Fitbit Inaccurately Tracks Workouts

[FitnessandFood]

My Ionic is telling me for most of my workouts that I only do a low percentage of cardio. Now, I can dance for an hour and still get this message. My heart rate will be peaking and it thinks I don't do cardio. Only time it ever registered over 20% cardio was with kickboxing.

Anyone else either noticed this or have suggestions for a super-intense at-home cardio workout it will pick up on?

[SunsetRunner]

Fitbit devices are not good at tracking high intensity workouts. In general, wrist-based trackers find it problematic due to where they are being worn (wrist is probably the worst place to wear HR monitor). The pattern I usually see is HR going into low HR during intense exercise and increasing HR when resting. Very often, when my HR is very high the watch shows two dashes or even something near my resting HR. From my experience, the best results I get from:

- steady intensity ( like run with steady pace )

- not too much of wrist movements (exercises that bend your wrist, like pushups, will give you worst results)

I gave up on wrist HR monitoring for the reasons mentioned above. Accuracy is not there for me and when it comes to working out targetting particular zones Fitbit falls quite short (only three zones, no zone alerts, no effort analysis, no way to export data for non-GPS based activities).

[Dominique]

It’s activity tracker vs. sport watch. Fitbits belong to the first category and focus on 24/7 monitoring of your activity. If you are primarily interested in tracking workouts, i.e. more intense activities of limited duration, you should consider a dedicated sport watch. And if you are interested specifically in monitoring your HR during these workouts, you should consider a device with a chest strap.