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MyFitnessPal Community

Best Fitness Tracker

dakotababy

I know there have been tons of posts about this. I am kind of curious what today’s techies think is the best fitness tracker ASIDE FROM FITBIT. I have used a Fitbit for years and honestly, I haven’t lost any weight with it. I highly doubt the accuracy with the HR models, the numbers seem insanely high. A lot of people use the trackers for steps and sleep...I want one that I can trust.

Replies

heybales

Any tracker that does HR will likely show the same issue.

They all use similar calculation of stride length from steps - so that's where your daily activity type stuff calorie burn comes from.

Your exercise level is HR-based calorie burn - again with similar formula.

If you had an issue with Fitbit appearing to be greatly inflated - you'll probably find that as an issue on all of them.

ALL of them are estimated - can work great for average person doing average things. Farther you move away from that - the worse it can get.

And all have tweaks that can help in some regard (like getting correct stride length entered, or entering a better HRmax figure) - but if meds or genetics just causes a higher or lower HR than normal - expect calculation issues.

I like Garmin, but not because anything to do with accuracy. It inflates bike rides hence being replaced with powermeter figures, it underestimates running sometimes so manually entered. Weight lifting is very inflated too even as manualy their database entry, so my own figure.

AnnPT77

My Garmin dramatically underestimates my all-day calorie burn: If I used it to guide eating, I'd be grossly underweight in a matter of months. This is true even though the exact same model is accurate for some other people.

Makes ya think it might be a statistical estimate, doesn't it?

From what I've read, most of them are pretty bad at sleep tracking, especially if you have any kind of unusual sleep characteristics.

Expecting them to be fully accurate is IMO unrealistic. They'll come out OK on average for a lot of people, because that's how sound statistical estimates work. More important than trusting them, IMO, is understanding how they work, what they're good and bad at and why, and working with one accordingly, as heybales' post implies.

P.S. I like my "inaccurate" one just fine, as it tells me real-time heart rate in a way that seems pretty accurate, which helps me guide workouts as I do them; gives me stats for on-water rowing (pace, distance, spm) that are close enough to be useful even if not precisely spot-on (I know they're not); and has some other functions that wouldn't justify buying it, but are nice to have.

watts6151

My Fitbit over estimated my calories
My garmin under estimated them

My Fitbit was more accurate with my sleep

traceyc83

I've had 2 different Garmins, vivofit with a chest strap HRM and I now have a vivosmart with built in HRM. I loved my vivofit, the chest strap is much more accurate than the built in HRM. The vivofit also doesn't need to be charged, it has a battery that lasts about a year. The vivosmart has extra features like receiving calls, texts, weather etc.... I don't need all that junk, I just find it annoying.
I'm just waiting for my vivosmart to stop working so I can go back to vivofit. My chest strap can connect to my vivosmart so I'm going to try doing that to see if I can get more accurate data.