Freestyle mode - bad energy values

misolin

Hi, I have Tomtom Spark watch. Running and cycling functions are great. I have problem with freestyle mode. When I hike, I measure trip in freestyle mode. I upload the trip at mysports and there is no energy consumption (it's logical for freestile mode). When I open the trip, I can choose different activities (hiking, snowboarding,....). I would expect, that when I choose hike, it should calculate energy automatically (it would be nice feature). It doesn't happen. I calculate energy manually, edit the trip and paste energy value. Everything looks great for a while. When I open progress/activity tracking/energy there is nothing about that hike. There isn't manually calculated value, but even no energy value at all. So if I will be at home all day and do nothing, I will have bigger energy consumption then after 50 km long all day hike.

Could you please fix this nonsense?

P.S. It's nice that there is skiing and snowboarding activity, but I really miss XC skiing activity. I think, that more runners do XC skiing during the winter than snowboarding.

Thanks a lot.

tfarabaugh

Do you have a Cardio version with the HR sensor on or a HR strap paired? Calories in freestyle is based on HR so without HR data it cannot calculate calories. Other modes use MET tables, which are scientifically tabulated tables of energy expenditure for a specific activity at varying paces. It uses the MET factor along with your personal stats to come up with an energy expenditure number. Since Freestyle is intentionally a generic activity to cover a wide range of sports and METs require a specific sport there is no way to use METs. They cannot add it after the fact as the calculation requires sport specific data (pace, speed, etc.). If you want calories burned during a freestyle activity you need to have HR, either through the OHR or a chest strap. If you use another mode it will not work as the calories for those are based on METs so it will not be accurate if you are not doing that sport.

Again, the progress tab, which is based on the daily activity tracker, will not pick up anything if the HR is not working. The daily tracker is using your BMR to compute calories, so without HR values in the sports activities to compute additional calories, you will not see a change here, it will continue to use your BMR for it.

I imagine this is not what you were hoping to hear but let me know if this answered your question. If it did, please mark it as a solution so other can look for it if they have the same question.

misolin

Thank you for your answer. I have basic version of Spark and my girlfriend Runner 3. We like long all day hiking trips, so I didn't want to buy cardio version because of power consumption. I understand, that a lot of people can measure a lot of activities. I don't understand, why it doesn't accept manualy entered values. I can edit every trip (distance, time, energy), but these values are not calculated in day summary. During the night I have pernament energy expenditure 80 kcal. It should be the lowest value during the day. During the two hours hiking, I have zero energy expenditure. It sounds me logical to have zero value during freestyle activity. But if I type my manually calculated value of energy (for example 800 kcal), it should use average value for these 2 hours (400 kcal/hour).

Anyway. I was looking for METs tables and it calculates only from type of activity (different MET values for different speed of the same activity), weight and duration. Weight is constant. Duration and speed is measured in freestyle mode. So it should be no problem to calculate energy expenditure automatically from average speed, when I choose type of activity.

I know that this problem is unimportant, but it looks so badly when I look at energy chart after 50km hike and see those zero volues :-)

Hannerieboshoff40

Please, help i want to know how, does the speed work in the freestyle mode?

tfarabaugh

Hannerieboshoff40 wrote: »

Please, help i want to know how, does the speed work in the freestyle mode?

It is based on GPS, as that is a GPS enabled mode.