Fitbit and Strava: What's the best practice?

[DeanaDeana]

Hello! I have a Versa and use Strava, and ride a bike as my main form of exercise. I'm having trouble with rides showing up twice in my weekly exercise tile. They'll both start at the same time, so I know they're the same ride, but one has a map and one doesn't, and the calorie counts are different. A couple questions:

1. How are these double rides affecting my daily totals? I've read that they don't, but I deleted one of the duped rides just to see what would happen, and my step count for that day went down.

2. If I delete a duped ride from Fitbit, will that mess with my Strava mileage, or does the flow of information only work one way?

3. So far, to record rides, I've been manually starting a ride on my Fitbit and not doing anything with the Strava app on my phone. Should I use both, or let Strava automatically record my ride, or just use Strava, or something else? I'm just sick of seeing two rides pop up every time I do a ride and not knowing what it means.

Thanks!

Moderator edit: labels

[LanuzaFitbit]

Hello @DeanaDeana.

Thanks for bringing this up.

To answer your questions, information goes both ways. Now the thing is that activities tracked by Strava that have GPS, will not crossover into Fitbit with the GPS data. On the contrary, GPS data from Fitbit activities will cross over into Strava. This should clear things up. 

As for how they affect your totals, it is possible that they are both being counted as separate activities and thus adding to your totals. The way to tell would be to delete one of them and check your calories. If they go down by the same amount that the activity reports, then it means that both activities are being counted towards your totals.

Please let me know if you have any further questions.

[Chipper1971]

It seems that Strava is informing Fitbit with a standalone activity (for me, biking) and Fitbit is recording the activity with info from Strava when I use Strava GPS to inform Fitbit of my route. 

I have to delete one of the activities to get an accurate distance, calories, time etc etc. 

What am I doing wrong?

[DeanaDeana]

I ended up solving this by turning off Fitbit's ability to automatically
recognize when I've started a bike ride--I have to start my ride manually
on my Fitbit before I leave. The down side of this is that if you forget,
you're stuck, but it solved the duplicate rides problem.