Recumbent Bike Exercising

[LewWagner]

Since the weather has turned colder this winter, I admit it.  I'm a fair weather walker/jogger/runner outside.

We have a recumbent bike we purchased way back in the 2003 and I started using that, again to burn calories. I had heard that my Fitbit device (zip) might not record stationary activity or pushups or situps, so I was interested to see what it would show me.

I wear the zip at the 11 o'clock position on the waisband of my shorts.  My hips move and the shrinking fat around my waist contributes to that movement.

In conjunction with Map My Fitness web site, I manually enter in the bike readout data and calculate my calories burned, mph, and minutes/mile.  I transfer this info to a manual activity log entry for biking in Fitbit.

That manual entry along with info from the Zip provides me with a metric result I hadn't noticed before while walking.

I'm burning the same amount of calories in half the time it took me to walk the same amount of calories burned.

Benefits:  no more sore feet from walking, 8 mile (roughly 30 minute time) segments about 3-5 times a day at about 15-15.5 mph avg speed are resulting in around 3,800-4,000 calories burned each day.

I'd be interested to hear from you about your thoughts and/or experiences with Fitbit and such exercise.

[LewWagner · Accepted solution]

Discovered that my manual entry of my bike exercise didn't contribute one thing to my step, calorie, or distance metrics for that exercise.

It did, however double the VAM and placed it just after the actual VAM recorded by the Zip on my shorts waistband.

So, I'll fine tune my iputs and drop the manual entries. 

[LynneExercises]

I am very disappointed that my Charge 2 does not accurately record my Recumbent bike activity 

i enter it manually but it does not update steps or km accurately I am thinking of returning it as essentially all I have bought is a heart rate monitor 

[LynneExercises]

Wish it was this easy - not all happy that the watch doesn't monitor a recumbent Bike which is a very common exercise option 

[blueswoman]

I just bought an outside recumbent.  It isn't capturing my rides which is why I came in here. 

[Heybales]

It won't capture rides, and even if it did happen to see "step" impacts to start and stop the time automatically, the "steps" would likely be road vibration and of course the distance from all "steps" on a bike has nothing to do with distance you actually rode, therefore it would have nothing to do with a calorie burn from the ride.

So even if it could see the road vibrations (mine did easily), any figures based on that are totally bogus and useless.

Unless you just want a high step count for challenges.

I always made a manual workout activity entry for accuracy.

You'll need to manually start and stop the workout - select Cycling.

HR-based calorie burn won't be too bad potentially - better than anything else unless your bike is measuring watts in which case you would have most accurate calorie burn available.