Garmin

74HarrisSB
74HarrisSB Posts: 1 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
I received a Vivoactive 5 watch for Christmas... Just wondered how many of y'all using Garmin Fitness Watches. I connected mine to MFP..pretty neat!! ✅.

Answers

  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 10,002 Member
    I have a small fenix and love it (mostly, depending on whether garmin pushes out a faulty firmware again). Not connected because I know that some workouts are grossly overstated.
  • Lietchi
    Lietchi Posts: 6,908 Member
    I have a Forerunner 255 now and previously I had a Vivoactive 4. I'm a big fan, it's an important tool for me to stay active and manage my weight.
  • matttrose89
    matttrose89 Posts: 1 Member
    Hello, I’ve had My garmin vivioactive for a while now. I want to say a couple years. I definitely am a fan of Garmins products. They helped me stay on track and make working out more fun as I can track what I want to track. I am actually upgrading to the forerunner 965
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,760 Member
    I have a Garmin Vivoactive 4, and before that had a Vivoactive 3. I like it a lot, but mostly for things not related to MFP.

    I don't sync it to MFP, though I'd always recommend that people try out that option, because if it ends up fairly accurate, it makes things easy. Many people talk about how inaccurate trackers are, but they're going to be fairly close for a pretty large fraction of people - we could quibble about whether that's a majority or a large minority, but I don't think that matters, it's enough to make it worth a try, IMO.

    That said, my Garmin's all-day calorie estimate is quite inaccurate for me, so I don't sync it. Over the last 4 weeks, it thinks my average calorie burn is 1606 calories. Without going back and doing detail math, I've been eating 2000-2100 most days, more on some (holidays in there, and more), and pretty much never more than a small bit lower than my base calorie goal of 1850 calories. On December 13, four weeks ago, my daily weigh-in was 133.0 pounds, this morning 134.8 pounds. I'd call that difference within my normal daily fluctuation range in maintenance, but if someone wants to assume it's fat gain, that'd be roughly a 225 calorie daily surplus, substantially less than the roughly 400-500 or so calorie gap between Garmin and what I've eaten.

    Even though it's that far off, if I'd used it from the beginning and synced it to MFP, I think I probably would've estimated the average gap between Garmin and my actual calorie needs over a few months, and used that as a guide rather than logging exercise separately, assuming it was close enough (as I'd expect it would be). However, I didn't get the first Garmin until 2018, when I already had a good, reliable practice in place with MFP. (I started here in 2015.)

    I do use its exercise calorie estimates in cases where I don't have a better estimating method. I have what I consider better estimating methods for some activities, but not all. For the balance, it's close enough, based on quite a few years' experience.

    It's horrifyingly inaccurate at tracking my sleep (including comparison with an in-hospital sleep study), though others find it accurate for them. The stress metrics make no sense for me whatsoever, though again others have found otherwise.

    It seems pretty accurate with heart rate, distance, and speed, which is important to me in my sport, and interesting in other active pursuits. The pulse ox seems fairly accurate, compared with readings at doctors' office and with a consumer-type pulse ox device at home. It gives me a super-flattering VO2max estimate (39) and fitness age (27, when I'm 69), which is nice but I'm very, very skeptical. Very. ;)

    Before the first Garmin fitness tracker, I'd been using a Garmin Forerunner and a Polar watch/chest belt to track my sport stats, among other specialized devices . . . for, gee, I dunno . . . years, maybe as much as a decade? That, and having a wristwatch (yeah, I'm old) are the big deal for me. I love the sport-specific way the Vivoactives track my sport (on-water rowing) in real time on my wrist so it actually can be used to run workouts. It's also nice that it syncs with my Concept 2 monitor in Winter, saves me some logging effort on the C2 side of things.

    As an aside, it kind of blew my mind when I got here and found so many people whose perspective was that fitness trackers are all about calorie tracking, and if not accurate for that they were worthless. I get it, and understand that it can be personally true (no criticism intended), but it was a surprise and a new idea for me at that time.

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