recumbent bikes and fitbit

[twingirls2]

I am looking to buy a recubent bike. due to knee injury. I tried a recumbent bike on sat. at a sporting store. I noticed that it counted the revolving of my feet and increased the milage. Is this normal> Does fitbit count miles on a recumbent bike?

[Mary]

It just senses the motion of your torso (or wrist) and guesses what step-based motion you're doing.  It doesn't know you're on a bike or when you're under resistance.  It's only going to be accurate for being on foot, unencumbered.  Which doesn't mean it's not going to detect motion on some bikes and log something but it definitely doesn't 'track mileage' of a bike.  

[gerrymcd]

Nope, the fitibit can't track milage.  If you have a smartphone there are lots of really good apps that will do that for you -- some that even update the info automatically to your fitbit dashboard.  Otherwise, you would have to buy a GPS enabled watch -- probably $100 or just over. 

[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.

[LewWagner]

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.