Fitbit frustration

mielikkibz

So, back story

I have a sedate life throughout the week. . 8 hrs at a desk, I try and walk at lunch, and walk/bike either in the AM/PM, depending on time of year.

On the weekends, I tend to hike/walk various trails here in MD during the winter weather permitting, or if i have a dog event, I can walk 10-24 miles a weekend.

I was told that my HRM(Polar FT4) was useless for these type of exercises, not sure why, I don't do either of them very sedately, but went and bought a fitbit. . and what a waste of money

I have an old car, it's not a smooth drive, the FITBIT counts part of the drive to wherever I'm going as steps done,a nd sometimes even flights of stairs! I'm trying to figure a way out of that, since I don't think you can manually enter steps to fix the issue, as I thought maybe keeping track of steps, zeroing it out, and putting it in the system when I got home would work, but i can't figure out if there's an option to do this.

I am so frustrated. . right now, I consider it a POS expensive lesson learned. ..any hints on how to make it work better would be much appreciated

dobenjam

I live in the DC area as well but walk to work so I don't have these issues, but I have seen other forums on the topic. Use the start/stop function and then go into the fitbit site and mark the activity as" driving". That fixes the problem. I love my fitbit and find it almost eerily accurate when walking. I need to adjust my running stride length but it has been great otherwise. I hope that helps.

jenniebean1680

Thanks for posting this... I have a Garmin HRM for my runs and a regular HRM for my gym workouts, but I was thinking about getting a fitbit, mostly because of the syncing between the device and this site. But I have been spending WAY too much money on fitness gadgets and other accessories lately, so your post nipped that in the bud. Besides, I teach spinning 3x/week, and it doesn't work for cycling, at least not when you're in the saddle, so our hills would be a bunch of nothing.

HorrorChix89

You can use the Start/Stop feature and mark your drive as DRIVING but it will only override the floors, not the steps. At least that's how it is for me. If you forget to use the Start/Stop then you can look at the graphs and see when it calculated floors and then use that time to guess when you were actually driving and then override it that way.