Bike rides and steps

tinakowalik

When I bike ride, I track it as an exercise. It counts my pedaling as steps. Do i need to remove those steps it counts, or keep them?

editorgrrl

Leave them.

heybales

Depends on your goals.

Some people want their steps to reflect ONLY their daily life, not exercise.
That way they have goals of being at a certain activity level outside exercise. Some research has shown that is just as effective as exercise in helping your body.
Several on Fitbit remove or blank out their steps from exercise, that way they can keep an eye to confirm daily activity is staying where they want.

But calories for exercise still matters - and if you have a non-HR based device, the steps seen (which is either 1 foot going down, not even both feet like normal steps, or it's road vibration and not even steps) have no bearing at all on calorie burn for the walking formula that is used.
My rides are commonly given 40% of a best estimate calorie burn, that's rather major unless the ride was just 5 min to grocery store or such.
Need to manually log with non-HR based device.

But if HR-based device - then starting activity like you do allows HR-based calorie burn - better estimate and manually logging not needed.

tinakowalik

Hi thank you! Mine is an HR device.