Cycling to steps

[Theshewee]

Me and a friend both have the ionic. We both have same stride length and run stride. When we cycle he gets twice as much walking distance and twice as many steps. WHY

[NellyG]

In theory neither of you should get any steps as cycling is not a step based activity. The 'steps' you get come from bumps in the road that the tracker misinterprets as steps. I have found on my bike that if I have my tyres pumped up really hard I get LOADS of these steps, but if my tyres are soft I only get a few. So it could be a difference in your tyre pressures, in your weights, or in the shock absorbtion on your bikes.

[Ozzie65]

Hi @Theshewee - Further to @NellyG's point, I think that if you track your ride with "Bike" as an activity, it will override any steps and give you accurate stats for your ride.

[Theshewee]

The problem I’ve found with tracking my rides is that there rather long 100 miles + and the ionic battery runs out. Must be the gps using it. Think I just have to shake my arm more. 😂

[PeteG-1]

Is your HR (average above resting) also much lower, for most of the ride?

I find that since my Ionic fails to track my actual HR, while riding (for about 95% of my ride it's 35-50BPM under, AVERAGE, against my EKG), it doesn't give me very many of these "phantom steps".

My Charge2 (third one now, also appears to be on its way out) gets my HR pretty close to actual, and it gives me TONS of steps, comparatively, I'd say 5-8000/hr, whereas the Ionic might give me 1-2000/hr.

I bet if you check your HR deltas, it'll match the steps, roughly.

FB appears to be using some sort of "interesting" algorithm here; I'm thinking of  creating a graph to show the inverse proportion, to see if I can figure out what sort of equation it's using, when it's counting the "phantom" steps.