ANSWERED
Since my previous Blaze and even with my current Ionic, my original purpose with Fitbit was to track my calories, steps and sleeping time in order to improve my fitness. However, as I begun cycling seriously about seven months ago, I began using it proactively to track my bike rides and syncing them with Strava.
So far so good. A few months ago I bought a cycling computer, the Wahoo Elemnt, paired with a band heart monitor, the Wahoo Tickr. I used both as the Wahoo Elemnt didn't sync with my Ionic, so I rather preferred to delegate all pertinent data (distance, altitude, speed, gradients, routes, etc) to the Elemnt, while also tracking my heart rate with the Tickr band. This way, my activities were directly uploaded from the Element to Strava, instead of doing it from my Ionic via the Fitbit App as I previously did. As I wanted to keep track of the calories on the Fitbit App, anyways I simultaneously tracked the activity on my Ionic (via Exercise > Bike > Start on my Ionic).
However, that's where problems began. After every ride, my information was accurately and automatically uploaded from the Elemnt to Strava, but when I synced the Fitbit after the ride, it also uploaded the ride information to Strava automatically. WhiIe I could accept that there were normal discrepancies between both the Fitbit and Wahoo data, the problem was that it created duplicated entries for the same activity in Strava, meaning doubling the distance and thus distorting the performance stats.
My first solution was simple: on Strava, I deleted the posted entry that came from my Ionic. However, I found a serious problem: once I deleted the activity tracked by Fitbit on Strava, the calories tracked on Ionic got slashed on the Fitbit app. In other words: if I delete the activity entry on Strava created from the Ionic data, once I got to Fitbit and synchronized it with my Ionic, the number of calories reported by the Ionic was automatically subtracted from the total calories on the day. That could mean somewhere between 1,000 and 3,000 calories less on a day, depending on the ride's effort.
That is a serious bummer, especially when you need to keep track of your calories as part of serious training. On a day of 6-hour ride, I can easily burn a total of 6,000 calories. To get 3,000 or 2,000 calories slashed automatically on Fitbit reduces my total calorie burn reported and affects my stats on Fitbit (potentially misdirecting the calorie intake program during the riding season, or during a race).
The second solution I implemented was to avoid tracking the activity on my Ionic (meaning not to activate the Ionic menu I mentioned before), and leave it alone so the Ionic could report the activity automatically as it detected the motion and heart rate increase in the background. This way I was able to prevent the Fitbit to report any activity to Strava. However, I also realized that the information reported on Fitbit was inaccurate: calories burned and heart rate were substantially lower than those reported by the Wahoo Elemnt and Wahoo Tickr. Just take a look:
1. Information reported by Fitbit (without activating the Ionic to track the ride via Exercise > Bike > Start):
- 1 hour 16 minutes (1'15" in Fat Burn, 1" Cardio)
- 130 bpm max heart rate, 88 bpm average
- 1,107 calories burned
2. Information reported on Strava via Wahoo Elemnt and Wahoo Tickr:
- 2 hours 26 minutes
- 169 bpm max heart rate, 139 bpm average
- 1,676 calories burned
So this is the big issue!! You can see discrepancies are high and I am not sure what to do. I can't get accurate data by activating the Ionic to track and report to Strava directly, but I can't either achieve it by letting the Ionic "as it is" to do the calculations automatically in the background.
I can infer I am not the only serious cyclist that has gone through the same issues. I've loved Fitbit from more than a couple years ago: the customer service is terrific, the hardware and software are adorable and very simple to use, and the community is great. I don't want to give up on my Ionic, but if there's no proper solution from Fitbit I won't have any other choice but consider moving to another platform.
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Best Answer@CeTroo I'm afraid your friends are right. I've been reporting these issues many times here. Went through customer support which didn't tell me anything else that I already knew. Still, I went with their advice, reset this and that, unpair this and that, turn around on my left foot counter-clockwise, thrown a pinch of salt over my right shoulder and said "please work Ionic" three times in front of the mirror during the full moon. Unfortunately, all of it didn't work 😞 My last Saturday ride:
The yellow line is Ionic, the blue line is Suunto with PolarH10 chest strap. The blue line breaks 2 or 3 times due to pause. Ionic keeps recording ( and wastes battery with GPS during paused activity ). There is a region when both are almost overlapping ( ~12-16km ) but that's it. Most of the time Ionic is way off. Moreover, I'm not quite sure what is that flat line at the end. Looks like for ~3km I had constant HR of 167BPM. This isn't even possible! Unfortunately, Fitbit will rather send you for wild goose chase than openly admit there's something wrong here. Also, the advice of keeping Ionic positioned properly during the fast ride... I don't know whether people who say that even realize how dangerous it may be on the road and stopping every few minutes to adjust the band is out of the question for me, too.
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