Counting Steps FAD
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ForecasterJason wrote: »
One day about two months ago, it was way off though. I woke up out of bed and had 1 floor climbed, and IIRC when I checked my dashboard it said it was around 5:30AM. I'm 99.99% positive I didn't go downstairs and come back up, or go up into my attic and come back down in my sleep. Then I was out shopping later in the day and literally watched my floors climbed increase as I was walking on level floor.thankyou4thevenom wrote: »ForecasterJason wrote: »
FWIW, not all Fitbit devices are based on hand movements. I have the One and most of the time it's in my pocket, so it's picking up motion from my hips/legs. I can tell you that there are times when I'm moving my hands and it does not register any steps from that.koinflipper wrote: »Your Fitbits are not counting your steps at all. They are counting your HAND MOTIONS.
21. Yesterday I walked 2 miles (according to my SHealth) on this thing it was 7 flights of stairs, over 10,000 steps!
22. Records THOUSANDS of extra steps in a day, and DOZENS of extra flights
COUNTING STEPS IN BED OR IN SLEEP
1. Counted steps when I was in bed
2. I've woken up and it's said I've walked over 100 steps while asleep
3. Shows hundreds of steps as I was a sleep
4. FitBit says I've walked 95 steps before even getting out of bed in the morning. I don't sleepwalk.
5. it had me walking over 10,000 steps on a day I was home sick in bed
6. The first morning I wore it, I checked it before even leaving the bed. It said I had taken 14 steps already, burned over 1,000 calories, and walked over 1 mile. All before even getting out of bed.
7. I was sick this past Monday and stayed in bed all day and it logged 2,000 steps.
As for extra floors climbed, I've had this problem before and mostly resolved it by resetting the device.
My device usually does count extra steps while I'm in bed, but I "make up for it" by just walking the extra 25-100 steps without the device. That's not a major deal IMO.
The Fitbit uses an althermeter (sp?) to measure your floors. So if you go up in a lift it'll register floors but not steps. Unless you're in a very shaky lift or walking on the spot no steps will be counted.
One day it was off? Maybe it was lint. When mine gets wonky, I clean mine and all is right with the world.0 -
Amazon buyers will complain about anything. All popular products have these negative reviews. A pedometer is a tool that has been used for a long while now. Some people find them useful, so what? I have no idea why it grinds your gears that the goals some people have and the tools they utilize to achieve them happen to be different from yours.0
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JustMissTracy wrote: »koinflipper wrote: »Your Fitbits are not counting your steps at all. They are counting your HAND MOTIONS. I borrowed my friend's for 2 days just to see. First day I had over 12,000 steps and all I did was four loads of laundry (clothes in washer, then moved to dryer, removed from dryer, then fold) and took the dog out 10 steps from my front door about six times. The next morning I already had 8,000 steps by noon. I was given credit for 2,839 steps for BLOW DRYING MY HAIR.
I don't see why ANYONE would have a problem logging 10,000 steps with this device just going about normal daily activities (especially involving hands).
So I went on AMAZON to see all the NEGATIVE REVIEWS specifically for the FitBit Charge HR. Here are some quotes for just the first 50 page of 300 pages of one star reviews.
STEPS FROM HAND MOTIONS
1. I bought this device for my wife in December. Since then, we have determined that it does not count steps, it counts hand movements. A guy sitting at a bar doing 12 oz. curls would probably register a fairly hard workout wearing this device.
2. I am a crocheter and if you don't take the devise off before you crochet, it counts every stitch as a step
3. I was ironing one night and looked at the Fitbit before I started and I had some 8,000 steps. An hour later after wearing the fitbit on my left arm and ironing with my right arm I had over 10,000 steps!!!.
4. Can walk 20 steps or more when cleaning my teeth.
5. The thing counts my "steps" as I drive. I turn the wheel, I get a few steps. I drive all day for work, so the "steps" add up quickly even though I have yet to get off of my butt. I can also reach above my head and back down, and I get a step or two added to my count.
6. When my husband claps his hands and his step count goes up.
8. The Fitbit I received from Amazon logged steps whenever I waved my hand around.
9. Adds 2k to 5k extra steps when I am not walking but doing the wash, folding laundry, or painting. I learned to remove the Fitbit when I am doing housework.
10. Today, I sat at my desk looking at my iPhone while waving my hand and the step count just kept going up until I stopped waving my hand!!! Smh.
11. I watched it add 100 steps just while sitting at my desk for the first hour of work
13. This is HORRIBLE if your going to push a stroller at all. It will not count your steps AT ALL while pushing.
14. Unless your arms swing like a monkey when you walk, forget about it reading movement as a step. The first night I had it I spend 45 minutes grocery shopping and had a grand total of zero steps for my effort since I was pushing the cart.
STEPS WHILE RIDING
1. I drive a compact car on city streets, and it continuously counts these as "steps".
2. Counts steps while riding golf cart
3. The next day I got 2 flights of stairs on an elevator, then 3 more on the way home in my car.
COUNTING NON-EXISTENT STAIRS
4. Apparently I have climbed 150 flights of stairs today. I have not. I have maybe climbed 15 flights.
5. Live in a bungalow yet climb 10 sets of stairs on average each day
19 . The step counter credits me while sitting and reading. I am credited for walking flights of stairs when stairs are not in sight.
19. I put it on and by the time i walked down stairs it said i did 900 steps.
20. It does not count floors/stairs properly. It’s pretty good when you can climb a flight a stairs without leaving your chair.
21. Yesterday I walked 2 miles (according to my SHealth) on this thing it was 7 flights of stairs, over 10,000 steps!
22. Records THOUSANDS of extra steps in a day, and DOZENS of extra flights
23. At the end of the day, it said I had climbed 17 floors when I really didn't climb a single one!
COUNTING STEPS IN BED OR IN SLEEP
1. Counted steps when I was in bed
2. I've woken up and it's said I've walked over 100 steps while asleep
3. Shows hundreds of steps as I was a sleep
4. FitBit says I've walked 95 steps before even getting out of bed in the morning. I don't sleepwalk.
5. it had me walking over 10,000 steps on a day I was home sick in bed
6. The first morning I wore it, I checked it before even leaving the bed. It said I had taken 14 steps already, burned over 1,000 calories, and walked over 1 mile. All before even getting out of bed.
7. I was sick this past Monday and stayed in bed all day and it logged 2,000 steps.
Sorry....I don't believe most of these. Because of my own experiences. I highly doubt ANYONE got those types of steps out of laying in bed all day, ever. Nice try tho. Since January, I've only gotten above 10000 steps 4 times. Yesterday I managed over 12000 for the first time, and believe me, I put effort into getting every one of those steps, as I work from home and my home is quite small. If I didn't have the Fitbit to remind me of how little I was moving, I'd still be averaging 5000 a day, max. Someone said it earlier, if you are so against it, don't get one. Trying one on for two days is a joke, a slap in our faces. How about doing a couple of months sincerely, tracking, and then showing us if you notice any difference in your own health?
My thoughts too, Amazon reviews are mostly garbage and unreliable. I've noticed a few times when it gave false positives but they were low, not in the hundreds or even thousands per day and you can adjust the sensitivity of a FitBit to lower the count. I've heard stories about steps from typing etc but I've had 4 different counters and I've put them through tests and they are pretty good at filtering noise. I've never seen anything fro typing, or swaying back and forth on my heels or such. I think a lot of these people are not being truthful. I also love all the reviews on Amazon that start off about how they just ordered the product and are excited or that they bought it for someone else, or someone knows someone who had a friend who had one. Yeah, just ignore those reviews a lot of them are from dubious sources.0 -
I have the Zip. It doesn't register anything but a step. I wear an old pedometer that measures steps with a small pebble along with the Zip every so often. Every time the two are within 7-12 steps of each other. I am satisfied with the accuracy of the Zip. I wear it on my waist band usually.0
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OP are you a shill for the anti-activity tracker industry? Is there some new product coming out soon that is going to put these activity trackers out of business and you are just planting the seeds? I just don't understand the animosity towards these devices that so many people find to be helpful tools to achieve our overall goals.0
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I said "300 pages" of negative reviews and I only browsed first 50 pages. I believe those that involve inaccurate "step counts" due to hand motions are true because I found that out by doing laundry and blow drying my hair.0
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koinflipper wrote: »Your Fitbits are not counting your steps at all. They are counting your HAND MOTIONS.
Then I would like to thank my hand motions from the bottom of my inactive little heart for the scale registering 25 pounds lower this morning than it did nine weeks ago.
Or maybe the scale is just registering my wishes and not actual weight loss. That's probably it.
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WinoGelato wrote: »OP are you a shill for the anti-activity tracker industry? Is there some new product coming out soon that is going to put these activity trackers out of business and you are just planting the seeds? I just don't understand the animosity towards these devices that so many people find to be helpful tools to achieve our overall goals.
I'm starting to wonder this as well.0 -
koinflipper wrote: »I said "300 pages" of negative reviews and I only browsed first 50 pages. I believe those that involve inaccurate "step counts" due to hand motions are true because I found that out by doing laundry and blow drying my hair.
You still haven't answered simple questions such as how is getting people to increase overall daily activity and baseline fitness a bad thing? What do you do for your activities that puts you in a position to say what others do isn't sufficient?
The new one, why the change from step counting isn't helpful to the bashing of one form factor of counter from one manufacturer? Another new question .. how does one devolve from citing their studies to Amazon reviews as the intellectual basis of a position?
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brianpperkins wrote: »koinflipper wrote: »I said "300 pages" of negative reviews and I only browsed first 50 pages. I believe those that involve inaccurate "step counts" due to hand motions are true because I found that out by doing laundry and blow drying my hair.
You still haven't answered simple questions such as how is getting people to increase overall daily activity and baseline fitness a bad thing? What do you do for your activities that puts you in a position to say what others do isn't sufficient?
The new one, why the change from step counting isn't helpful to the bashing of one form factor of counter from one manufacturer? Another new question .. how does one devolve from citing their studies to Amazon reviews as the intellectual basis of a position?
Exactly...I'd like to know too....0 -
There's difference to being PHYSICALLY ACTIVE and PHYSICALLY FIT. Steps are fine for keeping up physical activity. If one wants to get more physically fit, they train in exercises and activities that improve it.koinflipper wrote: »I am a big disbeliever in the idea that counting steps taken under any circumstances during the day are actually has any meaning to becoming physically fit. My physiology classes in graduate school taught me that to contribute towards fitness, there must be sustained physical activity for at least 30 minutes at cardio training level.
A friend proudly showed me his fitbit today saying he had 10,000+ steps for the day. How many of those steps were from his office down the short hall to get cup of coffee and back to his office chair (drinks at least 10 cups of coffee a day) ? Do those steps matter in the overall fitness? What about meandering around WalMart avoiding cart collisions and frequent stops to select item and put in cart? Do those steps contribute anything? How about multiple trips from family room to kitchen to get snacks to watch TV? He finally admitted that only half of those steps were during his morning run.
Is it the hypothesis that to get in 10,000 steps per day, you had to have been pretty active during the day? If I walked slowly all day to get 10k steps, is that equivalent to random steps taken throughout the day of any duration and any pace?
Step-Counting gadgets have become big business. Can anyone point me to a single peer-reviewed scientific article that indicates that step counting is a proven method to improve fitness? I doubt it. It is just a FAD that may lull many into the illusion that they are getting physically fit merely because they logged a certain number of steps each day. Is 10k steps the "daily recommended" amount for physical fitness? What happened to cardio exercise as the gold standard?
I think the problem here is that you're confusing ACTIVE with FIT.
And how can it be a fad if it actually encourages people to increase their activity with hardly any additional cost?
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Personally I have a Fitbit for one reason...................to see if I've been ACTIVE enough in a day.
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Just popping in to leave this study...
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2108876
OP if you don't like it, then don't use one. I've had mine for almost four years now and I like it. My main reason for purchasing it was to motivate me to remain active during the day, not just during the one hour I spend at the gym.
The inaccurate step counts that you and the Amazon reviewers are complaining about could easily be explained by user error and not understanding how the device works.0 -
Personally I have a Fitbit for one reason...................to see if I've been ACTIVE enough in a day.
A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition
Exactly. Even if, as claimed here, Fitbit grossly overestimates steps (the margin is much lower than OP is led to believe) it would still be a valid tool to gauge activity. Even if we go for broke and assume that half these steps are false positives, seeing 5000 one day and 15000 the next still indicates an increase in activity.0 -
amusedmonkey wrote: »Personally I have a Fitbit for one reason...................to see if I've been ACTIVE enough in a day.
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IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition
Exactly. Even if, as claimed here, Fitbit grossly overestimates steps (the margin is much lower than OP is led to believe) it would still be a valid tool to gauge activity. Even if we go for broke and assume that half these steps are false positives, seeing 5000 one day and 15000 the next still indicates an increase in activity.
exactly. If it's inaccurate in a fairly regular way, then it's doing its job as far as I'm concerned.
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Dude, you're just whining now. Find ANY tracker (HRM, Bodybugg, etc.) and they will ALL have faults on accuracy of reading calorie burns. Same with any cardio machine in the gym because the body and how one trains has so many variables. Unless you're hooked up to a direct/indirect calorimetry device at all times, we're just speaking of estimates.koinflipper wrote: »I said "300 pages" of negative reviews and I only browsed first 50 pages. I believe those that involve inaccurate "step counts" due to hand motions are true because I found that out by doing laundry and blow drying my hair.
A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition
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OP, your anger on this subject is really odd.
As ninerbuff and many others have noted, there is a difference between being active and being fit. Step counting helps you to be more active. Why you are so focused on the idea that people think step counting makes you fit is also odd.
When I got my Fitbit Flex, I wore it for two days along with an old fashioned pedometer clipped to a belt loop. The total difference after two days was less than 100 steps, so not an issue for me, I don't need it to be perfect, just to give me an idea of how I'm doing.
Most people I've known who were getting weird info from their trackers had set them up incorrectly as far as their stride, wearing it on their dominant arm and not changing the settings, etc.
I have a moisturizer I love that I have used for years, and the Amazon reviews mostly say it is either too oily, too drying, or gave someone hives.0 -
I've been using one for years to help guide me toward the correct caloric intake. I set MFP to sedentary and allow it to add activity based on my steps - which is a basic tool to gauge how active I am on a given day.
Do I think it makes me fit? No. I work out for that.
Does it help me gauge activity so that I can be reasonably sure that I am eating at a slight caloric deficit? Yes.
Does it help me to know when I have been far too inactive on a given day? Yes.
Does it motivate me to keep moving? Take the stairs? Walk from the back of the parking lot? Walk to the farthest restroom? Absolutely. What does that amount to? Increased activity. But I certainly don't fool myself into thinking that this makes me more fit. It's a tool and it works for me.0 -
I had a Jawbone Up3 briefly, and it gave me 'odd' results from arm movements. I didn't get angry, I didn't decide that my circumstances meant it wouldn't be more accurate for someone else, I didn't even leave a bad Amazon review ;-)
I simply bought a tracker that clips onto my clothing (Withings Ox, which comes with a wrist strap and a clothing clip).0 -
OP, your anger on this subject is really odd.
As ninerbuff and many others have noted, there is a difference between being active and being fit. Step counting helps you to be more active. Why you are so focused on the idea that people think step counting makes you fit is also odd.
When I got my Fitbit Flex, I wore it for two days along with an old fashioned pedometer clipped to a belt loop. The total difference after two days was less than 100 steps, so not an issue for me, I don't need it to be perfect, just to give me an idea of how I'm doing.
Most people I've known who were getting weird info from their trackers had set them up incorrectly as far as their stride, wearing it on their dominant arm and not changing the settings, etc.
I have a moisturizer I love that I have used for years, and the Amazon reviews mostly say it is either too oily, too drying, or gave someone hives.
Great post.0
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