One of the other training platforms I tried recommended turning off Smart Record and have it do every second. Otherwise they say there can be significant gaps in the data.
Should I do the some for Athletica?
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Thanks @shaun for rising this. It looks like there is no shared consensus in favour or against Garmin smart recording, as it will depend on the kind of accuracy you’re after and in what data. Given that smart recording responds to variations in “direction, speed, heart rate or elevation”, it is reasonable to think that most of the cases are covered. However, for example, if you do not have HR and you are riding a bike at constant speed on a straight road, in that case smart recording might introduce gaps. Also, “true” variations might not be instantaneously detected for a number of reasons.
As you probably already know the trade off is between data consistency and memory/battery. I would be quite interested to know how this can affect the data analysis on Athletica. Please keep us posted on this topic if you will be trying to activate/de-activate smart recording.
Hi @Andrea I’ll turn smartrecord off and see what results I get although tbh I’ve no idea how I could compare with it turned on!
When I looked at this previously it doesn’t affect the battery as the garmin is always recording at the same rate, it just discards readings that are the same so saves space.
Sync does take longer as there is more data so I suppose that would drain the battery a bit more but very marginal.
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If you are using power and heart rate you’ll generally see one second recording, apart from auto pause, in the output FIT file.
Hi Phil - I mainly run outside so figured all of the movement would mean high-fidelity recording. I’ll most probably just leave it at smart recording and worry about other stuff!