Fitbit and working out

K_saine

Do you take off your fitbit when you are at the gym, or do you put it on workout mode to not count your steps. I want to wear it but I am afraid that If I am lifting weights it will count my arm movements as steps.

editorgrrl

Leave your Fitbit on at all times, and do not overthink the accuracy of your step count. It's just a metric—what really matters is the accuracy of your Fitbit burn.

Non-step exercise (like swimming or biking) should be logged either in Fitbit (that's what I do) or in MFP—never both. Exercise logged in MFP overwrites your Fitbit burn during that time. If you want your Fitbit exercise to appear in your MFP newsfeed, post it as a status update.

heybales

You have a misunderstanding.

Putting it in to workout mode does NOT cause it to not count your steps. It is merely making a snapshot of the start and end time, so you can see the stats for just that block.
And for HR models, it starts per second HR logging.

Arm movements aren't counted as steps. Impact is counted as steps. The device is actually trying to see impact despite the arm moving, or not as the case might be. To various levels of success.

But you should manually log lifting in Fitbit no matter what device you have. HR model will inflate calorie burn, non-HR model will badly underestimate.

See the FAQ for more details as to why on several of those points.

SimonCypher

I leave mine on when I'm at the gym lifting weights, however when I'm hitting the treadmill I take it off and use the information from the treadmill to input distance ran / calories burned. I don't personally log any of my weight training on MFP / FitBit as otherwise I'll always find myself WAY under my calorie goal daily.

heybales

SimonCypher wrote: »

I leave mine on when I'm at the gym lifting weights, however when I'm hitting the treadmill I take it off and use the information from the treadmill to input distance ran / calories burned. I don't personally log any of my weight training on MFP / FitBit as otherwise I'll always find myself WAY under my calorie goal daily.

Just so you know, if the distance Fitbit is estimating based on steps is that incorrect that you need to manually log it - your daily burn based a large part on steps and distance is very incorrect too.

Also - when you manually log walking or running - you replace not only the calorie burn like other manually entered workouts - you also replace the distance. And Fitbit uses your stride length to calculate steps based on that and replaces that too.

Might as well wear it.

Weights doesn't add that many calories, not compared to cardio anyway.

Wouldn't you especially want to feed your weight lifting workouts to get the best improvement from it, by accounting for it?