Outdoors, smartwatches do a great job of telling you how far you ran or walked. Indoors, they often disagree with the readout on the gym’s treadmill. Which leaves a lot of us wondering—should we trust the treadmill, or the watch?
Whenever we’re evaluating accuracy, it’s important to know whether a device is measuring something directly, or interpreting data to make a guess. In this case, the treadmill is measuring distance, while the watch is guessing at it. (Calories are always interpreted, which is why they are never truly reliable.)
How watches determine distance
Your watch, by contrast, is on your wrist. There’s no way it can know what your feet are doing. It can make some guesses based on how much your wrist is swinging back and forth, and thus pick up a cadence (each arm swing corresponds to one footstep). You’ll swing your arms a bit harder and higher when you’re running faster, so it can use the oomph in your arm swing to make a guess at the speed you’re running. From speed and time, it calculates distance.
How to get the most accurate numbers on a treadmill
Neither is guaranteed to be perfect, but the treadmill is a lot more likely to get the right idea. A treadmill can be slightly miscalibrated, and give you a distance that’s a smidge off from what you actually ran. But a watch is just riding on your wrist, guessing. I’ve noticed that my arms don’t swing all that differently when I’m running at a fast versus a slow pace.
In fact, while following an interval workout on the treadmill on a Garmin, I’ve found that the watch thinks I’m going slower than I am during the fast parts. If I'm following a Garmin workout that asks me to run specific paces, it often buzzes to chide me (“Pace low”) even if I'm going at the right speed. I can often convince it I’m in range by pumping my arms a little harder. This isn’t really a solution, though.
Garmin Forerunner 570 42mm Advanced GPS Smartwatch (Slate) $549.99 at Amazon Shop Now Shop Now $549.99 at AmazonThe treadmill speed during the workout
The heart rate from my watch (especially if I’m using a chest strap)
I then follow my workouts appropriately. If it’s a heart-rate-based workout, I let my watch handle everything. (Garmin might tell me to do 32 minutes at 139 to 167 beats per minute. Perfect. All you, Garmin.)
But if I want to do a speed- or distance-based workout, I manage that manually, with my human brain. A quarter mile at 7.5 miles per hour, repeated eight times? I boop the buttons on the treadmill accordingly. At the end of the workout, I’ll either “calibrate” (from the watch) or edit the distance on my app to make sure it recorded the correct total distance.
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