Fitbit "driving" activity and sync

Pirnie13

I use the driving activity on Fitbit to remove the extra steps I get on my Charge 2 when I go cycling. However, when I do this the sync between MyFitnessPal and Fitbit stops working for the remainder of the day (Probably because MyFitnessPal shows several thousand more steps than Fitbit and so doesn't think it needs to sync I guess).

Does anyone else have this issue or a solution to it. I really don't want the thousands of extra steps but also would like sync to keep working.

Thanks in advance!

heybales

Fitbit only sends new daily calorie burn when it's 100 higher than prior sync, and steps is sent at that time too.

If Fitbit got that cycling workout with huge amount of calories, and then you corrected the workout with basically nothing by removing the steps - that's not correct, because you actually did burn something.

If you don't mind the overestimated steps - they generally don't have much distance or calorie burn to them - in fact my calorie burn based on those bogus figures are always 1/3 to 2/3 actual calorie burn I did.
So my correction of workout is going UP.
If I cared to run that app to remove steps, my logging of workout would increase calories and allow another sync.

If you are truly burning less than Fitbit incorrectly estimated from bogus steps/distance, then it could take awhile, or never potentially until end of day.

Just the way Fitbit sends it's data is the problem. And they are limited to that max frequency, or they'd be flooding MFP even more than current amount crashes the caching system and causes sync issues.

Pirnie13

Hey, thanks for that. Really useful info about how sync works behind the scenes.

If I'm right the calorie burn shouldn't be an issue. I record my rides on my Garmin computer, which sends the calorie burn to MFP, which then sends it to Fitbit. If I understand right then this should override whatever calories Fitbit thought I burned for the exercise with the "correct" value from Garmin?

If I do correct the steps with a "Driving" activity then I manually enter the calories from Garmin so the burn overall should be the same. Sync looks something like this:

Garmin --> MFP <--> Fitbit

Currently my solution is to enter the driving activity the following day so the steps are gone in my Fitbit history but it doesn't affect MFP

heybales

You are correct about eventually Garmin determined calorie burn will replace the Fitbit burn.

But what if Fitbit said it was 800 calories because of it's HR-based formula.

And Garmin said 400.

And this was an evening ride ending at 7pm.

Fitbit would have synced a daily burn value that was about to be dropped by 400 cal.
How long for sedentary activity after the ride would it take to increase by 500 (replace the lost 400 and 100 more than last sync) in order to get a new daily burn sync - likely longer than 5 hrs since most BMR burns are below 100 - so now past midnight.

That's what can happen - so merely think about what since calorie burns you are talking about and timing of the syncs.

I'd frankly want to do the Driving app replace with minimum calories prior to Garmin coming across, that way you are wiping out the steps and reducing the calories below reality - but the garmin sync coming in will get calories back up to where they belong.

That was as soon as the daily calories finally sync over, the step correction will too.

Perhaps you don't have a 400 cal difference to worry about, so the delay will be smaller.

Pirnie13

I'd never seen that happen but completely see how it could! I guess I've just got lucky so far, or not had Fitbit record higher calories.

Cheers for all the tips!