Fitbit not switching from walking to running stride??

[mbrittb00]

I have had my FitBit one for a while now (over a year) and until recently I've been only walking with it.  Recently however my wife has gotten into running and I've been doing interval training (i.e. 30 seconds run/jog followed by 2 mins of walk).  My FitBit is consistantly shorting the distances, by quite a bit. 

In addition to my Fitbit I also use MapMyRun to track my activity.  Additionally prior to my last few runs I've mapped out the "course" I was going to run (using online tools) so I'm relatively confident in the length.

On a recent run I did a course that I had measured to be 3.1 miles (5 km) yet my fit bit only recorded 2.45 miles, and 4775 steps.  This got me wondering that maybe my fit bit isn't changing from walking strides to running strides.  If we assuming that all 4775 steps are walking steps then in order to get 2.45 miles, that would requrie a walking stride of .9 yd (or m) which is reasonable for someone 5'11"

Map My Run logged my walking pace at around 14:30 mins/mile and my running pace at 8:00 mins/mile.

For that activity I was using a :30 / 2:00 interval set, so 20% should have been at running / jogging strides.  If we assume that my jogging stride is 2 yards, and apply that to 20% of the steps I get 3.03 miles, which make much more since.

I am just about convienced that what is happening is my FitBit is not sincing when I'm switching from walking to running, but I'm not sure what to do to fix the problem.  I have checked the stride lengths listed in my profile and both are set to 0, presumably causing fitbit to use the default values.

[Rich_Laue]

Yes with zero it uses a calculated value based on you gender size etc and then what exactly else is proprietary as and we dont know. If you know your stride it is almost always better to set them up.

[Colinm39]

@mbrittb00 Welcome.. Fitbit uses the standard 0.415 for men and 0.413 x height for women to calculate your walking stride. We don't know what they use for running.

Many have reported it is better to work out your own stride lengths and enter them.

Then you can use them and back calculate using the Activity Record option and home in on where you were running.

The following is my Fitbit One and I have homed in on 2 minutes of walking and the calculation proves that it is using the walking stride. I don't run because of lower back issues but when I first used Fitbit I proved that my One does detect the change in pace and it used my running stride in that test.

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@mbrittb00 wrote:

I have had my FitBit one for a while now (over a year) and until recently I've been only walking with it.  Recently however my wife has gotten into running and I've been doing interval training (i.e. 30 seconds run/jog followed by 2 mins of walk).  My FitBit is consistantly shorting the distances, by quite a bit. 

In addition to my Fitbit I also use MapMyRun to track my activity.  Additionally prior to my last few runs I've mapped out the "course" I was going to run (using online tools) so I'm relatively confident in the length.

On a recent run I did a course that I had measured to be 3.1 miles (5 km) yet my fit bit only recorded 2.45 miles, and 4775 steps.  This got me wondering that maybe my fit bit isn't changing from walking strides to running strides.  If we assuming that all 4775 steps are walking steps then in order to get 2.45 miles, that would requrie a walking stride of .9 yd (or m) which is reasonable for someone 5'11"

Map My Run logged my walking pace at around 14:30 mins/mile and my running pace at 8:00 mins/mile.

For that activity I was using a :30 / 2:00 interval set, so 20% should have been at running / jogging strides.  If we assume that my jogging stride is 2 yards, and apply that to 20% of the steps I get 3.03 miles, which make much more since.

I am just about convienced that what is happening is my FitBit is not sincing when I'm switching from walking to running, but I'm not sure what to do to fix the problem.  I have checked the stride lengths listed in my profile and both are set to 0, presumably causing fitbit to use the default values.

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[mbrittb00]

So yesterday I both ran and walked the same section of a sidewalk near my house.  And got 71 walking steps to 34.5 running steps.  So my running stride is 2.05x my walking stride. 

Since I don't have easy access to something that is acturately measured (i.e. a football field), I used .9 yards (2' 8.4") as my walking stride (what I had previously calculated as my walking stride based on FitBit recorded steps and distance) and calculated the running stride to be 1.85 yd (5' 6.6").  I then input these values into my FitBit settings.  On todays run 3.73 miles (6k), my fit bit recorded a distance of 4.17 miles.  So the problem has flipped.

I'm going to recalculate the running stride based on the .415xheight for walking stride as was mentioned above and see what I get on Friday. 

[mbrittb00]

Also, how exactly do you hone in on a section of a recorded activity.  I'm sure I'm missing something simple, but I can't find it.

Thanks.

[mbrittb00]

So for anyone still following this thread, my fitbit measured todays run very closely.  It registered 3.04 miles on a measured 3.1 mile course.  As previously indicated I was using the standard .415 x height for my walking stride and calculated my running stride based on my test.  The next step is to find a short accurally measured section (i.e. football field), to accuratly measure my walking stride.

So the only thing I did was to actually set the walking and running stride rather than using the FitBit defaults.  It appears that the FitBit default for my running stride was the same as my walking stride.  Not sure why, but ...