Your Garmin watch can make mistakes if you don't pay attention

I think that for most people doing exercise that their primary focus is to see how many calories they can burn in a day. Caloric deficit is the only non-surgical way to lose weight after all.

Well the other day I was done exercising and forgot to switch off my Garmin watch at the end and because of this the watch thought that I was taking a huge break between sets and ended up giving me some rather crazy results and the end of it and this has rattled my faith in the watch and associated app a little bit. However, this is mostly user error and I will likely just delete the entry rather than try to criticize the technology too much.

I lift weights on a regular basis, but I never do it for 4 hours in a row. What happened her was that there is a button that you hit between sets and then hit the same button again in order to let the watch know that you are doing another strength set. I have always been amazed that the watch can determine what sort of exercise you are doing with a relatively high level of accuracy as well.

The 2nd time bench press appears is wrong, that was actually a lat-pulldown but I am willing to let that slide since I am just astounded that this little thing on my wrist can even have a semi-accurate guess on what it is that I am doing in the gym. This was one of those days where I am doing my sets quite quickly and not really focusing on doing anything super heavy.

It frequently gets the wrong exercise but that is fine, I am moreso attempting to let the watch know when I am actually working and it does, in fact, register the change in heart rate and then make a reasonable guess at how many calories such an activity would burn based on how your heart rate increases.

I did make a terrible mistake that will end up negating this entry though and that is that I forgot to end the exercise and it wasn't until 3 hours later that I looked at my watch again to see that it was still on a "rest" between sets yet it was still recording this as exercise. In reality I was living the rest of my life and doing things like sitting at a computer, taking a shower, and it wasn't until I saw a friend when I was walking somewhere that I noticed I had set the watch to "rest between sets" rather than ending the workout. Therefore, my actual work out time was only about 40 mins to 1 hour, not 4 hours like it registered as.

I think that the watch should probably auto-pause after a while because it's a bit silly to think that someone would have 3 hours rest between sets. I also think that the system might be padding the numbers a bit because during my false break between sets it is still registering me as exercising, which I was not. So this gym session, according to the Garmin VivoActive states I burned 1000 calories which is not at all true.

I know they say that your body is burning calories just by being alive and that is true but I wonder if it is actually this high. 300 calories an hour just to keep my heart beating and my lungs breathing seems like a lot.