Friday, May 6, 2016

Fitbit Charge HR: my first 24 hours

So I wrote yesterday afternoon about my less than pleasant experience getting my new Fitbit Charge HR set up.  I wore it for the rest of the day, including my fantastic U-Jam Fitness class in the evening.  It was an intense class and I had a great time.  I was excited to see the statistics when I got home. ;)

The overall calorie burn is on target with what I've seen in past experiences with my old chest strap heart rate monitor.  It doesn't provide any pretty graphs or statistics though, so no comparison for you! ;)

I'm delighted to see that I was in "the zone" for the whole workout - surprised by some of the peaks and valleys there, but overall, it's all good.  I thought I burned more calories per minute, honestly, but again, this isn't out of the ordinary compared to my chest strap version, so I can't fault Fitbit for it. ;)  I do look forward to doing one of my elliptical workouts with this on and then comparing the numbers from the machine to the Fitbit. ;)

I am frustrated, however, that I only got credit for 5,517 steps during this workout.  Fitbit uses steps as the ranking system between friends, and I could've taken a ridiculously slow stroll for an hour and gotten more steps.  I had manually entered in my workout from before I wore the Fitbit yesterday morning, and it did not count those steps towards the amount shown on the friends list, but it did include them in my personal count for the day.  Very weird - and frankly, very frustrating.  I know it's not healthy to compare yourself to others constantly, but dang it, I want credit for my workouts!

I also got credit for 5 flights of stairs during the workout.  Um... odd.

I wore the Fitbit to bed last night, but it was so uncomfortable that I took it off before I fell asleep, so no sleep data for me.

I'm finding often that it's uncomfortable to wear - right now it's off so I can do my typing with less pain.

I wore it while I did two miles of a Leslie Sansone Walk Away The Pounds video, and though I did break a little sweat, it was by no means intense.  ;)  Interestingly, with an average heart rate of 115 bpm, heart rate zone time of 0 min peak, 5 min cardio, 20 min fat burn - I still ended up with an average calorie burn of 10 cals/min.  Whaaa?  Feels a bit demotivating, eh? ;)

One last tidbit: my son had a meltdown at the grocery store this morning, and when I got home I learned that it caused my heart rate to go into the "fat burning zone".  Ahem.

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