HR Charge 2 SmartTrack Exercise Times and steps

[mreed7773]

Hi all.. I am a tad confused why the exercise times don't start being tracked until you've done 10 minutes. I cycle to the shops all the time it's about a four minute ride and it's annoying that it's never tracked nor can I add it myself. I have trouble with it recording all my steps as well. I am just starting the gym and I only do five minutes on each thing as I suffer Ill health and only just beginning an exercise schedule. It extremely unfair that I can't log any of my exercises it should take in mind us that can't do ten minutes of exercise in one go. Is there a way of changing this at all? thanks for any input .

Moderator Edit: Updated Subject For Clarity.

[RobertoME · Accepted solution]

Hi there @mreed7773, nice to have you here as a new member of the Fitbit Community! I was reading your post and I can understand your point of view. Rest assure I will forward your comments as feedback to our teams, since this is what help us to improve the Fitbit experience.

The intention of the time was to differentiate when you are just having a short walk with a complete exercise routine. Otherwise your tracker wouldn't have a chance to detect the difference in your motion pattern or it would sync several walk exercises in your history that might not be necessary to have. So the intention was to find a middle point for the functionality of this feature.

At the moment there is not an option to reduce the time of the exercise, as only 10 minutes is the minimum gap for SmartTrack. 

In your post you mentioned that your tracker is not recording your steps, but rest assure even if the tracker do not separate this as an activity, your steps are still being counted.

As an alternative, despite is not the best solution; I recommend to manually log these exercises that can be detected with the SmartTrack feature while you are using your tracker, given the fact that your exercise routines has to be short.

1. From the main page, tap "Track Exercise"
2. Tap the Stopwatch icon at the top-right
3. Switch from "Track" to "Log" using the toggle at the top of the screen
4. Choose the activity you'd like to log from the list, or create your own
5. Fill out the details and submit the log

All steps, calories, and active minutes recorded by your tracker are overridden for the duration of a manually logged activity by the activity's entered values. This ensures that your steps are not counted twice as long as the manually logged activity has the correct start time and duration.

Thank you for bring this to my attention. See you later and let me know if you have other questions.

[mreed7773]

I thankyou for your reply. The fitbit would be better to track all steps / activities for some of us less able as everything we do adds to our exercise routine. Fit bit could do with remembering not everyone that is fully able will be using these products. If I knew this I would of reconsidered my purchase to another better suited.  

[LZeeW]

@mreed7773   @RobertoME  I would like to offer an alternative to manually logging the exercises.  The Charge 2 has a Multisport (Exercise) mode where you can track an activity that is less than 10 minutes. 

Here are links to two Help articles that describe using the Multisport (Exercise) Mode and how to customize your list of exercises.  I don't think you will need to change the list of exercises, a I believe Bike and Workout are on the default list.

So for your bike ride, you would push the button until you see the icon that says Run.  Then tap the tracker until it says Bike.  You press and hold the button to start and stop the tracker.  If it is a four minute bike ride, it will track a four minute bike ride and you will get credit for that four minute bike ride.  Likewise, when you are at the gym, you would set it to Workout, but I recommend that you start and stop it at the beginning and end of the total workout.  You can pause the tracker during an exercise, but I recommend just skipping that part.  Too much work for little return.

I see two major drawbacks to manually logging exercises.  First, it is TEDIOUS and time consuming when you have a device that, by its basic design, can track them.  Second, when you manually log an exercise, The calorie burn is a Fitbit derived number that is the same for each minute of the exercise.  The Charge 2 is designed to base your calorie burn on your heart rate. 

I think you can continue to use your Charge 2 -- I believe that you just need to set it up to meet your needs.