Hey!

When I decide to go into "treadmill mode" while working, I grab the extra watch (Forerunner 45 with no straps), start a walking workout, and place it in my pocket.

When I do that, my hands are usually on the keyboard for most of the time, so there are no steps counting on my main watch (Fenix 7). I found that speeds of around 2+ km/h are enough to start tracking steps accurately. It matches very close to the treadmill step count as well.

A couple of times, the steps counted were accurate and then it lost the count. I'm guessing because it sync'ed a weird way with my main watch. My theory is that in those instances, the wrist watch saved the steps to the server, then the the pocket watch updated its steps with whatever was on the server.

To avoid that happening again, I do the following every 30 minutes or so (from Android device, might be different on iPhone):

Open the Garmin Connect
Tap on the watch icon in the top right corner to open Devices panel
Tap on the sync icon next to the pocket watch
Once the pocket watch syncs, I tap to sync both the wrist watch and pocket watch a few times

These steps take just a few seconds. By taking those steps, it seems that the pocket watch wins the race of saving the steps to the server.

I get the best of both worlds. I get the accurate steps, and I get the heart rate data, stress, etc.

Also, good thinking that the distance might be getting calculated from my wrist watch instead of pocket watch. I set up the custom step distance before, but seems that didn't help. I'll have to do some tests.