Fitbit not pulling from Strava again

[bbarrera]

Fitbit pulled a GPS ride from Strava on Monday, February 19. Rode last night and Fitbit did not pull the GPS ride.

This is the flow:

Garmin GPS bike computer > Strava < Fitbit pulls from Strava

Lately Fitbit has been pulling rides from Strava, but not consistently. There sure has been a lot of trouble with this integration. Same activity flow as 1UNQGRL in that closed thread.

The only reliable flow for getting bike computer rides into Fitbit:

Garmin GPS bike computer > Endomondo > Fitbit

- Garmin pushes to Endomondo

- Endomondo pushes to Fitbit

The other problem with Fitbit's Strava integration - calorie estimates are always wrong.

[RobertoME]

Hello there @bbarrera, thank you for visiting the Fitbit Community, indeed we have seen reports the integration with Strava seems to be inconsistent.

However in your post you mentioned that "Garmin GPS bike computer are sent to Strava and from here to your Fitbit"

In this scenario, note that exercises recorded or sent to Strava will be synced to Fitbit as manually logged activities, but will not include GPS or heart rate data from Strava. So it might be possible this might be the explanation why the data is not consistent. The same for calories, this integration was designed to sync only activities, hence calories is not an information that will go through.

For more details about the integration with Strava please review the following post: Third Party Apps - Informational Post.

Let me know how it goes and stick around if you need more help.

[bbarrera]

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@RobertoMEwrote:

In this scenario, note that exercises recorded or sent to Strava will be synced to Fitbit as manually logged activities, but will not include GPS or heart rate data from Strava. So it might be possible this might be the explanation why the data is not consistent.

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@RobertoME Yes, I understand. Allow me to restate:

Lately Fitbit has been pulling rides from Strava, but not reliably. Some rides are missing from Fitbit dashboard.

Fitbit servers are responsible for pulling the rides from Strava as seen when initially authorizing:

When rides are missing on Fitbit, this is a Fitbit problem.

Fitbit pulls this data from Strava when creating a manual activity:

- start time

- total duration

- miles

For calorie estimate in a manual activity, Fitbit uses an algorithm. From manually adding activities by hand, it can be shown that Fitbit's algorithm uses average speed and duration to estimate calories for a manual bike ride. Unfortunately this is a bad algorithm and in my experience overestimates calories on flat or rolling routes (where I average 18-22mph), and underestimates calories on climbing routes (where I average (10-14mph).

Only on Fitbit can I find my 3+ hour ride to climb a 4500 feet mountain ridge resulting in less calories than 1+ hour flat ride.

When Endomondo creates a manual Fitbit activity, it includes the calorie estimate from my bike computer. My bike computer calorie estimate is based on actual power applied to pedals, which is more accurate than other calorie estimates for cycling.

Hope that helps.