What am I doing wrong! Apple watch, recording wildly inaccurate

Hi
Can someone please help.  I’ve just Strava on my iPhone for a few years and it’s worked well for recording casual running.

I was recently given an Apple watch (series 7) and was pleased I’d be able to record my main sport on Strava, field hockey, and see how much I was doing.  Obviously the phone is too large to carry when playing hockey, but the watch looked ideal.

But something is going wrong – I’ve tried recording it as Football (Soccer) as that seems the closest match to hockey.  But check out the screenshots below from last night’s training session.  Mine is recorded as 0.52 miles.  The same activity, recorded by a team-mate is as 3.48 miles! 

I can’t work out what is up.  I had auto-pause turned off, and I’ve checked and Location Services and Motion Calibration & Distance are turned on.

Any ideas what is going wrong!?

Hi ​@davescott 

Thanks for your post. In general GPS recordings work best for activities like walking, running or biking riding. For sports like hockey or soccer, where are is a lot of stopping and turning in a relatively small area, it can be hard for the GPS recording to accurately track all of your movements.

Comparing the 2 maps (thanks for providing those) it looks like your friend’s map recorded more movement, however I can many GPS errors on that map also, and I wouldn’t be confident that the distance and pace shown is accurate.

When GPS data is inaccurate, distance and pace calculations will also be inaccurate. One idea would be to record your field hockey activities using a sport mode that doesn’t record GPS data, such as cardio or HIIT or workout. 

Your activity will not generate a map, but the other recorded data should be more accurate. I hope that helps.

Thanks for the response!  Will try that out.