Fitbits....

00mid
00mid Posts: 79 Member
edited February 2016 in Fitness and Exercise
does anyone have one?Are they accurate?Is there a better brand of activity tracker?I'm looking at the fitbit surge or blaze, mostly to track exercise and calories. Which tracker do you recommend?
Price under 200 pound. I found the only negative is that fitbits aren't waterproof, and I do like swimming now and then. However, I do like the fact that it calculates calories burned whilst doing strength training.

Thanks :)

Replies

  • darrinotoole
    darrinotoole Posts: 24 Member
    I have the charge hr. I didn't go for a surge as I wanted to wear something unobtrusive when sleeping.

    Great piece of kit.
  • drachfit
    drachfit Posts: 217 Member
    edited February 2016
    charge HR here, useless. very inaccurate heart rate. i compared to a chest-strap HR monitor in many activities, which are much more accurate. fitbit is always 20-30bpm too low. it is too slow to catch the quick spikes in heartrate that you would get while lifting. it is even inaccurate when running, climbing, rowing, and even hiking. its really only good for very low intensity stuff. it gets thrown off by sweat and wrist movement.

    it will calculate calories burned during lifting but just because it calculates a number doesn't make that number accurate. it calculates based on heartrate; this is only a good estimate if the activity is aerobic. lifting is anaerobic so HR does not strongly correlate to calorie burn.

    i was hoping for a replacement for the chest strap monitor during my runs, this thing is too inaccurate for any kind of athletic training.

    for calories you are going to be more accurate just tracking your average body weight each week and adjusting calories from there. TDEE spreadsheet post

    sleep monitoring was kind of cool, but it doesn't have a "wake outside of REM sleep" alarm feature which you can get on a phone app. it's algorithm for measuring your resting heart rate is off too, usually 4-5bpm higher than when i measure it manually. good for seeing general trends, but no real accuracy.

    i didn't like the way it allots calories during the day. MFP does it better, just giving you your daily total all at once. In fitbit, say your TDEE is 2000, it will give you a slow stream of calories throughout the day, so at 8AM you only have 200 available, by 10am it gives 400, noon 800, and so on. So if you eat breakfast at 8am you will be "over" your calories until it alots you more of your day's calories. Not that this is a problem (i ignore it), but why bother breaking it down like this? Plus, it's annoying having it tell you "50 calories over" and an hour later you are 100 calories under despite doing nothing. The only info i really need is, how many total do I have left today?

    Overall, for $150 I expected more accuracy compared to a $30 bluetooth chest strap and Free version of myfitnesspal. it is easier to manually log calories for exercise on MFP than it is to ignore the annoying setup of fitbit.

    I don't think optical, wrist-based heartrate tech is good enough yet. I doubt any competitors will have significantly better heart-rate tech. IMO, better to save your money for a nice pair of running shoes and a real Chest-Strap based heart monitor. Heck, for $150 you can even get a sweet GPS watch that pairs to the chest strap.

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