Calibration overview

Calibration is optional.

Most users can get useful planning value from TRIPS without calibration.

Calibration is best for advanced users who have a meaningful history of recorded outdoor activity and want TRIPS to better reflect their own movement patterns.

What calibration does

At a user level, calibration helps TRIPS better reflect how you tend to move under real-world conditions.

In practice, it can improve:

• pace assumptions
• terrain-response assumptions
• energy assumptions
• the relationship between your historical activity patterns and future planning estimates

When calibration is worth considering

Calibration is most helpful when your historical files are:

• numerous enough to show patterns
• varied enough to include meaningful terrain range
• representative of the kind of hiking or backpacking you actually do
• reasonably clean and believable

Poor or unrepresentative data can produce misleading calibration outcomes.

If you are still learning the core planner, start with defaults and honest manual inputs first.

The basic calibration workflow

At a high level, calibration usually looks like this:

1. Ingest representative FIT files.
2. Review whether the dataset is good enough to calibrate from.
3. Preview calibration changes.
4. Save a profile if the result improves realism.
5. Apply that profile deliberately to a trip or future trips.

A good mental model

Think of calibration as optional personalization, not as a prerequisite for using TRIPS well.

If you want more detail about whether you need it, see Optional calibration.

If you want to do the workflow itself, continue to:

• Ingest FIT files for calibration
• Saved calibration profiles versus preview
• Apply calibration to a route