How do you like them? Useful devices for the not-so-geeky fitness improver?
Do they sync well with Strava?
Useful insight on gym going?
Sleep?

Not many of them have GPS, they use the GPS from your phone, which is pish tbh. Missus had one, quickly sold it and bought a garmin for her.

The two people I know who had fitbits had problems with the straps/brackets disintegrating. They both now have garmins.

I have a Garmin for riding.
Interested in something for the other fitness add health stuff.
Well, mainly gym and sleeping TBH.

Garmin then. I like the sleep tracking too, the effects of a night ride frinstance on your RHR (and alcohol, wow!)

Have a basic garmin one, steps, activity, HRM. Useful for the trends, prompts from connect reminding you that you are having a lazy day, spotting patterns of typical bad or good days and streaks of activity.
Pair the HRM with my garmin 520 for the bike but use the watch to log swimming hrm

Syncs through to strava via connect, gone through 3 silicone straps in 2 years but they are cheap on amazon

Fitbit probably has the best app for what you are after, it syncs well with others e.g. My fitness pal, Endomondo etc. And worked OK with phone GPS for me.

Only anoying part is poor battery life. Also while HR is more accurate than most much of the data is not a accessable.

Weekly progress reports are detailed as is sleep tracking. Also measures trips up stairs, not all do.

I got an Ionic cheap from the US. Seems to do all you say. Tracks heart rate, sleep, has GPS so I can track a ride and sync to Strava. Waterproof so you can swim with it. Also supposed to have a blood oxygen sensor that will be enabled at some point. Got a few different straps. Overall I like it. Oh and it does basic smart watch stuff too. Notifications, contactless payments.

Fitbit family here…Flex 2, Blaze & Charge 2. Think they’re great for steps etc & basically general healthy lifestyle who aren’t necessarily into sports. Also like the app too for logging weight etc

…but when it comes to sport, i use my Garmin

Charge 2 here, not used anything else to compare it to.

Seems to track HR, steps and general activity quite well (including sleep stages etc) for everyday life. But, I’d say it wasn’t great for tracking sport activity as it doesn’t pick up sudden peaks in HR – it undercounts my spin class calorie burn by about 60 calories in a 600 session for example (when comparing it to the bike readout)

I’d be a bit lost without it tbh – I do find it difficult to assess the activity I do in a day (for instance when I walk to the station I always expect to hit the step count for the day, but find I tend to sit around during the day more if I’ve done this so don’t!)

I’m sure there are other wearable trackers out there that are better, but not for £80

Fitbit Blaze here – syncs with Strava and logs my PureGym spin classes. Battery life is good. Can control / log exercise via the device and can control music, read texts and other notifications. It does all I want and expect.

Major issue with blaze when tracking a ride – if you are wearing a long sleeve top which is snug at the wrist or gloves with cuffs it will pause the ride whenever you flex your wrist – quite often off road

I believe you can buy copy ones on Amazon for about £5, they don’t record HR or steps, but they fulfil their primary goal of telling people just how much you’re into fitness 😉

Anyway cynical joke aside, I had one of the old ‘Charge HR’ models a few years ago, I’m told the newer ones are better, but here’s my 2p.

They’re crap.

I really hope in the few years since I clapped eyes on one they’ve improved / fixed all of the below, I’m sure they have or they’d be out of business by now (saying thay, I’m sure they sell 90% of them in January and they’re designed to last until about March)

The build quality was appalling, they just fall apart, a few of use got them, they all broke, Fitbit sent more, they broke.

The software was appalling, even for such a simple device they crash a lot, the reboot sequence is annoyingly complex, there’s a simple one that basically turns it off and on which does the square root of SFA, and a ‘special one’ that actually reboots it, but you lose all your data.

I really hope they’ve fixed this, they’re not water proof, and not in a “don’t swim with this” way, and in an actual “if you sweat too much, it’ll break way”

The battery life is terrible, but in an age of Smart watches, maybe that’s acceptable now, personally I like the 10 year battery life of my G Shocks, but maybe once a week is okay?? I think fitbits are about 30 hours.

I think fundamentally though you’ve got to ask yourself – are you Cardiologist? Will 24/7 data recording of your HR be the key to unlock that Athletic Performance that’s always alluded you? Or will you just bore your significant other with that data. Do you need a pedometer to tell you that you probably don’t walk far enough, it’s not going to be the case that you discover in your normal everyday life you typically take 9000 steps a day and you’re going to die at 50 from a heart attack, but if you can up that to 10,000 you’ll live forever. Either you’re an office based, drive / bus / train to work kind of person who probably takes less than 5000 steps a day and a walk to the shops instead of driving wouldn’t kill you, or you’re someone who’s on their feet all day in work who laughs in the face of 10,000 steps.

Sleep recording? Here’s a tip, make a mental note of the time you close your eyes in bed, to the nearest half-hour will do, note the time you wake up, the bit in between is how long you slept.

I really hope they’ve upped their game and their apps actually offers an interpretation of the data over and above “you should walk 10k steps a day, here’s your heart rate and here’s what the based on nothing but averages your max heart rate should be” Otherwise they’re just another rubber and plastic bit of consumer crap to show off with or provide some fitness motivation, for about a month, tops.

Blaze user here, works great for me. Syncs my rides with Strava, logs my gym workouts / spin classes. Have had the issue with it pausing like smokey_jo mentions but I just put it on tight and a little further away from my wrist and haven’t had the issue since.

I had an Alta, basically a glorified pedometer. Now have a Garmin which does HR etc and it appears (insofar as these things are ever accurate) that the FB was overcounting steps. It was also rubbish for picking up cycling as an activity.

The FB also annoyingly wouldn’t sync with Apple Health, so you needed another app to do the sync for you. Garmin does directly, if that sort of thing matters to you.

Thanks all.
I’m actually just focused on Fitbit for business reasons.
Work night even spring for one for me.
So Strava ingests workouts from them in similar way as it does from a Garmin?

I have a Charge 2 and to be honest the thing i use it most for is the silent alarm for sneaking out the house for the gym without waking the Mrs.

So i guess it helps!

…So Strava ingests workouts from them in similar way as it does from a Garmin?…

I assume so – you add it as an authorised connection from the Strava side. Seems to work well.

https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articles/216918087-Fitbit-and-Strava?page=2

I have a flex 2 and a charge 3. I bought the flex2 to count lengths at swimming mostly. Replaced with a charge3 when that was released as wanted something to function as a watch too.

Not really had any issues with either. Battery life is fine, occasionally have to restart my phone to get in to sync but have never had to do a reset.

I don’t use it as a serious training tool so it doesn’t have to be perfect. I can connect to the api and calculate monthly totals and create all sorts of other useless statistics and that’s good enough for me 🙂

Re the comments on access to data and synching with other platforms from Fitbit – there are a few really good applets on IFTTT that do just that. You can use them to sync between services, or simply export your data every night to a google spreadsheet. Worth a look.

P-Jay

I think you need to revisit your opinion on Fitbits completely based on my experience of them…

I have a Blaze which I wear constantly (only taking it off to shower) and that includes bike rides, runs, three times a week spin classes. Not once has sweat broken it. It looks almost as good now as it did the day I got it (which is approx 2yrs 5 months) apart from some wear on the strap where it constantly rubs on my desk. Battery life is approx 4 days and it can charge from empty to 3/4 full in about 20 minutes. I have had to restart it about three times in all that time (when the HR monitoring stopped recognising heartbeat). Restarting it takes about 30 seconds. The app is great and the web app is equally useful.

Before that I had a Flex which I lost whilst cutting a hedge. About a year after losing it I decided to take the hedge out and lo and behold it was there – hanging from a branch. A quick wipe down and recharge and it looked as good as new (despite spending a full winter outside) and I sold it on Ebay.

And I can honestly say your guestimate of using them for ‘a month, tops’ is way out based on my experience. I wouldn’t be without mine.

P-Jay

I think you need to revisit your opinion on Fitbits completely based on my experience of them…

I’m really glad they’ve improved the quality of them, I’d be prepared to shrug it off as a ‘bad one’ if so many of my friends hadn’t had the same problem with the particular model we had.

I still don’t really know what I’d do with the data they produce though. I suppose I’m pretty ‘lucky’ as I’ve got a pretty studious Nurse for a wife I rarely go a month without a full set of tests with her latest bit of kit. Do you need a Fitbit when the wife wants to test her new Ultrasound Doppler machine on you? Dunno.

Still, I’m in a better mood today, but I still think they’re a bit of a gimmick, I really don’t get the point of them really.

I really don’t get the point of them really.

I find mine useful because:
– It tells me the time
– It shows me notifications from my phone
– I can play/pause/skip music playing on my iPhone
– I can set alarms (particularly useful to have the silent ‘vibrate’ alarm so I don’t disturb my wife when I have to get up early
– It links to Strava so I can trigger a tracked run / cycle from my wrist (paricularly useful when doing ParkRun and I want to accurately time it from my wrist)

Then there are all the other bits of data which, as you say, aren’t particularly useful in themselves, but I do like to have a record of my activities and have confirmation that I am being as active as I should be.

I’ve had a Fitbit Surge for about 18 months now

Bought it second hand on EBay for about £65, reasoning that if I didn’t use it then I could sell it on and get most of my money back

I don’t use Strava so can’t comment on whether they sync well

Mine has the built in GPS

Battery life is very good when not using the GPS (about 8 days between charges), using the GPS results in a daily charge being needed

Replaced the strap once during ownership

App works well and gives useful information, it’s also reliable

I like the fact that it auto tracks exercise regardless of whether I start an ‘exercise’ running

Auto start/stop would be useful when running the GPS and I have managed to accidentally end ‘exercise’ when I didn’t want to (easily done when you pause the activity)

Mine has a minor software glitch where you sometimes get limited menu access (this doesn’t matter much in practice as almost all of the time I just want to track activity and this is always accessible) – letting the battery run totally flat fixes the problem every time

Had a charge for a couple of weeks, found it okay but the strap gave me a rash so it went back, replaced it with a garmin vivosmart hr plus.

Prefer the Garmin app and now have a fenix 3 for gym and riding dutys and the vivosmart for general tracking.

I have a surge, and on the second one after the strap broke on the first, but they replaced it. However this one must be over two years old. I now don’t really care about the step count anymore but I use it for Strava which saves draining the battery on my phone. If it broke I would probably replace it with something else. Probably a normal watch and another way to strava