Workout tracking Q's

[SunsetRunner]

When I hit the gym, I do a bit of lifting and then usually do a bit on the stationary bike...

Does the tracking "type" matter? How accurate are the calorie counts?

When I lift  I used the Weights option and on the bike I use the Spinning option.

If I am lifting super heavy, it would seem that I am burning more than a lighter day.

Would it make a difference if I just used Weights option for the lifting and while I am on the bike since I don't need distance measurements for either of those?

[JohnnyRow]

I don't think there is total agreement on the answer to your question.  My viewpoint is that which exercise name you call it is for 2 purposes: to determine which stats are displayed during the workout and in the exercise summary, and as documentation for you in exercise log to remember what the workout was.

Calories burned are determined by heart rate as the measure of intensity, regardless of what activity you are doing.

However some people believe that what exercise you track it as is a factor in calculated calorie burn.  I have never seen any clarification of this issue from Fitbit, and am not expecting it.  You can experiment tracking the same workout as different categories, but you can never duplicate the exact same intensity to detect small differences.

[WavyDavey]

I agree with @JohnnyRow, the difference is more for ease of tracking, and heart rate is the major factor when determining calorie counts. I prefer to track them separate, just so I have a record of how much time is spent in each mode.

Since you mention lifting "super heavy", one thing I have noted is the calorie counts, being based on heart rate, don't calculate the entire amount of effort. That is, the number of calories needed to recover from a heavy weights workout, and build muscle afterwards aren't fully taken into account by the HR tracking. So it may be necessary to add a few extra calories at mealtime for the muscle protein synthesis, depending on if you're trying to add muscle, or maintain it (or are doing a cut).

[Heybales]

Usually the selection is merely the choice of text labels to make your review in the future easier.

And while you might not be thinking about why you would ever need to review or find these workouts - the part of any good workout is making progress down the road. If not making progress in some manner then maybe you have a different purpose for the workouts - perhaps purely for calorie burn.

But for weights I'm guessing not.

Maybe the cardio easier to look at HR though if tagged correctly.

On a couple of the newer devices the Weights workout correctly does NOT use HR-based calorie burn, which would cause inflated reading.

Rather it uses the database rate of calorie burn - and while small compared to cardio - it is true too.

What you can do to confirm right now - find a past day with a Weights Activity Record, get the start & duration time from it, and manually create a Workout Record for Weights and accept it's calorie burn.

Now compare them.

About the same? You have newer device, only use Weights for lifting.

Different on manual being smaller? You have device using HR-based calorie burn. Would be better served manually logging the Weight lifting, use correct workout option for others.

If the spin bike is merely for warm up/cool down, and not a part of a workout goal to see progress on - I wouldn't even worry about it.

Picking spinning, or let device pick whatever it thinks it is - will both lead to HR-based calorie burn which is all you may care about.

Not creating an extra deficit perhaps when attempting to maintain or gain muscle.