Fitbit + treadmill workout - enter separately?

I usually take my FitBit off when I am on the elliptical because it is counting steps and syncing with MyFitnessPal when I am definitely working harder on the "hill climb"mode of the elliptical, so I prefer to just log in the closest exercise in manually.

eal401 wrote: »

I wear my Fitbit 24/7 and log about 6000 steps during my workday just walking the halls at school and on the playground with my students. Each night I hit the treadmill for 40 minutes at 4mph at 1% incline.

My question is: do I just leave my exercise alone and just log the synced Fitbit steps or do I also manually log the treadmill session? I'm so confused because I wear my Fitbit while on the treadmill, but 5000 treadmill steps gets me sweating and my heart rate up far more than 5000 steps down the hallway!!

It depends. I'm guessing your Fitbit isn't one of the models with a heart rate monitor. In that case, I'd say definitely use the Fitbit number. If you have a separate heart rate monitor, use that to get the calories burned. However, your Fitbit is likely giving you more calorie burn for your treadmill workout than it does for normal walking because it takes into account the intensity and frequency of your steps, not just the number of steps you take, to compute calorie burn.

So, I'd lean towards using the Fitbit number. Second choice, log the treadmill session in Fitbit (not MFP), putting in distance, and see what number it comes up with. Last choice - use the values that MFP gives you for a walk at that speed and for that duration. MFP's exercise estimates are not very good, in my experience. They want to give me way too many calories for pretty much everything.

Anything step-based, such as walking on the treadmill, is already accounted for by Fitbit so there's no need to log it

I guess it would depend on which fitbit you have - I have the Blaze, which can track my treadmill/elliptical workout for me, so I wear it 24/7. If your fitbit doesn't include a heart rate monitor, that might be a different story - though if you enter your exercise into the fitbit app with the correct times, fitbit should automatically recognize those steps as belonging to that exercise - and will actually delete them if steps is a ridiculous unit of measurement for the exercise you've entered (which is why you can enter "driving", for instance, because sometimes fitbit will count steps during a drive, and that provides an easy way to delete all the steps counted during that time).

Oh, and @caseylainetx: yeah, your body definitely cares. Sweating isn't the best way to measure calorie burn, but basically the higher your heart rate is, the more calories you're burning, as a general rule - and a good bout of sweat-inducing exercise is definitely good for your heart. In terms of calories, I'm finding that taking 10k steps at a light walking pace will expend about 500 kcal - I'm not sure how many steps I take exactly in my 5km runs, but it's around 6000, and according to fitbit I burn more than 500 kcal on them, so the difference is quite large (almost double the amount of kcal per step). It actually makes a lot of sense when looking at the motion itself: your stride distance will be larger when you run, and it takes more energy to move something a longer distance. Also, when walking, you're mostly sticking your leg out and letting yourself fall forward (no kidding, that's a good part of what makes it hard to let two-legged robots walk properly) - there's no time during a walk when you don't have at least one foot on the ground. On a run, you're basically adding a little jump in there, which is good for a bit more energy as well.

That said, don't let that discourage you from walking 5000 steps at a leisurely pace - even light exercise is exercise, and any activity is better than no activity at all.

Aside from that, there is the fact that running 5000 steps take a lot less time than walking 5000 steps. There's a good chance you'll be walking those 5000 steps anyway, and it's a lot harder to fit a good long walk into your schedule than it is to fit in a short run, so it's a lot easier in terms of time to take 5000 extra steps with a run than with a walk.

Your normal steps that you're walking throughout the day are accounted for based on what activity level you selected in your profile. Log just the work out steps.