Garmin Vivofit and HRM

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ckfox95
ckfox95 Posts: 73 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
I just got the Garmin Heart Rate Moniter to go along with my vivofit as I have become very interested in challenging myself with my speeds, distance, etc. with my walking and cycling. Do you wear your HRM just while working out or on you daily while you go about your day?
Also, I added it on Garmin connect as a cardio activity I noticed it shows me calories burned which has synced over automatically to MFP so now I see the adjustment for my daily steps thus far and an adjustment for the calories that I just burned during my walk. So this will add back into my daily calorie goals, correct? Am I supposed to or not supposed to eat those calories back? I am in process of trying to loose a few more pounds before I hit my maintenance goal weight. I hope this makes sense, I know what I am trying to ask just not sure how to ask it haha!

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  • ckfox95
    ckfox95 Posts: 73 Member
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    A couple more quick questions. It doesn't show me on the app under the activity my speed or elevation. Are these not included on the tracking with the Vivofit?
  • smuehlbauer
    smuehlbauer Posts: 1,041 Member
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    I only wear the chest strap during my cardio activities. Eating back calories or not has 200 post about. it depends on your goals. Some do, some dont. Try both and see what works best for you and your body.
  • mbaker566
    mbaker566 Posts: 11,233 Member
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    I would just wear the hrm while you are active. i have found with my monitor it only tracks my heart rate during recorded activities.
    yes, you can eat back those calories. you are supposed to net at least 1200 cal, so eat at least that. I'm 5'3" too
    so eat at least 1200cal, or your calorie allotment is its above 1200cal. I try to eat half my exercise calories back.
  • MobyCarp
    MobyCarp Posts: 2,927 Member
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    ckfox95 wrote: »
    A couple more quick questions. It doesn't show me on the app under the activity my speed or elevation. Are these not included on the tracking with the Vivofit?

    The Vivofit is basically a pedometer with some fancy software. Distance and speed will be based on what it has for your average stride length, and won't really be accurate unless you have a very consistent stride. (Hint: Everybody has a longer running stride than walking stride, and most people have a longer vigorous walking stride than ambling stride. This makes it very difficult to get a stride-based distance calculation to be accurate.)

    The speed and elevation are functions that you get with Garmin GPS watches. Speed or pace will come with all of them, and elevation with some of the high end models. My 620 does not measure elevation directly; that gets pulled from the GPS data correlated with a map. It can be wrong at bridges, where the data may think I went all the way down the gorge to the river when I really went about halfway down to the footbridge. Or it may not pick up the bump of going over an overpass. Higher end watches have an altimeter to fix that problem.

    I use the Vivofit to track steps, to track sleep, and to display heart rate when I'm running without having to use another data field on the 620. The ability to look at heart rate in real time while running is going away now that we're getting to weather where I need long sleeves, and Vivofit will be inside the outer layers.

    I only wear my heart rate monitory when I run. If I wear it too long, it will chafe my chest; and it doesn't have any data I really need when I'm not running. For your situation, that would correspond to wearing the HRM on your planned exercise walks and bike rides. That's a good idea anyway, because the heart rate data helps Garmin compute a more accurate calorie burn.

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