calculations, you'll get 5 different ways of performing the calculations and AT LEAST 5 different answers.

    For me, I Have a sort of heirachy of how much I believe the data... From least belief to most it runs...

    MFP's Guesstimates based on time of a "exercise"

    Endomondo based on smartphone tracking but no HR data

    GPS and HR tracked data

    GPS / HR and POWER tracked data on a "Vanilla" Garmin Device

    GPS / HR and POWER tracked data on a "NewLeaf Calibrated" Garmin Device

    ...



    But there's a REALLY good rule of thumb to work by... if you've got 2 or more different figures - LOG THE SMALLEST and err on the side of caution.


  • TheBigYin
    TheBigYin Posts: 5,683 Member
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    smeakim1 wrote: »
    Awesome post... I looked for new leaf or the area I live in to get it done but doesnt appear that exists by by. I'd love to know those numbers. Great post BTW.

    thanks - i think it might have been a bit of a tough read for the OP, they seem to have disappeared after making their initial post!
  • TheBigYin
    TheBigYin Posts: 5,683 Member
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    To be honest, without a power meter, then the New Leaf profiled Garmin figures are the best bet.

    WITH a power meter, and without the New Leaf Profiling, then to be honest, my Garmin 520 pretty much matches the kJoules expended (i.e. the "power generated" figure direct from the powermeter) to it's kCals figure...

    FOR ME - the kCals is mostly 20-30 calories higher than the jKoules figure at the end of a ride - I think this is pretty much down to the fact that at the end of a climb/hard effort you may well be freewheeling (so generating no power and hence no jKoules contribution), but your HR is still sky high and therefore your metabolism is elevated and burning slightly more kCals than it would be at RHR (resting heart rate - lying down doing nothing) or NHR (normal heart rate - walking around not putting any effort into anything).

    For me, back when I wrote the "epic" post back in 2013, I decided that keeping up with the NewLeaf testing (and the associated cost - you need to keep getting re-profiled periodically, especially if you have a "material" change in fitness levels - either up or down) wasn't really worthwhile now i'd got a powermeter - I'd purchased the powermeter in the september of 2013, maybe a month before getting into the whole "stats" thing. Since then, I've had a BIG change in my whole fitness and associated MEF factor...

    Just over 2 years ago, I had Pneumonia, the complications of which resulted in Costochondritis (infection and inflamation of the "rib end" joints) and Pericarditis (inflamation of the "bag" surrounding/protecting the heart) - the Pericarditis caused a small weakness in one of the arteries in my heart, which basically took around 6 months to manifest itself into a near complete blockage of the artery. One night I experienced violent Palpitations - heart hitting 190+ for 20 seconds, then slowing to maybe 30-40 for a minute or so, then repeat... To cut a long and scary story short, I had a short ambulance ride, a spell in the resus room, a week in the heart ward, every test under the sun, and ended with angioplasty, which removed the blockage, fitted two nested stents into the damaged area, and fixed the physical damage. Allowing the repair to properly stabilise however required, and still requires my being on a (slowly reducing) cocktail of BetaBlockers, Statins, Anti-Coagulants, Platelet aggregation inhibitors and Angiotensin II receptor blockers.

    I don't really care, because, well - i'm still alive (though it was a close thing at least 3 times)... But it HAS pretty much mullered my fitness levels - for the techie's my FTP's down from 360+ to 220-225, my weight's UP by maybe 12kg (mostly gained during the recovery from the Pneumonia, when I wasn't allowed to exercise at all, and I got depressed/comfort ate!) - the beta blockers just suppress the metabolism so much that it's REALLY difficult to lose any weight as well - it's a slow process getting it back off)

    But basically, my NewLeaf profile was based on the old figures, with a MHR of 174, RHR of 49 and FTP of 362 at the final test. My current figures are nearer MHR 142 (that's what I'm "allowed" to go to without medical supervision, though i've been taken to 158 under hospital tests - that's the limit under the chemical regime I'm currently on!), RHR of 38-39, and at last test, a FTP of 219 (though i'm overdue another of those torture sessions, and expecting 225-230 from figures I'm seeing on outdoor rides). From these figures, it's pretty clear that the newleaf profile would be miles out...

    I'll have a rummage around on my computer and see if I can find any figures from the Newleaf Testing... they did actually make "quite interesting" reading for the stats obsessed geek...







  • TheBigYin
    TheBigYin Posts: 5,683 Member
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    Okay, think I've found the last Data and Spreadsheet I got from my final Lewleaf test...

    Basically, there's a "stream" of data that's pretty much once a second reading of power output and heart rate. Each of these readings is allocated into a "zone" - the zones being

    Zone 1 - HR 30-39, Z2 - HR 40-49 and so on, right through to z21 that goes 230-240! - yes, nobody's likely to score in Z1 and Z21 in the same test. Most people score in z5-15, the outlier zones are basically there to "sweep up" any errors in readings from the HRM belt... Alongside this is captured data from respiration that calculates what component of your "energy consumption" comes from carbs and what from fat. While I was provided with the HR data, I only got the "cooked" figures for this calculation - i'm assuming it's propriatory and they're trying to avoid reverse engineering it...

    To avoid just adding a stream of data from the test, I've subtotalled/summarised it as follows...

    fu122b8glero.jpg

    it's pretty simple - the "zone" is the numbered zone from above, heartrate is the sum of the pulse readings in that zone, power is the sum of the power readings at the second that the hr was taken, zone is the number of readings in that zone, average joules is power column divided by the zone count, average calories is the joules converted to calories (multiplied by 0.239005736) and the final column is simply a per-minute conversion of the average calories.

    These figures then plug into a calculation that applies the (propriatory) MEF calculations and fat/carb burn splits...

    a0wk4h5ze6ol.jpg

    my "MEF" calculation came out at 20.27%, a little lower than strava's estimate of 21.44%, as i'd expect, because, well - even when I was doing these tests, I was overweight and not very fit - certainly not a typical "athlete" as far as cycling goes.

    The data in this section is again fairly simple - the columns are from the left

    HR numbers
    Zone No
    Measured Cal/Minute (from the raw data summary above)
    Total Cal/Minute using measured MEF - so measured cal/minute *0.2027
    Fat Cal/Minute (Tot cal/minute multiplied by the "fatburn %" from the rightmost column
    Fatburn Factor (again, another propriatory calculation...)

    (actually, looking at these figures, I'm not 100% sure I've not been "playing" with this spreadheet before, as those "fatburn factors" look awfully like round numbers, and I'm pretty sure they're normally something like 5 decimal places... however, for the purposes of this discussion, they're near enough - and frankly, i've done the screenshots now and don't fancy re-doing the whole bloody lot again!)

    now - you've probably noticed the mint-green and pink bits on that sheet - where the figures aren't from the summary. Well - they're basically just there to "make the numbers up" - i.e. the green bit is just blank, because, for me, under zone 5, there was no difference in my energy burn from sitting on the bike or sitting in an armchair. And the pink zone - well - that's basically just "sweeping up" any over-revving recorded from the HR monitor - at the time, with no heart issues, this basically meant "the HR monitor belt had slipped, and gliched" or "i'd ridden under an electricity pylon in the fog and my HR belt went crazy for a couple of seconds, registering 233bpm because of the electrical interference from the insulators sparking") either way, the green and pink zones were basically not going to make ANY material difference to energy consumption readings in a ride.

    Now - what of those "fatburn factor" things... Well - it's pretty well known that at lower HR rates, we can burn more energy from fat reserves, but as the HR goes up, the demands for energy increase, beyond the limits that the fat burning mechanisms can cope with (at least in a "typically fuelled" athlete - I don't want to get into the whole "keto" thing in this as I don't really understand it well enough). Now, if we graph the data from the zones we get this...

    175dr8ht82m6.jpg

    if you look at the yellow line you can see that my body at the time "turned the corner" from fat metabolism to carbs at around zone 8 - 100 to 109bpm, that's the peak in the graph, and by 130-139, less than 25% of the energy was coming from stored fats - considering on a typical tempo road ride, I was averaging a HR of 155ish, it was fairly clear that I needed to keep re-fuelling or hit the wall pretty early into a ride.

    The Blue line is basically the measured calories per minute curve, after point 14 the figures simply being extrapolated into a slow decline.

    The Pink line is simply an echo of the blue line, adjusted for MEF, with the gap between the yellow and pink line showing the amount of "carbs" burned at a given heart rate - so when the yellow "turns the corner" at zone 8, the pink still continues to climb all the way through zone 13, only slowing/declining in zone 14 because basically at that point i'd "gone anaerobic" and wasn't really consuming anything other than what was already in the muscles/bloodstream at the given second... z15-24 are, again simply there for the sake of completeness...



    the $10,000 question - Do I think that newleaf testing is worth the money. Back then, yes. Today, no. To qualify that, in 2011-12 when I did the testing, it cost me around £300 for the year in initial tests and the periodic retests. At the time, the cheapest available (and reliable) powermeters were around £1000 or more. Fast forward to late 2013 and Stages launched their powermeter for £500 over here. I bought the powermeter, and allowed my remaining 5 months worth of subscription to Newleaf to lapse, because I was happy to work to the power figures instead.

    Now, you can pick up a 4iiii or Stages powermeter for under £400, and I'm pretty sure that the Newleaf won't have gotten any cheaper, indeed it's probably more expensive given it's mainly paying for the technician to run the tests, and interpret the data for you (and skilled wages inevitably cost more year on year).

    So, for the cost of 15 months worth of testing, you can buy a powermeter, and have data on every ride you do... for me it's a no-brainer.









  • TheBigYin
    TheBigYin Posts: 5,683 Member
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    actually, i've just looked up my notes on the above spreadsheet, and it's one I was working with my then trainer to "reverse engineer" some of the non-propriatory newleaf stuff so I could re-adjust the "power" figures without having to get re-profiled with the breathing mask on - okay it wouldn't have been as accurate in terms of fat/carb consumption, but probably more accurate if based on a monthly FTP test run than working with a 3 month out of date reading from quarterly "real Newleaf" tests...

    There's even a page in the spreadsheet that actually creates a newleaf profile (which is basically just an XML file with a .NLF extension) from the data entered...





  • TheBigYin
    TheBigYin Posts: 5,683 Member
    edited April 2017
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    if anyone fancies a look at the spreadsheet, complete with the XML file it writes, its on Google Sheets here.

    It's read-only, but it's nothing special, formulae wise, so if anyone fancies a crack at rolling their own version, it could be a starting point...

    Limitations:

    there are three "assessments", Treadmill, Bike, and "other". In this sheet, all three assessments get the same "burn" figures. Technically, only the "bike" assessment should get these figures, but I didn't have a real Newleaf .NLF to reverse engineer that was from either a treadmill or (say) a rowing machine. How they'd actually measure power, I don't know, so basically, it's a 1 size fits all.

    How It Works:

    IIRC the "raw data" was basically a .TCX export from a strenuous test on a powermeter equipped bike. This can be a "ramp test" or something like a FTP test, but it really MUST be something that has a gradation of power from "pootling along" barely breaking sweat, to "on the rivet" and sweating bolts - ideally with a heart rate that hits, and sticks at your MHR for a good minute or two. Not for the faint hearted, or for anyone with any fitness issues - standard disclaimer - if you're not 100% sure you're fit enough to try this, then DON'T before you've been checked out by your doctor.
    (actually, the ride data for this particular spreadsheet came from a "normal" road ride - but one where I pretty much did a bit of everything, from loafing along, to riding tempo, and a full on flat out blast up a hill that very nearly had me on the verge of collapse... so I guessed that it was going to be the perfect file to profile!)

    So, you go ride, save the ride on your Garmin, or if it's a fancy ergo trainer, export from whatever software into Strava. Then Use strava to export the ride file as a .TCX File. Now the next bit is tricky... I used Excel rather than Google Sheets, and I don't know how Google will handle importing a .XML file if I'm honest. But I basically renamed the filename.TCX as filename.XML and asked excel to import it. And that was that. I did it in a seperate sheet and cut/pasted it into the "raw data" page of a template version of this sheet.

    Column R is the Heart Rate, and Column T the Power figure. Copy/Paste as values to populate columns C and D in sheet1. Then basically, sort the figures by heart rate, ascending, add subtotals at the required "bit bucket" intervals, and you're getting there.

    from there it's a simple enough matter to pick up the data into the calculations page (the one with the pink and mint-green bits) and the numbers crunch through into the XML page - which can then be cut/pasted into a plain old notepad .TXT file, then renamed as a .NLF file. Pretty sure that the final stage was then to copy that newleaf profile into the "new files" directory of your garmin and the next time you switched on it'd display something like "Newleaf Profile Updated"... it's been a while and my memory isn't 100% on this... It COULD have involved the old "Garmin Training Centre" program, which I haven't used in years!





  • falconpunch79
    falconpunch79 Posts: 2 Member
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    Man, you guys went above and beyond. Thanks
  • TheBigYin
    TheBigYin Posts: 5,683 Member
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    Man, you guys went above and beyond. Thanks

    yeah, we try ;)
  • NorthCascades
    NorthCascades Posts: 10,968 Member
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    TheBigYin wrote: »
    FOR ME - the kCals is mostly 20-30 calories higher than the jKoules figure at the end of a ride - I think this is pretty much down to the fact that at the end of a climb/hard effort you may well be freewheeling (so generating no power and hence no jKoules contribution), but your HR is still sky high and therefore your metabolism is elevated and burning slightly more kCals than it would be at RHR (resting heart rate - lying down doing nothing) or NHR (normal heart rate - walking around not putting any effort into anything).

    Heart rate (always) lags power. So the thumping in your ticker just after you crest the hill has already been accounted for by your power meter. At least that's my understanding.

    My Garmin (Fenix 3) just changes the label from kJ to kCal. But a lot of the time it's slightly off. Like yours, it's only off by a very small amount. I think it's a combination of rounding errors, and moments when your head unit and power meter drop out for a split second, so the Garmin falls back on using HR instead of power to calculate energy expenditure.

    I'm pretty sure that while a Garmin has a power meter connected, it doesn't even consider HR for calories.
  • TheBigYin
    TheBigYin Posts: 5,683 Member
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    I'm pretty sure that while a Garmin has a power meter connected, it doesn't even consider HR for calories.

    I think that if you don't have a NewLeaf profile loaded that's very probably the case - however, with my old Garmin 800 head unit, and with a power meter attached at the time, the figures in this data from above certainly show that with a Newleaf Profile, then the Garmin takes that over the powermeter figure for its Calories.

    pmo03v2skrkl.png

    that said, this all may be academic - I've not been able to find if any "modern" garmin head units actually support the whole Newleaf thing anymore...

    As always DC Rainmaker has something to say on the subject - BUT, it's from 2010 so it's potentially completely out of date by now.

    https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2010/11/how-calorie-measurement-works-on-garmin.html




  • TheBigYin
    TheBigYin Posts: 5,683 Member
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    smeakim1 wrote: »
    @TheBigYin I went and pulled my numbers from my FTP test and started looking at the data . The key is the Fat Burn factor as when you take mine and plug them in using the same factor you end up with a similar curve. That is the real key when does the energy required (peak) exceed what is in your fat stores and you become less efficent atr burning fat and require more glucose/sugar????

    yeah - pretty sure that's why the whole MEF and fatburn data was provided only as a result, not as raw data and the result - though in fairness, that part of the test results comes from wearing the horrible respiration vapour analysis mask and being hooked up to a fancy gizmo that presumably split out the ketones in your breath from burning fat...

    Without that end of the testing, all the data you can throw at it is still going to be a guess - yes, your data's curve will be "tailored" to your heart rate and your power output, but the MEF (that 21.44% guess from strava, or my measured 20.27% in the above descriptions) is really the defining figure in terms of total accuracy. And of course, what I dubbed the "fatburn factor" is also highly personal, so using anyone elses figures is also going to introduce inaccuracies that again render the final output no more than a guess once more.

    I think what I'm saying is, that spreadsheet I posted up earlier, is pretty much "not for use" for anyone else but me (as it's got my actual test data in there - or at least my (now highly inaccurate) test data from 4 years ago!) but more of a tool to play around with and see / explore the interactions - if nothing else, it shows just how bloody difficult it is to measure calorific output in any meaningfully accurate way outside of a lab. Even the Newleaf profiled setup isn't directly measuring the kCals, it's just guessing, but instead of having a single estimate to guess on (i.e. your height, weight and heart rate, or your powermeter figure and the assumption that you're averagely metabolically efficient) its guessing on (in my case above) ten HR zoned areas - but it's still only really guessing...
  • niblue
    niblue Posts: 339 Member
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    For some reason I'm now seeing very big differences between Garmin and Strava in their calorie burned calculations for bike rides. For example I did a 100km non-stop ride on Saturday which took bang on 4 hours. Garmin reckons I burned 4645 calories which is exceptionally unlikely, especially as I was taking it reasonably easy so only averaged HR of 138 (against a 182 max) and power of 176W (against an FTP of about 250W). For the same ride (based on the same GPX file from my 810) Strava reckons I burned 2,858 calories which is a lot more believable.
  • pedermj2002
    pedermj2002 Posts: 180 Member
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    @niblue I had something similar this weekend, but even Strava got it messed up pretty badly. 30mi ride, and Garmin claimed 2838 calories, while Strava claimed 778. Since I was without a power meter, Strava estimated my power, and claimed 83W, and that's just not possible for the ride I did. Average HR of 166, maintained (while moving) over 13MPH, and on the indoor trainer when I maintain even 12MPH I wind up at over 100W.

    I don't know what's going on there, but I'm getting a power meter this week and getting it working. Enough of the wild guesses. Time to get useful information out of this (and make the guesses at least in the same ballpark as reality).
  • NorthCascades
    NorthCascades Posts: 10,968 Member
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    @smeakim1 Something sounds wrong. What Garmin are you using?
  • NorthCascades
    NorthCascades Posts: 10,968 Member
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    TheBigYin wrote: »
    I'm pretty sure that while a Garmin has a power meter connected, it doesn't even consider HR for calories.

    I think that if you don't have a NewLeaf profile loaded that's very probably the case - however, with my old Garmin 800 head unit, and with a power meter attached at the time, the figures in this data from above certainly show that with a Newleaf Profile, then the Garmin takes that over the powermeter figure for its Calories.

    pmo03v2skrkl.png

    that said, this all may be academic - I've not been able to find if any "modern" garmin head units actually support the whole Newleaf thing anymore...

    As always DC Rainmaker has something to say on the subject - BUT, it's from 2010 so it's potentially completely out of date by now.

    https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2010/11/how-calorie-measurement-works-on-garmin.html




    I've been using an 800 for 6 or 7 years now. And a fairly modern Fenix 3 watch for 2. As far as I know, there's no way to put a NewLeaf profile into the watch.

    The Edge 800 and Fenix 3 have different calories logic, the 800 seems to think I burned slightly more than the kJ account for. I had an Edge 1000 briefly (long story) and it worked like the F3, for what it's worth, just a straight 1:1 conversion except for drop outs.

    I have a Fenix 5X arriving today! I'll report on that if anybody cares.
  • pedermj2002
    pedermj2002 Posts: 180 Member
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    I haven't been able to justify the watches yet, despite having the VivosmartHR+. I'm not a runner, and that's where those watches do their best work. I'll admit that i'm considering it, though. Maybe next year I'll take it up. All of which is a long way of saying I care and am curious :)
  • pedermj2002
    pedermj2002 Posts: 180 Member
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    That would explain why I wasn't seeing the differences you were talking about. I've got the Edge 820, and the calories/kj seemed pretty consistent between platforms after I added the power meter. What do you think of the Edge 820 so far? Have you gotten livetrack to work yet (have you cared to try?)?
  • NorthCascades
    NorthCascades Posts: 10,968 Member
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    @smeakim1 Thanks for the update!
  • NorthCascades
    NorthCascades Posts: 10,968 Member
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    Have you gotten livetrack to work yet (have you cared to try?)?

    I haven't used an 820 but use this feature all the time with my watch. My honey wants the peace of mind.

    One thing I learned is that you'll invite some people to the live track session using the app on your phone, then you'll start your ride, and at that point, there's no way (that I can find) to invite new people. It remembers the list of people you invited last time. Every now and then I'll want to send the link to someone else, maybe I'm running an errand that involves them or something.

    Always include yourself in the list of invitees. Then you can just forward the email if you forget.