High Heart rate alert when running

[RHaas]

Hello, I'm new to Fitbit. I have the Versa 3 and was in the process of trying to setup alerts so I know when to back off from threshold heart zone. In the app its written as ""Get Notifications if we detect that your heart rate is outside your high or low threshold while you appear to be inactive for at least 10 minutes"" To me this means it will only give alerts if heart rate reaches a target while I am in rested state.

How can I set it to alert me while I am active and on a run?

Thanks

[t.parker]

You may try to set up Custom Zone in Heart Rate setting in the app. Not sure whether it's going to work the way you want (never did it myself) but you may try and see.

[RHaas]

Still no answer on this. Will be nice if someone on the fitbit team could elaborate about if  or how  this works. I set off for a run today using the run option on my watch and I did get a few heart rate alerts but I'm not clear on what triggered them. 

The behavior was my watch would vibrate and at which time I would look at my watch and for a few seconds it showed my heart rate. At that time my heart rate was the 140's. I could not find any setting in my app that has any value of 140 for hear rate. I would like to know what is driving this.

It seems unrelated to the other heart rate setting while you appear to be inactive for at least 10 minutes.  

Thanks

[t.parker]

@RHaas what you're seeing are HR zones notifications.

[RHaas]

Is there any information about how this works. As far as I can tell it seems to alert you to zone 3 and higher.

[t.parker · Accepted solution]

There is no higher zone than 3 (Peak). Fitbit defines only 3 zones and you can see assigned ranges in the app under you profile -> Activity&Wellness -> Heart Settings -> Heart Health. You may define a custom zone, too but I don't know how it affects notifications because I haven't done that myself. There is chance that some things are explained in the manual and Fitbit help pages.

[RHaas]

Hey thanks for your help. I think I also figured out that after you start an activity if you slide the clock face to the right you can view and set the face to heart rate, and other stats for the duration of the activity.

Thanks 

[SunsetRunner]

One issue you may encounter is frequent false HR zone alerts. E.g. during a slow run yesterday my HR spiked at a value that was well in excess of my theoretical max HR and stayed at this elevated level for quite some time - even when I slowed to a walk.   Other times the readings swing erratically up and down even when running at a steady pace.  In the end the frequent haptic buzzing from these erroneous HR zone changes just became annoying and very distracting and I have since disabled them. 

Annoyingly the Versa 3 HR monitoring during some exercises is just very unreliable, quite erratic and for me a big disappointment.  Nothing I've tried reliably stops it from happening.   

[James291]

Standard behaviour is during an exercise the watch will vibrate one, two or three times when your heart rate changes to a different zone. These are Fitbit zones, not the zones 1-5 that others use. The screen will show which zone as a confirmation. You can enable or disable this on the watch in exercise settings.

For example: tap Exercise > Run > swipe up before tapping Start.

Now you can change all kinds of settings for the exercise, including the alerts and the stats shown at the top, bottom and centre of the screen.

To get back to the Start button, just swipe all the way back up and beyond to find the Start button.

As your say, during an exercise, you can tap or swipe left or right to change the value shown in the centre of the screen.

As others have said, you can set a custom heart rate alert zone in the app under heart rate settings > heart health > custom zone. Apparently this should override the default zones.

[t.parker]

@RHaas so I have tried to use a custom heart rate zone for an indoor bike ride. I set it up to my low-aerobic zone(138-154):

It works as expected however there are no notifications when you enter or exit the zone. So in fact, you need to look at your HR to see whether you are within the specified range. The regular HR zones (fat burn, cardio, peaks) don't show when you use the custom zone. For the custom zone, there is no vibration. It's just this:

So it's either "below zone", "in zone" or "above zone". So it kind of does what you want. Just set up the zone you want to be in. You will have to look at HR from time to time as the watch will not notify you when you leave or enter the zone.