I like to import my indoor TR rides into Strava for the mileage estimate and the ability to synch the workout into Apple Health (esp. bc I do a lot of non-TR workouts and like having a single repository to track everything, i.e, Apple Health). Typically Strava generates a reasonable mileage estimate and a calorie burn that is reasonable albeit somewhat lower than TR’s own estimate. Let’s call that small calorie gap the baseline wonkiness. The Strava mileage and calorie numbers go directly into Apple Health, and all is well. A couple of weeks ago, I updated the iOS on my phone and iPad. I have no idea how old/new the updates are, as I tend to ignore them until I feel like it. On my TR rides since that update, Strava does its mileage and slightly lower calorie estimate, as usual. However, the Apple Health calorie count is WAY lower than Strava’s. So now, the wonkness has intensified. What’s weird is when I look behind the scenes at the actual source data that gets synched, Apple is getting the right (ish) number from Strava . . . it’s just not displaying it on the front end. Any insights? I unconnected all the permissions/synching I could find, restarted the phone, and then reconnected the permissions. The problem is still happening, though. For the ride I did today, TR says I burned 635 calories, Strava says 604, Apple Health has my active calorie burn for the day at 484 (even though it has the Strava number when I dig into “show all data”).
Everything I see online from a quick search indicates that Strava doesn’t include basal metabolic rate in their calorie calculations, but their own support articles don’t seem to explicitly say they don’t.
I only mention that because you specified active calories in your post for Apple, not total calories. That was my first thought—the higher counts are total calories. That doesn’t appear to be the case, though.
Worth looking at that possibility.
Or maybe Apple doesn’t take into account power data and bike weight like I think Strava does, so it could be recalculating calories burned based on limited activity data it uses in its calculations instead of accepting the data and calculations provided by a third party, i.e., it says no thanks to all data except time, HR, and maybe body weight if it has it. That certainly sounds like Apple.
The Apple Watch will normally use calorie count from the watch instead of third party applications (I.e. derived by HR). You can however override this my changing the priority of the apps. Take a look at the link below. You should probably also use RunGap instead of Strava for syncing.
Thank you for sharing that article! I don’t have an Apple Watch, but using that article, I was able to put Strava’s data above Apple’s own data in terms of priority. Hopefully that will do it – will try to report back after my next ride. Will look into RunGap.
Yeah, leave it to Apple to try to outsmart the apps that were designed to collect this very data. Thanks for the research. Elsewhere in this thread, someone pointed out a way to instruct Apple to prioritize the other apps’ data, so I am trying that + will report back.
Checking my data after today’s ride: I think this priority setting fixed the issue. Thanks!