Fitstar Personal Trainer creating duplicate exercise logs

[Wiza]

I recently started noticing logged exercises categorized as 'Fitstar: Personal Trainer' that seem to be duplicates of exercises I manually started myself. I suspect this is related to Fitbit offering me to log a workout session after doing a guided workout. Does that make sense? Does Fitbit not detect that I manually started an exercise and that the automatically logged exercise was in fact already recorded? If so, in the future I should probably decline the offer to log workouts after they are finished, to avoid this double counting of the same exercise.

On a side note: while most parameters are an exact duplicate of the manually started exercise (time, avg bpm, zone minutes), strangely enough the Fitstar generated exercises typically report much less calories burned (like 30% of the calories reported in the manually started exercise, so a big difference). Any explanation?

(for info, I have a Versa 2 and am using the app on an Iphone 7)

[LZeeW]

@Wiza   I’m not a software engineer, but my son is.  This is how he explained it to me.  There are certain Fitbit features that are, in essence, compartmentalized.  In his words, “They don’t talk to each other.”  So yes, you should not do a Fitstar workout and manually log it or use the Exercise app.

With respect to the calorie burn, your Versa 2 uses heart rate based algorithms to calculate calorie burn.  Fitstar can be used with many different devices.  Some older devices don’t measure heart rate.  Fitstar calculates calorie burn very differently.

If you are familiar with the concept of perceived exertion, then you should know which calorie burn feels right.  So choose one or the other.  If your Versa 2 numbers feel right, then decline the save offer.  If Fitstar feels right, then don’t log it any other way.

 I hope I helped.

[Wiza]

Hi @LZeeW, thanks for your reply! I guess the compartimentalized nature of the Fitbit app does explain this behaviour. Now that I'm aware of it, it's easy to avoid the issue by declining the offer to auto-save workouts, as you suggested. Thanks.

If a Fitbit moderator is reading this: can I just add that I find this whole Fitstar thing confusing? I wasn't aware that Fitstar was integrated in the Fitbit app (or even that it existed at all). What I usually do is start a guided workout via the 'Discover' section in my app and there's no mention of Fitstar anywhere in that interface. The exercise log it - apparently - creates doesn't identify the exercise type (it just mentions 'Fitstar: Personal Trainer'), and  it assigns a wildly inaccurate calorie burn. Not exactly a very useful feature....