30 minute "no break" weight session. What does Garmin think of it?

Today was one of those days that I was still a bit sore from another workout and didn't really feel like spending hours in the gym waiting between sets and just wanted to get in to our home gym, do a good solid session and get out. The idea was that it would take 20-30 minutes total, I would not take breaks at all and would move from one exercise to a mostly completely unrelated muscle group. There were of course brief breaks to get some water but for the most part I was always moving. I also did much lighter weights than I would do on a normal strength-training day.

Maybe this is what HIIT works like, I wouldn't know because the people involved in that stuff behave as though they are in a cult so I have always avoided it.

here is what the overall snapshot looked like after I was done.

For starters that heart rate is a lot higher than my normal would be if I was taking breaks, for obvious reasons. I suppose that is good even though 30 minutes at around 130 isn't exactly cardio but then again, that wasn't the point. I wanted to test to see if the Garmin watch was at all correct on determining what sort of exercise I was in the process of doing if I did them quickly.

My first "set" is actually multiple different things because I wanted to see what the watch would process if I went from a curl to a bench to a row and it didn't know what to make of that. Therefore I started manually resetting the reps as I was changing stations from one exercise to the next. I'm actually quite impressed at how accurate it was considering that I was moving a lot faster than I normally would because I was at around 50% of my max lift for all sets. The sit ups and legwork I did are not recorded because I already know that Garmin cannot detect that since it is attached to my arm.

It got some of the rows wrong as those were other exercises that move in a similar fashion but they were actually shoulder exercises. I am impressed that it got most of the lateral raises correct considering that there isn't a lot of movement involved in that exercise at all.

Including things I couldn't record such as the situps and legwork I think I did 26 sets in half an hour and that was working pretty fast by my standards. I achieved my goal of getting a workout in at around 30 minutes and that was the ultimate objective.

Now burning 300 calories is certainly nothing major but this is substantially more than I would normally burn during a normal strength session because of the fact that my heart rate never dropped.

I don't know if I will make this a part of my regular regimen or not because I don't feel any sort of burn afterwards and I like the burn. I think I'll just save it for days where I am feeling like I am either going to have to work out fast or not at all. Also, I wouldn't be able to do this at a public gym because other people would be getting in the way so therefore I reserve this only for the home gym, which is actually quite limited in the types of exercises that can be done.

All in all though, I am really happy with the readout that Garmin gave me, it was almost entirely correct on everything.