Do you add all exercise activities?

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g_racedisneygirl
g_racedisneygirl Posts: 13 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
My Garmin is linked in and keeps track of my steps..but am I supposed to add in my HIIT fit and hip hop classes..I don't want to double count something and not get accurate reads..

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  • estherdragonbat
    estherdragonbat Posts: 5,283 Member
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    I add my purposeful exercise. Walking around the house (even if, in the past, my pedometer has told me I got about 8000 steps just walking back and forth from fridge to counter to stove to sink repeatedly on cooking days), no. Walking 15 minutes to the corner store, yes. (Walking is my main cardio and I shoot for 2 hours daily. If I can account for some of that by running errands, great.) Shlepping a 10-lb bag of potatoes from the grocery store, no. Doing a set of 12 reps with 10lb dumbbells, yes.
  • 4legsRbetterthan2
    4legsRbetterthan2 Posts: 19,590 MFP Moderator
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    If you are wearing your garmin for those activities I would not track them.
  • cmriverside
    cmriverside Posts: 33,944 Member
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    There are Groups here on Myfitnesspal that have "How To" threads in regards to Garmin.

    Go to Groups, type "Garmin" in the Search box in Groups, https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/groups and you will find a lot of info.
  • grimendale
    grimendale Posts: 2,154 Member
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    I typically don't account for any exercise from steps (I include it as part of the default setting), and use a separate app (Runkeeper, in my case) to track specific exercise. If you take calories for your steps and for your workouts, you're double-dipping and eating more than you should.
  • NorthCascades
    NorthCascades Posts: 10,970 Member
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    I wear a Garmin watch (Fenix).

    I let it send my steps here. Sometimes they add up like crazy.

    I use it to record exercise I want a record of. Saturday I went hiking, yesterday I drove my bike to ride in the mountains. This stuff I record, and it gets synced to MFP as exercise. I don't record the 15 minute walks I take on my breaks at work, because that would clutter my exercise log book in Garmin.

    Losing weight is about eating less, and ideally moving more. Your body doesn't know if it's moving because you consider what you're doing to be exercise or not, just that work requires calories to perform. And that's how the system is set up, you get calories for "background" steps and you get credit for purposeful exercise, and regardless of how you put it in, the system is smart enough to work it out.

    I would record HIIT as exercise because if your Garmin thinks you're walking, it will get the calories wrong.
  • g_racedisneygirl
    g_racedisneygirl Posts: 13 Member
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    That makes sense...thank you so much
  • heybales
    heybales Posts: 18,842 Member
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    As soon as you manually log a workout on MFP when linked with tracker account like Garmin - there is no double counting unless you entered totally wrong timestamp for am instead of pm, ect.

    MFP subtracts workouts it knows about from the total daily burned given to it by the tracker account.
    Rightfully assuming it's already in the total daily burned. Total burned would include workouts.
    Which it should be after manual entry - because that workout should have synced over to Garmin and replaced whatever it came up with for calorie burn.

    Question is which had better estimate - you manually entering it - or what Garmin had already?

    You can create a workout on Garmin Connect for that chunk of time using whatever calories it came up with already.
    That workout will then sync to MFP.

    You will likely find the GC work diary much more useful than MFP's anyway - more stats, compare notes you include, ect.

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