Help/advice for Excercise/Auto-Track (football/soccer/HR/Steps)

[MattSando_]

Hi all,

Just received a Blaze and I'm struggling to understand the interface and UX. 

To save battery I have disabled HR unless I'm working out. I'm not fussed about keeping HR on all day. 

I weight-train 2-3 times a week which involves a warm-up jog on a treadmill, and do various excercises which involve carrying weights and walking (farmer's walk, lunges, etc...). 

I also play soccer/football twice a week both indoor and outdoor. 

I never need to use GPS. 

When doing my weight routines, I will enable HR. Then, If I go through the Blaze and select 'Excercise' I can choose 'Weights'.

Will 'Weights' track my steps and add them to my daily total - I don't want to lose what could 2,000 steps!?

Will using Excercise > Weights utilise the HR monitor to calculate total calorie burn throughout the weights routine?

When I play football, I will enable HR. I can't use the Blaze menu 'Excercise' because Football doesn't exist. So, I have enabled 'auto-detect' >  'Sports' (because the icon is a person playing football!). Will this mean that, if I play continuously for over 15minutes, my football game is recorded? Will my steps, distance, calorie burn (from the HR measurement) be recorded?

does anyone else find it all very unintuitive and confusing? It's like they've added feature after feature without the foresight to combine features that are similar in a simple, non-confusing way.

[wmchapman]

Balancing using your tracker as a pedometer for steps and using it to analyze calorie burn can be a challenge @MattSando_ , so many of your "strides" in an activity are not forward or even chopped, it is going to be highly unlikely you'll get "credit" for all of the movements.

You are on the right track with using the HR feature to monitor calorie burn though, you do the activities for the exercise not the steps is the general thinking.  It is easy to change the name of the auto-recognized exercise or turn the auto-recognition off all together if you just are interested in raw steps:

SmartTrack might detect a “walk” but you prefer your exercise history to show that it was a “treadmill” (because steps counted will be lower than if walking in the real-world with a normal stride and free arm movements) :

1. Log into your fitbit.com dashboard
2. On the menu bar at the top, click Log and then click Activities.
3. Click the pencil icon next to the name of the activity you want to categorize.

To turn off one or all of the auto recognized activities:

 fitbit.com dashboard

Log into your fitbit.com dashboard and click the gear icon in the top right corner.

Click Settings > Devices. If you have more than one tracker, choose the one that supports SmartTrack.

Find and modify the option for automatically recorded exercises.