Advice needed about how to track various exercises on 'health' watches?

[likelysuspect]

Ive got a Samsung watch thing, which syncs with the Samsung health app on my phone

Walking, great, tracks this, times it, steps seem accurate. Calculates calories but obviously thats always going to be a ball park figure

But anything else its utterly rubbish

Never seems to know when Im cycling, whereas my OH's Samsung thing seems to spot when he is cycling

But sea swimming its also utterly useless at. An example is today, it thought I was walking for 27 minutes today at 1 mph when I was swimming. To make matters worse, it has calculated that during this episode I used over 55k calories, yes 55 THOUSAND calories. And then insults my intelligence by saying my total burnt calories for today thus far is just over 1100 (which would be more or less correct without the swim, my TDEE is 1540.

Saturday, it identified a swim, 28 mins, 246 calories. Its being sensible with that calcuation

Friday however, again, it thought my swim was a walk and calculated that I burned 13 THOUSAND calories for the day and that my activities burned up 12 thousand calories.

So it doesnt like a swim for some reason.

Any ideas? Do I dump the watch in the sea??!!

Can you not just tell it what exercise you're doing?

Well yes, I thought someone would point this out!

Yes you can, but I suffer with neuropathy and other disabilities in my fingers and hands and dont really like trying to swipe on a small screen, I dont even use a phone that easily

But more than that, call it stubboness, it should do what its meant to do which is identify what you're doing. And my OH's does and I dont understand why mine doesnt, althought to be fair he doesnt go swimming so I dont know if his would recognise that.

So I dont want to faff about remembering to start and stop the thing and pick the exercise etc etc.I leave the phone in my car rather than take it to the beach so it would be on the watch face I would do this.

Tbh I don’t know how any watch is going to be able to accurately identify what activity you’re doing out of hundreds of possibilities. I tell my garmin the activity so I know it’s correct. Remembering to start it and stop it does take practice however!

what is your Samsung thingy & what is your OH's Samsung thingy, what models exactly?

Different "thingies|" have different functionality. Not every fitbit has same functionality as all other fitbits, not every Garmin, not every Polar... etc.

Mine is a fit 3, Im not sure what his is. But he doesnt do swimming

For the last couple of swims it has identified that Im swimming, it calls it a pool swim, rather than sea swimming but I suppose there isnt much difference.

its so unpredictable about what it will or wont do.

My Apple Watch is fairly poor at identifying the type of workout that I’m doing as well, so I say ‘hey siri, start a (insert whatever workout you like here) workout on my Apple Watch’ and it at least pulls it up on the screen so I just have to press ‘start’. Even when I forget and it does identify the workout itself, it almost never starts when I think the workout started…I guess it takes time to figure out what the movement actually is. Sometimes (walking, running) it will backdate to pretty much the beginning, but for almost anything weights or gym related not a chance!

Ask your partner now much he paid for his.

Samsung Fit3 costs £60 at Argos. Other Samsung activity trackers cost £280+.

Well my version is only 30 quid now on Amazon

He paid about 50 for his, but I will double check it might have been some sort of special offer