Fitness Tracker Recommendations?

Thebajan

I used the Fitbit HR for the past 3 years and it finally gave up the ghost. I've been without a tracker now for about a month and I'm considering getting another one. I never actually enjoyed wearing the 'watch' style tracker and since that's what most of them are, I'm looking for alternatives. I came across the Motiv ring tracker but before I take the plunge, I'm wondering if there's anyone here who has one and what your thoughts might be on it? For other options, please do post your experiences with what your favorite tracker is and why. Since I'm already VERY FAMILIAR with the Fitbit, I don't really need that info but others reading this might benefit from it so go ahead and share. Thank you!

Duck_Puddle

I have a Motiv ring. I also have and use a Fitbit (currently a Versa or Ionic-i have both) and a Garmin Fenix 5s.

I’ll start by saying I’m firmly in the early adopter camp. I’m happy to invest in new products that may still have some bugs and/or are fairly sparsely featured at the outset.

The ring is beautiful. It is the most discreet tracker I’ve worn and isn’t any less accurate than other trackers for counting steps and indicating HR. It has scratched some with weightlifting, but otherwise seems to be holding up well. It’s also not in my face with notifications and buzzing and so forth.

Where I’m not as impressed with the Motiv ring (yet) is that there’s minimal data transfer to the Apple health app (which is what could link to mfp), there’s no ability to customize stride length so while I knows I’m running, it assumes I’m running quite a bit farther than I am (so the calorie burn is quite inflated).

I think my biggest issue is that it detects periods of some activity, but then only “counts” them (for calorie burn and active minutes) if I then go in and declare what I was doing during that time. So I’ll open the app and it’ll say “were you active from 10:24am-11:17am?”. Well, now that it’s 11:19PM, I don’t precisely remember what I was doing 13 hours ago. Every other tracker I’ve ever had (which includes several Fitbit’s, Garmin’s, Polars, Jawbone, bodymedia, etc.) has found ways to account for this rather than having me itemize my day (or dismiss those times and have a calorie burn estimate that is about my BMR).

From the standpoint of being a discreet tracker that will measure your resting HR and probably eventually become considerably more featured than it is now, it is a nice tool.

From the standpoint of guesstimating TDEE-I don’t think it does any better than just using any calorie burn estimator/calculator on the interwebs (including Mfp’s). You’ll essentially be itemizing your day anyway (which you can do for free with any calculator). I suppose that the wildly high days from running combined with the ridiculously low days for the days I don’t itemize everything will probably balance out to something close to my actual average-but I could do just as well with a calculator (which kind of defeats my primary purpose of wearing the tracker).

But-it’s really fairly new and I believe that android app is still in Beta (I’m on iPhone) so it’s far from a final product. It does what it says it does. Whether that’s practical for you and/or will meet your needs really depends on what you’re trying to do. New features are released quite a bit more frequently than with other devices though-and they seem receptive to customer feedback on which features to develop next.

If my primary goal of a tracker was to have a guesstimate/estimate for TDEE, the Motiv ring wouldn’t be my first choice (yet-but again-it’s a very new product and is updated frequently).

If you’ve liked the Fitbit and don’t want a watch type - the Alta can be worn in a clip (or bracelet or necklace).

Thebajan

I really appreciate the feedback.