Fitness Tracker gadgets and monitoring calories during cardio excercise

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Phelper
Phelper Posts: 7 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
One thing I just don't understand is how to incorporate a fitness tracker (fitbit, polar, whatever) while working out. The fitness counter is great for counting steps and offering additional calories for exceeding walking goals. But it also miscounts steps during working out. My wife rowed for 30 minutes, and it turns out the Polar Loop counted those as steps. Calories during rowing are much more than walking. When my wife goes to enter her calories burned for rowing, she's now double dipping because the loop counted those as walking calories. The easy solution I see is removing the loop while working out. Is there something I'm missing?

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  • Sued0nim
    Sued0nim Posts: 17,456 Member
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    With a basic fitbit zip, which is my preference, I have it automatically synched to MFP and eat them all back

    When I do steady state cardio, which rowing would be, I wear a polar HRM with chest strap (FT4) and update exercise on MFP with those calories manually ...this overrides the steps during that time

    With circuit or HIIT I take a percentage of the HRM burn and log that as exercise
  • MeanderingMammal
    MeanderingMammal Posts: 7,866 Member
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    Phelper wrote: »
    One thing I just don't understand is how to incorporate a fitness tracker (fitbit, polar, whatever) while working out. The fitness counter is great for counting steps and offering additional calories for exceeding walking goals. But it also miscounts steps during working out. My wife rowed for 30 minutes, and it turns out the Polar Loop counted those as steps. Calories during rowing are much more than walking. When my wife goes to enter her calories burned for rowing, she's now double dipping because the loop counted those as walking calories. The easy solution I see is removing the loop while working out. Is there something I'm missing?

    Different activites lend themselves to different measures to approximate calorie expenditure:
    • Walking - either GPS to determine distance or a pedometer
    • Running - GPS with an HRM for best measures, or an HRM for lower accuracy.
    • Rowing - Based on distance or an HRM
    • Circuit training or weights based HIIT - Based on time as there are too many variables for a meaningful measure
    • Weight training - Just based on time as again too many variables for a meaningful measure.
  • Phelper
    Phelper Posts: 7 Member
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    Maybe I'm not articulating this right. My wife has walked today for almost 9,000 steps. MFP reports it's connected to the Polar Loop and MFP says the Polar Loop is counting steps. They claim to be synching. Yet, with her activity level in MFP as Sedentary, despite having logged 9,000 steps, there is no polar calorie adjustment.

    If sedentary expects 3500 steps anyway, shouldn't she see a calorie adjustment for the other 5500 steps?
  • ScubaSteve1962
    ScubaSteve1962 Posts: 609 Member
    edited November 2015
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    With polar loop if you want it to count your calorie burn during exercise you have to use with a heart rate sensor MFP will give you credit for those calories burned.
  • Phelper
    Phelper Posts: 7 Member
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    Turns out the Polar Loop was in FlightMode. No idea how it got there, I've only had it a week and never put it there. It's now communicating with the app, which is communicating with MFP, and tracking calories.

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