Miles don’t match steps

[tiffs3]

Hello,

Newbie here. I have had the Inspire HR for about 2 months. My mileages seem to be all over the place in comparison to my steps (and generally low I think?). I have not changed any of the default measurements for stride length, etc. Here are some examples:

7,859 steps = 3.21 miles (walking only)

13,297 steps = 5.53 miles (walking only)

15,058 steps = 4.91 miles (walk, bike)

17,229 steps = 5.11 miles (walk, bike)

25,483 steps = 5.53 miles (walk, bike)

Any ideas why? I’m not finding any recent info about the current technology in the community.  It seems like days that I bike skews the steps compared to the miles. The longer the ride, the higher the steps, but lower the miles (mt bike or road bike). I’m more interested in steps than miles and don’t typically measure my walks because I’d rather not carry my phone with me, so I don’t have any idea about actual walking distances. 

I sync with an iPhone 8. Thanks in advance for ideas!

[JohnnyRow]

Do you manually log any data?

For bike particularly, do you let fitbit automatically detect you rides, or use the exercise app, manually starting and stopping the workout, and if so, are your calling it "bike"?

Assuming never using phone's GPS or manually logging data, walking distance should be simply number of steps times stride length.  Grouping biking together with it complicates things, perhaps on how ride is detected. 

Without GPS, fitbit has no way of knowing your bike ride distance, but steps on bike don't really make sense either, really just getting steps from vibrations to wrist.

[tiffs3]

Thanks for the response! I do both. Sometimes I let fitbit auto-detect, then select bike in the app. Other days I start a ride by choosing bike and using the GPS tracking. I haven’t noticed a difference in my steps to miles data other than no specific mileage info in the exercise log without GPS. I have GPS data for a 29 mile road ride and my stats for that day are: 23,115 steps & 4.86 miles...so very similar to those that are auto-detected and in line with the overall trend. 

I’ve been using the auto-recognize feature more lately because I’ve been having issues with the GPS dropping my workouts and I just learned today to try turning off the WiFi on my phone.

Is fitbit really just registering bumps on my wrist for biking and not my heart rate for biking workouts?

For clarity, the walks are separate events from the bike rides (walk the dog, then ride later). 

Thanks for any additional thoughts!

[JohnnyRow]

For biking, yes it is using your heart rate for calories and active minutes, but you were talking about steps and they are not relevant to bike rides and you will get steps only from vibrations.

If you measure some bike rides with GPS, you should get good distance, but probably fewer steps, so as far as steps so, walking and bike riding are like apples and oranges and it doesn't make sense to compare steps on a walk to steps on a GPS-measured bike ride.

If you look at your exercise log workout summaries just for walks, then you should see consistency between steps and distance, with some variance on whether or not you were using GPS.

Does that make sense?

[tiffs3]

Sure, that makes sense. I did some math. When I only walk during a day, I get about .0004 miles per step. The more I bike, the more that drops to .0002 miles per step for the day. What I’m gathering is that my app & device are working correctly and should be crediting fewer miles per biking “step” than per walking step...is that right?

[JohnnyRow · Accepted solution]

Yes, that is correct.