Step Counting - a warning

spiriteagle99

I don't sync my Garmin with MFP. Instead I log deliberate exercise and ignore the day to day steps. Last night I got a confirmation that that is a good idea, for me at least. We have a new dog who is very clingy and demands a lot of attention right now. He sits at my side and expects to be petted constantly. When I was doing this last night, my watch let me know I had met my step count for the day. Since I only walked about 3 miles, and my goal is about 13,000 steps, that surprised me, until I realized that the frequent petting was getting counted as steps. Good thing my watch wasn't determining my calories for the day.

A few issues with using the watch to determine your calories: 1) If you do things with your hands, your watch may say you are burning a lot more calories than you actually are. Even talking with your hands could inflate the calorie count. 2) if you are active but not moving your hands much (i.e. mowing the lawn or riding an exercise bike) it will not give you an accurate calorie burn.

NorthCascades

My watch can think I'm walking sometimes when I was the dishes. So I take my watch off when I do that. 🙂

COGypsy

Trackers are just wonky sometimes. I routinely get “steps” when I’m driving the curvy road to my mom’s house

earlnabby

Like everything else, step counters and calories used estimators are tools. As long as you realize they are not perfect, they can be very helpful. I don't get steps counted when I am shopping with a cart because the vibrations from the cart handle mess with the vibrations from the footfall and it gets confused. A Costco trip can only result in 500 or so steps. On the other hand, I discovered extra steps the day I wound a skein of yarn into a ball. I now hold with the left hand and wind with the right.

I tested it driving and got less than 100 steps while driving the 90 miles to my Mom's. The road was slightly curvy and slightly bumpy but mostly easy driving.

heybales

Those types of bogus steps almost always have a minimal distance to them - and it's distance and time and mass that gives a good estimated calorie burn for daily stuff.
So the calorie burn is negligible. (unless auto-workout was enabled and turned on, and used HR-based calorie burn).

Sadly Garmin doesn't allow the same ability like Fitbit to just select a chunk of time and view the stats for it (Activity Record) - it's easy to confirm that fact then.
But when people notice distance/calories before and after those types of activities on Garmin - the distance barely increases, as does the calories. So it matches up.

Here's the other extreme.
The bumpiness in my 2.5 hr road bike ride on Sat was seen for a whole 14K steps about, but only about 4.5 miles was given when impacts were translated to distance.
Well, 4.5 mile in 2.5 hr is only 1.8 mph, not a huge calorie burn by itself if the FR310XT computer hadn't synced in better info.
Almost net 300 cal given by just VF3, but no where near the almost 2000 it really was.

For compare 1:50 hr run/walk prior weekend was about 15K steps, seen as 8.5 miles (actually 10.5 miles with GPS), and given 1500 calories, much better though tad low on actual distance.

Lawn mowing is the one that gets me - slow pace because of pushing harder than just walking, but it just appears to be slow walking and barely any extra calorie burn.

ythannah

My Fitbit Charge 3 does a fairly decent job of counting only actual steps, as did its predecessors the Flex and the Charge HR. If anything, it sometimes has a tendency to undercount. I've had times that I've been close to 10K at bedtime so I've paced around the house just to hit that goal, and I'm sure I"m doing more steps than required.

The things that added steps were using some kind of power tool like a grinder or air impact, or heavy hammering. Fortunately I don't do that often!

Bluetail6

I'm almost to goal. I find that my Garmin Fenix 6 Pro does an excellent job. I rarely eat all of my calories back from exercise, anyway. I eat a fair portion of them. I have continued to lose weight. I wear in on my non-dominant wrist. As stated above these are tools, they are not absolutes. If it a fitness watch does add an obnoxious step or two... If you are feeling great, and losing weight. Who cares. Nothing in life is perfect!!

Lietchi

heybales wrote: »

Those types of bogus steps almost always have a minimal distance to them - and it's distance and time and mass that gives a good estimated calorie burn for daily stuff.
So the calorie burn is negligible. (unless auto-workout was enabled and turned on, and used HR-based calorie burn).

Sadly Garmin doesn't allow the same ability like Fitbit to just select a chunk of time and view the stats for it (Activity Record) - it's easy to confirm that fact then.
But when people notice distance/calories before and after those types of activities on Garmin - the distance barely increases, as does the calories. So it matches up.

I'd like to add that, for my Garmin at least, heart rate also plays a role. When I'm walking (no workout session, just steps) I will get more calories when my heart rate is high and less when my heart rate is low. This is based on my experience of doing similar steps after doing a run or when nervous - heart rate elevated - compared to other occasions. The other extreme being during my TOM, when my heart rate is lower, when sometimes I barely get any calories for steps.