Biking and FitBit

Heartlight441

How do you use your fitbit for biking? I have the Blaze (brand new) and earlier this week the Charge HR which I found out was terrible for tracking biking.
Was wondering - what if i put it on my ankle somehow? Would that not track revolutions of my peddling, like a step? Or are there other apps/gadgets to better record biking with caloric expenditure? Or do you just track it here in MFP as a cardio activity and bypass fitbit?

heybales

Depends on what you are trying to track. Route, steps, calories?

Sounds like you are thinking merely steps - but biking isn't step-based anyway, if it even sees a step on the ankle, it'll only get 1 foot going down, not the other. So different "steps" than step-based would provide.
And yes there are cadence sensors when using a true bike computer, or HR monitor that allows data from other sources (like Garmin and a few Polars).

But then you throw in calories comment - but that's done by HR anyway, so steps don't matter during exercise for calories since HR-based calorie burn is done.
In fact that's the issue for step-based devices - total inaccuracy for biking and no way to improve it - so other source or manual logging on Fitbit using their formulas.

Obviously for route, Charge HR has no GPS but could use Fitbit app function to track route.

Heartlight441

Actually you are quite right... my fitbit did capture heart rate. I guess distance would be nice to track. I did 35 km's on my bike but for some reason only about 7 kms registered over my day.

heybales

Steps will never be able to show distance on bike correctly.

Change gears and your cadence has no bearing on how far the wheel goes. Impossible task.

Need to use GPS if you want nice workout records of distance, avgHR, time, ect.
That's the type of thing for comparing later to see how the workouts go.

And that is worth editing the Activity record to change the name to perhaps a route - for easy compare down the road.